2017 studio album by Juicy J
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7 episodes with no english
3 episodes with no english
2 episodes with no english
3 episodes with no english
2 episodes with no english
2 episodes with no english
2 episodes with no english
2 episodes with no english
2 episodes with no english
Salvete sodales! Welcome to our series, "Rem Tene;" a Latin podcast presented by Latinitas Animi Causa for beginner and intermediate learners of the Latin language built and designed for the acquisition and understanding of it as a language, not just a code to decipher. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live entirely in Latin? No English. No distractions. Just a group of people playing games, sharing meals, reading, and talking—all in Latin.That's what Rusticātiō is all about. Every summer, we run these immersive Latin-speaking retreats in the countryside. We sleep under one roof, we speak only Latin, and we have the time of our lives.In this episode of Rem Tenē, I talk about why Rusticātiō is my favorite event of the year—and how it changed the way I think about Latin forever.latin.org0:22 - Praefatio0:49 First Round (slow with subtitles)3:27- Second Round (natural speed)6:08 - Rem tenete, verba sequentur!We gloss some words throughout the episode in English and repeat them. We don't, however, gloss everything. Our brains are really good at deducing meaning when we know a lot of the context surrounding words or phrases. The transcript for the show can be found below so you can follow along. We hope you enjoy this show!Please take some time, if you enjoy this, to rate us and write to us! We love hearing from our listeners and receiving feedback on how we can improve! You can also support us on Patreon (link below); though everything is free, it helps us do what we do and reinvest in creating more Latin and ancient Greek content. Gratias vobis agimus et curate ut valeatis in proximum!
It's cancellation week on TKAD! Join Graham and Kellan as they finally get cancelled by the woke mob. Johto continues with a pair of fun filler episodes. We get to know Politoed better in Ep 251 “I Politoed Ya So!” and also see the dark side of cheerleading. Ep 252 “No English title” aka “The Ice Cave!” teaches us about refrigeration, Jynx smooches, and the Joy of ice caves. Does Brock finally get cancelled? Does Ash go too far in his pursuit of badges? Tune in and find out!Subscribe to get every new episode of To Kill a Delibird in your subscription feed. Welcome to "To Kill A Delibird", the Pokémon anime rewatch podcast that combines a love of literary puns and analytics with pure Pokémania. Join Graham (Pokémon expat/video game and manga fanatic) and Kellan (hard boiled Pokémon die hard) as they discuss the Pokémon anime and hopefully construct some fun sentences along the way.HEY ITS A PATREON patreon.com/tkadpodcastAND A PERPETUAL GOOGLE FORM IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfPAPIUCcnl_PmFXu1OZrIFIIRKogPwWe6gwM2j8J-LCQMWuA/viewform?usp=sharingCheck out the official TKAD spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y40feTKtoUQp5Thk4p1UJipEVRf_78u_qFViwAsVvCk/edit?usp=sharingIntro/outro music "Synthwave 80's" by AlexiActionThanks to Bulbapedia and TVTropes for our ongoing research.Follow the podcast on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1yQ3EQ2P91mE6Bq0i4I3EYon Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/to-kill-a-delibird/id1667957767Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b37371a4-331d-4254-999b-e21fc0fdd837/to-kill-a-delibirdfor more half baked content: https://www.twitch.tv/hydraleechTiktok is essential for new creators so: https://www.tiktok.com/@hydraleeches#pokemon #ashketchum #pikachu #misty #brock #anime #indigoleague #teamrocket #existentialism #comedy #pokemonjohto #totodile #cyndaquil #chikorita #charizard #wobbuffet #pokemonanime #podcast #pokemonpodcast #jasmine #ampharos #pokemondiscussion #pokemonanalysis #gaming 0:00 Intro18:16 I Politoed Ya So!42:58 The Ice Cave
Profile This, TV Time with Ted and Headlines!
I first met Gus at ATHX in Birmingham. Actually, I first heard him. This powerful voice with a fascinating accent was coming through the loudspeakers while I was pushing myself to exhaustion during ATHX two years ago. I later learned that he brings that booming voice and big personality to fitness races and competitions all over the world. I wanted to bring him on the show to hear more about his story and how he ended up in this space. What I got was so much more. He shared how he came to the UK with hardly any money and no English, did whatever it took to survive, and eventually thrived as a coach and business owner. Plus, we talk about the new training program he's launched with Chris Hinshaw. Today's episode is sponsored by Amazfit – Amazfit is the official timekeeper and wearable partner of HYROX. All Amazfit smartwatches now feature HYROX Race Mode to track split times, monitor performance, and crush every station. Click HERE to find out more about the T-Rex 3 and other amazing Amazfit products. Follow today's guest: Gus | Hybrid Racer Support us through The Cup Of Coffee, and also through our 1st Phorm Link. Check out Matt's favorite coffee alternative – Speedlabs. Follow Hybrid Fitness Media on IG.
