Beyond the books: English learning for curious minds

Hey everyone, it's Hadar. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm happy to share with you a conversation I had with Alasdair. Alistair is the podcast host of the podcast English Learning for Curious Minds. In the conversation, we talked about his story and his experience as a content creator. We talked about his relocation experience, moving from the UK to Malta to Sweden. He's also going to talk about how he loves turning complicated ideas into simple stories, like he does on his podcast, and so much more. So let's go ahead and listen to our conversation. Hi, Alistair, how are you doing?

I am doing fantastically. How are you doing, Hedda?

I'm great. It's so great to be here and speak with you today and I can't wait to introduce you to my audience. So for those who don't know you, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to, to everyone?

Sure. So I guess if you are, if you are in the minority, people who might know me, you probably would know me from my podcast which is called English Learning for Curious Minds. I'm from the UK originally and I now live in West Sweden in the beautiful city of Gothenburg, which most people think is probably rainy and wet, but it is a glorious 28 degrees and sunny today.

Nice. Very good.

So that is why I'm sitting in this dark room enjoying the rare Swedish sun.

So the first time we interacted or had a conversation was actually on your podcast. We're going to link to our conversation in the description below, but we actually talked about relocation because you have experience relocating twice and this is how we started talking. So before we even get to your English work and your podcast that I'm really curious to hear more about and the work you do behind the scenes, tell me a little bit more about your relocation experience because this is something that we both relate to because I have recently relocated and you have as well. So tell me, tell me a little bit about that.

Sure. So I guess I've, yeah, I've relocated twice as a semi functioning adult. I moved around quite a bit as a, as a child. But if we, if we take relocation to mean kind of properly moving to a different country without any definite return date, kind of not knowing what's going to happen then, yeah, I've done it twice. The first time was about seven and a half years ago. I was living in London in the UK. I've been living there for, I think about 12 years. And I moved to Malta, which some of your viewers might know is a tiny island in the middle of a, in the Middle of the Mediterranean Sea. So if you go down to the bottom of Italy to Sicily, the football, and you go down about 100km, you'll find a tiny little island in the sea and that is Malta. I imagine people might know it because it is a big destination for people who want to learn English. It is an English speaking country. Kind of strange, but there are lots of English schools there. People go there to learn English in the sun, away from the, the rain and cold of, of the UK and the high costs of other places.

So when you relocated for the first time, you, you didn't have the challenge of learning another language or immersing in another language really.

No, not at all. It's, it's kind of moving to Malta as a British person is kind of relocation on easy mode because yeah, there's, there's no language elements. Also, even very basic things like the plugs are the same. People drive on the same side of the road, although they drive in a slightly, slightly different way. There's the same color post boxes, the same color phone boxes. They even have the same, the same traffic lights as in the uk. So it does seem strangely familiar in some ways. So yeah, it's definitely easy mode.

And is that any different than your second relocation experience?

Yes, in, in many ways. So as I said at the start, I'm, I'm now in Gothenburg in Western Sweden. And of course in Sweden people speak very good English. It's I think one of the, one of the countries in the eu, perhaps even in the world with the, the highest level of English generally spoken. So it's not so tricky as a, as a non Swedish speaker, although I am, I'm trying my best to learn Swedish at the moment. It is a very different experience mainly because of me rather than Sweden and Malta. When I moved to, to Malta, it was just me and my, my girlfriend at the time. We now have two small kids and it is a very different experience moving with children and pretending to be a responsible adult and having to do things like find schools and not just hop around and be irresponsible in the same ways you can do when you, when you have less responsibilities. And, and clearly Malta and Sweden are very, very different countries. So yes, it's been very different. But I think that's one of the good things about any kind of relocation is that if you're, you know, if you're relocating, one of the main reasons is to, you know, to experience something different. It can be to, to get another job to be in a better position economically, but for other people, it can be just to experience something new, experience a change, have a little bit of an adventure. And for. For me, it's certainly the. That's certainly the category. We moved in both cases for my wife's job, so for her it was a, you know, a professional. A professional move. And I'm just tagging along and. And having some fun.

Nice. So what would you say is, what is the best thing about the relocation experience and what is the worst thing about relocating?

Well, I think the best and the worst thing can be the same thing for different people. And I'll explain that because what I think has been the best thing for me and for my wife and for our family is the fact that it's all new and unknown and it's a bit of an adventure that you never really know what's. What's going to happen. The things that you thought will be easy might be hard. The things that you thought might be hard will be easier. And it's all, you know, the nature of going somewhere you've never been before is that you. That you don't know what's going to happen. Right. You might have some idea, but you might have a strange conversation with someone that leads to something interesting. You might go to a place that you never thought would be interesting, and it turns out that it's the. It's your favorite area of the city. You might discover a new sport or a new. A new thing that you love. And I think it's only by putting yourself in these unusual and to some people, uncomfortable situations that you discover that kind of stuff. In terms of the. The worst thing about relocation, I think for. For friends of mine or people I know who've relocated and not had such a positive experience of, is often because they sort of have rigid expectations of what it might be like and, you know, they're expecting it to just be a bit like home, but in a different town or city. And I think if you. If you come with slightly more fixed expectations and you have a more definite plan, then you're often going to be disappointed by that because there are so many. So many things outside your control. And if you. If you arrive in a place and kind of look at it through the lens of your own country or your own culture, then it's just going to be harder for you. I think if you. If you approach it with the view of like, this is a complete different place, I'm going to try to understand it as best as I can, but lots of it will probably be pretty weird. And, And I might think, I can't believe why those people are doing that or why this is the way things work, then you might just be disappointed. So that is the. It's probably one of the worst bits. But then there's another. Another category of worse things, which for me is just all of the admin things that is required. Because I don't know if there's anyone in the world who enjoys paperwork and kind of being on the phone endlessly with electricity companies or filling out documents or changing a registration. That is just tedious. And Sweden, to be fair, makes it all pretty easy. I've lived in countries where it is not this easy. So I think as far as. As far as bureaucracy goes, Sweden is quite a good place. But there is still all of that necessary evil.

I wish I could say the same thing about Spain. I haven't had the best experience yet in terms of bureaucracy and paperwork, but I'm learning from it. I absolutely love what you said about making sure that you. Or being aware that expectations can create a bad experience for you, and that could be perceived as the worst thing because your expectations are not met. Because one of the things that I feel you need to let go of when you relocate somewhere is the sense of control, controlling situations or controlling what's going to happen. Because really you have to surrender to everything which kind of relates to your favorite thing or your best thing, which is just exploring new things, being open to new experiences, and recognizing that sometimes it's going to be good and sometimes it's not going to be ideal. But still, you know, it's a learning experience.

And if you can embrace the chaos, I think you'll have a wonderful time. And clearly Sweden is not the most chaotic place in the world. There are many, many more chaotic places. But if you can. If you can, kind of instead of putting up your garden, thinking, oh, that's. That's unexpected. If you can just sort of roll with it and think, well, you know, something. Something fun's gonna happen. If not, I'll probably get some funny story that I can. That I will be able to tell my friends or my. My brother or my kids, whatever, and it's. You're probably gonna waste time. It's. It's not gonna go exactly as you. As you planned. But that's. That's all part of the fun.

That's. That's a good piece of advice. Embrace the chaos, because there will be. And even if it's just internal chaos, right? So. So one of the benefits of being an online creator which is what you do. And what I do is being able to relocate fairly easily because you don't have to, you know, you're not dependent on the market or where you move into. So tell me a little bit about being a content creator and about your podcast within this relocation experience, but also outside of it. Like, why did you decide to start creating content and teaching English learners? I'm curious to hear.