In this English lesson, we explore a surprising news story—Mark Carney visited the White House in Washington DC and told President Trump "Canada is NOT for Sale! Learn 28 or more key vocabulary words and expressions while diving into the history and mystery of this famous prison island. Perfect for English learners who want to build their vocabulary using real news stories!
From No English & Dishwashing In RAK To Running Marathons Barefoot: Meet Hamza Masmoudi
Mike "C-Roc" sits down with the unstoppable Lara Schmoisman—an award-winning marketing strategist, podcast host, and founder of The Darl, a boutique marketing agency. Lara opens up about her extraordinary journey from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles, where she arrived speaking no English and juggling nine jobs just to make ends meet. With raw honesty, she shares how she taught herself the language, stepped outside the comfort of her community, and overcame societal judgment—especially around her appearance. Lara reveals the emotional and physical challenges of living with PCOS, how she ultimately lost 160 pounds, and what it truly means to take back your power. From starting her podcast against all odds to building a top 100-ranked show on Apple Podcasts, Lara's story is a bold testament to grit, reinvention, and refusing to let anyone else write your story. Tune in for a heartfelt and inspiring conversation about self-worth, identity, and becoming exactly who you were meant to be—on your terms.Website-https://thedarl.com/Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/laraschmoisman/
No English? No entry! On today's #NCFWhittle we speak with podcaster & media commentator Sunil Sharma, former head of Conservative Friends of the Commonwealth We discuss the staggering number of Tories switching to Reform, state of Britain, immigration, ethnicity & patriotism
Welcome in for another edition of the Morning Espresso from the SDH Network, brought to you by Oglethorpe University, Atlanta's premier undergraduate learning experience and soccer powerhouse. No English club has ever won the Quadruple, the three domestic trophies (league, FA Cup, Carabao Cup) plus the Champions League, but Liverpool are still in the running for it this season after demolishing Tottenham's injury-riddled side yesterday. Arne Slot has come in to what was expected to be a transition year and might make it the best year ever for the club. MLS updates as the NY Red Bulls strengthen their backline by adding Chilean international Marcelo Morales and veteran center back Tim Parker. Hernán Múñoz has been linked with a departure from the San Jose Earthquakes, but it involves Foster Gillett and it's very complicated. Gillett has been disruptive with his "investments" in Argentina, specifically to benefit Estudiantes. However reports surfaced yesterday that he is behind in payments for players to clubs and we'll just have to see where all of this goes. Luciano Acosta was a player linked with a move to Estudiantes, but it hasn't happened yet. He expressed his unhappiness in Cincinnati to reporter Laurel Pfahler and we'll have to see if things can be repaired. FA Cup 4th Round takes place this weekend, along with a 1 vs 2 matchup at the top in La Liga between Real Madrid and Atleti. Legendary fullback Marcelo announced his retirement yesterday, one of the all-time greats in the position, he won 25 trophies at Real Madrid. Check your sources, the graphic circulating that Thiago Messi scored 11 goals in a U13 game against Atlanta United is not true. Mexican clubs struggled last night in Concacaf Champions Cup on the road, with Chivas needed an equalizer in the 10th minute of stoppage time in the Dominican Republic and Pumas losing in Calgary. Both get the second legs at home next week. Atlanta United preseason action on atlutd.com/live tomorrow afternoon at 1pm as the team takes on New England from Bradenton, FL. Thanks to everyone who has signed up for our Fanaticos membership platform, more information on our social media platforms! More Espresso on Monday on the SDH Network, presented by Oglethorpe University.
Jed has been on the dating scene for quite some time now... but what dating revelation did he go through where the girl doesn't speak his native tongue!
The trio hops into a game-filled episode including “I'm a Tree”, “No English-y”, and of course “Unfair Trivia”.