So I, I guess I started it partially because I wanted some of the, the same kind of freedom that we're talking about. I. Yeah, so I started this podcast, English Learning for Curious Minds, almost exactly five years ago now. And before that I was, I was working on various projects that basically required me to go back and forth from Malta to London almost weekly, which sounds, sounds glamorous, but I can assure you it was certainly not. Yeah, and my wife was just about to have a child and I did not want to, I did not want to be doing that kind of commuting and not being there all the time. So I, I stopped and I started this, this podcast kind of as a experiment, as a way of sort of scratching my own itch to see if people, people would be interested in the same kinds of things that I thought I would be interested in. So to give you some background, I, I studied languages at university. I studied French, Italian and then Mandarin, and especially in French and Italian, I got to a relatively high level. So much so that I didn't really enjoy any kind of textbook based materials or materials that were designed for learners of the language. But at the same time, you know, listening to very fast, you know, radio broadcasts or watching, you know, watching films with no subtitles or no sort of crutches, let's say no stabilizers. I found quite hard and not always such a satisfying experience. I could do it, but I might understand kind of 95% or so. And I thought, what if there's a way I could try and create some, create something that English learners could listen to and sort of learn interesting things from. Not necessarily directly related to language or kind of language learning, but rather stories about people's lives, stories about interesting historical events, that kind of stuff. Well, if I could kind of create that kind of content if I was in, if I was in the same position that I was 10 years before, well, 15 years before, then I would have absolutely loved that. So I just started and thought, if nobody listens to it, then it'll have been a fun, fun thing to test out and I'll go and do something else. And it turned out that People did start listening to it and. Yeah, that was five years ago. Just a few weeks ago I released the 500th episodes of it. Wow.

Congratulations.

It's. It kind of feels, feels like not five years or 500 episodes, but it has been, it's been going for quite a long time. So yeah, that's the kind of idea behind it in terms of the kind of topics and things that I tend to talk about. There really isn't any one single theme, to be honest. And it's really sort of whatever I think is interesting, whatever I think might make a compelling story and interesting thing for people to, to learn about. And essentially I go away for, for quite a long time and do as much researching into a particular topic as I, as I can and try and condense it into a 20 minute or so kind of 20 to 25 minutes normally.

So tell me more about this, this process of creating content because your, your episodes are really well researched and there's, I'm assuming there's a lot of work that goes into a 20 minute episode. Usually people hear a 20 minute episode and they move on with their day. Tell us a little bit more about what goes into creating an episode. What, what you need to know to be able to share that knowledge with others.

Sure. I mean I wish I only, I wish I only took 20 minutes to make, but it's, it takes a lot longer than that. Normally there will be, you know, I'll have some kind of idea of a general subject or a general story, perhaps it might be a news story. And I will do as much kind of reading into that as possible and might involve reading books, not entire books all the time of course, but like sections of sections of books, articles, watching sometimes watching YouTube videos, listening to other podcasts that have like interviews of people who might be involved, that kind of stuff. So that I feel like I have a suitable enough understanding of a topic that I, that I feel comfortable telling other people about it. In some cases these are things that I already had some kind of background knowledge of. In other cases I might have kind of, you know, known that it was a historical event or known that it was something that happened or know that it was a person but not known a huge amount about it at all. And the, the challenge, I guess like, like anything is condensing all of that information into something that people actually want to, you know, want to want to listen to and making it, giving it the right balance of information plus entertainment plus storytelling. Because people clearly don't, don't just want to have you know, a chronological list of what happened in, in a particular, particular time period or they don't want to know this person was born on this date and then X, Y and Z happens. So the challenge I think for me is always trying to take people on, on a journey, try and make it interesting and you know, 500 episodes later, I think I've, I've got a bit better at it. But lots of the times I still listen back and I think, oh, I, I should have, I should have structured it in a slightly different way or this, this bit wasn't so useful or, or so on. But that's just what you got to.

Do, I guess, based on all of that incredible experience. That's, that's really mind blowing. All the work that you've, that you do put in, into your episodes. What is the formula or how do you make a complex idea simple?

That's an excellent question. I mean, to be honest, the, the real challenge that I, I have with, with the more complicated ideas is like turning them into really relatable stories that people can, can listen to and that don't necessarily benefit so much from, you know, visual component. So there's some times where people suggest episodes or. I think that would be cool. But I think actually really people need to see something for this to really, you know, for it to really work. So we don't do many episodes on, I don't know, great art or those kinds of things because there's only so much you can, you can describe in terms of your question about how to condense it into actually something that's compelling and I don't know if there is a single secret to it. I try to find the most kind of relatable bits, try to use analogies where possible and try to try to not choose topics that are so complicated that it's just going to be really difficult for someone to listen and enjoy. I mean, there's a bit of a balance, I think, when I'm trying to choose the episodes because some subjects are incredibly interesting but so complicated that you can't really skip out major bits. For example, I made one recently on the wars of the Roses, which is this, you know, period of kind of not quite civil war, but I guess infighting in, in England. And it's so complicated with so many kind of switching sides and switching allegiances and different people doing that. And at the end I was like, like, if anyone manages to listen to all of this, then I will definitely take my hat off to them. But at the same time I, I heard from lots of people who did listen to that. They thought, I can't believe that I managed to get through that and listen to something so complicated in my non. Native language.

So that's a big win. I think I was just thinking about it for, for people who are. Even if they don't understand everything, but they get through. They. They get through it. I think it's like, it's. I think it's a big achievement and this is why it's good to expose learners to that kind of content. I think this is, I think this is why you do what you do. No?

Precisely. And I can, I know from personal experience the level of satisfaction that you can get from understanding something that you didn't think you'd understand, whether that's a conversation or a movie or a TV show or a podcast. If, if you listen to something and you think, guy, I know exactly what they said and I can understand exactly what happened there, or it's about a subject that you never thought you'd be able to engage with in a foreign language and you can, that gives you a huge amount of satisfaction. And I think, as we both know, for language learners, feeling that these kind of little, little doses of satisfaction is super important because they, they keep you motivated.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's so important to remember that learning English is not just about learning English. It's about using English to, to expose yourself to other things, to consume content that you enjoy. Right. And a lot of times when I look at English content, it's about the language or the story doesn't matter so much. And what you're saying here, no, the story does matter, knowledge does matter. And let's use English just to. As. As the means to get to that knowledge. And I, I really appreciate that. What are some of your favorite episodes that you've recorded over the past five years?

Oh, I was hoping you could ask me this. So there's one actually that is, that I just did, which has been one of my favorite ones to make. I can't remember what the title I gave it, but essentially it is about a big robbery of a Canadian maple syrup warehouse. It's the greatest robbery Canadian history.

Even hear about those stories. Like, I'm, I'm so curious, but I love it. Okay, keep going.

I, I don't, I don't know. I can't remember exactly how I found out about that one. That I think that one is going to be, going to be good. One of my favorite recent ones also was about a guy who made his Millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions in, in modern terms, shipping ice around the world. Shipping huge blocks of ice that were cut from ice ponds in North America in the 19th century. And obviously the fortune completely evaporated when people invented freezers. Things about. Yeah, there's another one called the Affair of the Diamond Necklace where Marie Antoinette was tricked into handing over a diamond necklace to. To a cardinal. So there's. There's a lot of these fun kind of stories, true stories, which almost write themselves. Right. So those ones, those ones, just great stories. You don't have to do a huge amount of thinking, do I turn this into a good story? Because the facts are great. I also really like the. I think there's a general theme of episode where my hope is that it just makes the listener sort of realize how lucky we are to be living in 2024 and not 1924 or 1824 or 1024, and sort of emphasizing just how, you know, how recent some things are in the scale of human history. So I don't know, there's. I did a pretty grim series on like the Haitian Revolution recently, which is just a terrible period of history. Things around like capital punishment, which obviously are very different to the. The first category of story of episodes that I mentioned. You know, nice feel good stories about maple syrup, but make a huge, A huge variety. There's ones on like TikTok on Marvel Comics, on the Royal Family. And initially I sort of thought it maybe is a bad thing that there's just. It just flips from like one completely unrelated thing to another. But surprisingly, what I've heard from lots of people is that they really like the idea of, you know, coming back each week and thinking, oh, what's it going to be on now? Is it going to be on some strange revolution or some modern celebrity or what's it going to be on? And I only choose things that I think are interesting. And my hope is that people who are listening and people who are following along have a similar sense to me about what makes an interesting story.

Well, we're definitely going to link to those episodes in the description and I'm definitely going to listen to a few of those because that is so. It sounds so interesting. Like, I can't wait to hear how you tell that story. And I think that, you know, like, this goes back to what you said about making a big story simple and easy and fun to listen to. I really do think that the narrative and the story and the imageries and all of that that you obviously include in your episodes is a big part of it. I think there should be a lot to learn about not, not it's not just about English, but it's also how to tell a story. So I would encourage people to listen to it. So before we wrap up, Alistair, I have a, like a question with two parts. So one is what is one thing that you see people do that you feel is holding them back or some misconceptions about English? And the second part is what is your best recommendation for English learners?

I think the biggest misconception that I see is that there are kind of four very distinct elements of English and that you just work on one at a time. So it's like today I need to do just listening and then. Or just speaking or reading or writing. And I think people don't necessarily understand the, the extent to which all these things are kind of working together. And specifically within that sort of misconception, it's the idea that listening is somehow less valuable than these other. These other skills because you are. Because it kind of seems easier and you just sit there and listen and therefore it's easier and less important to work on. I get lots of people who say, oh no, I don't need to improve my listening because now I'm only working on my vocabulary or I'm only working on speaking. And lots of people don't seem to understand the relationship between listening and speaking. And I know that this is something you talk about a lot, that if you can't, if you can't recognize sounds, then you're going to have a lot of difficulty actually producing them. So I think that's the. My main misconception is that people think of listening as sort of firstly a distinct thing that isn't helping you do, helping you improve other areas and something that is less valuable, less important to work on. So if you, if someone watching this or listening to this is thinking, oh, you know, I've said that in the past, then listening, like listening could be so helpful to, for your speaking. It's helping you improve your vocabulary. It's. It's helping you do a huge amount of things sort of behind the scenes that you probably confident realize.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, yes, it is sort of easy because everyone's got ears and you just need to press play and, and it can be. Can seem at least more passive than other learning activities, but don't mistake its passiveness for kind of unimportance.

So then what would be your recommendation for learners to improve their fluency and confidence? I can guess.

Well, I guess it's has to do.

With maybe, I don't know, but it's.

Probably, it's, it is certainly to do more listening. But I think also as I'll give one, one extra tip which is more just a motivational tip, is that almost everyone that I have come across thinks that they're worse than they are. They, they all kind of, they all, they all think, oh, no, I'm. I'm not so good at listening. I'm not so good at speaking. I make so many mistakes. Please correct my mistakes when I'm writing and like people who are able to write that or say that in English, even someone who's able to say I'm bad at English, I'm making lots of mistakes. That already requires quite a, quite a decent command of the language. So you are probably doing a lot better than you think you are. If someone has got to this part of the video and they've been able to understand most of what I'm saying, you're doing fantastically well. So keep up the good work is what I will say to you. Anonymous viewer. I love it. Fantastically.

I love it. I agree. What a great way to end this. Alistair, thank you so, so much for all your insights and sharing your story, your relocation story and your podcast story. I absolutely think that listening to different content, especially when it's, when you have the learner in mind, even though you don't necessarily just make it easy, but you just make it accessible, I think it's great. I think it's a great resource. And like I said, we're going to link your favorite episodes and the podcast. Where else can people find you?

Well, if you are already a podcast listener, the best thing to do is just type in English Learning for Curious Minds or you can find all the episodes@leonardoenglish.com great, great. And thank you so much for having me. Hidar, it's been a pleasure to speak and yeah, have a wonderful day.

Thank you so much. And let's remind them that you can also find our conversation about relocation on LSTR's podcast. So we're gonna link to that as well. Elster, thank you so, so much. Have a beautiful day. Enjoy the rest of the fall, end of summer and your upcoming. Your, your winter in Sweden. Thank you so, so much.

I will. Bye.

Bye.