In your Phone Tap we're taking the traditional customer service interaction and flipping it on its head and turning the ridiculous up to level 100!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In your Phone Tap we're taking the traditional customer service interaction and flipping it on its head and turning the ridiculous up to level 100!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey, please share this podcast with your friends, family and neighbours or even write a review :). The podcast can now also be found on Youtube (https://t1p.de/kt83z) If you got feedback or ideas for topics, please write to: learngermanwithculture@web.de . Transkript: Hallo und herzlich Willkommen zur heutigen Episode. Wie geht es Dir? Mir geht es gut. Ich war gestern… gestern war ich in einem Restaurant. Und das Restaurant war auf einem Schiff. Das war sehr sehr cool. In der heutigen Episode sprechen wir über einen Beruf. Der Beruf, über den wir heute sprechen ist ein sehr wichtiger Beruf. Momentan werden in Deutschland viele, viele Menschen für diesen Beruf gesucht. Es herrscht ein Mangel an Arbeitskräften für diesen Beruf. Wir sprechen über die Arbeit, den Beruf als Bauarbeiter oder Bauarbeiterin. Man als Bauarbeiter eine Ausbildung machen. Man eine Ausbildung in unterschiedlichen Bereichen machen. Viele dieser Ausbildungen liegen im großen Bereich des Handwerks. Du kannst zum Beispiel eine Ausbildung zum Elektriker machen. Du kannst aber auch eine Ausbildung zum Klemptner machen. Ein sehr wichtiger Beruf ist auch der Beruf als Maler oder Dachdecker. All das sind sehr, sehr wichtige Berufe und es gibt noch viel mehr dieser Berufe im Handwerk. Du kannst aber als Bauarbeiter auch ohne eine Ausbildung arbeiten, zum Beispiel auf einer Baustelle. Wenn Du auf einer Baustelle ohne Ausbildung angestellt bist, dann bist Du ein Bauhelfer. Du hilfst dem Bauleiter und machst unterschiedlichste Arbeiten. Und nun zum Schluss: Es ist noch sehr wichtig, die richtige Kleidung als Bauarbeiter zu haben, denn die Arbeit kann manchmal gefährlich sein. Sehr wichtig ist zum Beispiel der Schutzhelm oder die Schutzbrille. Es gibt aber auch Gehörschutz, Arbeitsschuhe oder Arbeitshandschuhe. Und du? Interessierst Du dich für die Arbeit als Bauarbeiter oder Handwerker? Wenn Du dich für diese Arbeit interessierst und ein praktisches Talent hast, dann ist dieser Beruf sehr gut für dich. Und er ist wie gesagt sehr, sehr wichtig und angesehen. Und man kann heutzutage sehr gutes Geld als Handwerker oder Bauarbeiter verdienen. Und das war es auch schon mit der heutigen Episode. Bitte teil doch die Episode auf Deinem Social Media oder mit Freunden und Verwandten. Für Feedback schreib mir gerne an learngermanwithculture@web.de . Ich hoffe Du hast noch einen schönen Tag und bleib vor allem gesund! Ciao, tschüss!
Hey, please share this podcast with your friends, family and neighbours or even write a review :). If you got feedback or ideas for topics, please write to: learngermanwithculture@web.de . Hier findet ihr den Link zur Tagesschau in einfacher Sprache: https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/sendung/tagesschau_in_einfacher_sprache Transkript: Hallo und herzlich Willkommen zur heutigen Episode. Ich hoffe, dir geht es gut? Mir persönlich geht es auch richtig gut. Falls es dir richtig gut geht, hoffentlich. Und ich freue mich auf die heutige Episode. In der heutigen Episode sprechen wir über das Fernsehen. Genauer gesagt sprechen wir über eine Fernsehsendung. Die Fernsehsendung, über die wir sprechen, heißt Tagesschau. Die Tagesschau ist die älteste Fernsehsendung in Deutschland. Sie ist sehr, sehr bekannt. Bis zu 16 Millionen Menschen schauen jeden Tag die Tagesschau. Die Tagesschau ist eine Nachrichtensendung. Eine Sendung der Tagesschau dauert 15 minuten. Das ist eine Viertelstunde.In der Tagesschau gibt es Nachrichten. Nachrichten zum Beispiel aus Politik, auch weltweiter Politik, der Gesellschaft, Kultur oder auch Sport. Momentan gibt es zum Beispiel Sportnachrichten über die Fußball-Europameisterschaft in Deutschland. Das ist sehr wichtig natürlich. Aber wann läuft die Tagesschau? Die Tagesschau läuft jeden Tag zu unterschiedlichen Uhrzeiten. Die wichtigste Tagesschau-Sendung läuft aber abends. Sie läuft um 20:00 Uhr, 08:00 Uhr am Abend. Und das ist die Sendung, die auch die meisten Menschen schauen. Produziert wird die Tagesschau in Hamburg. Und zum Abschluss habe ich noch einen Tipp für dich. Möchtest du auch die Tagesschau schauen? Es gibt jetzt auch eine Version der Tagesschau in einfacher Sprache. Das könnte also auch zum Deutschlernen eine sehr, sehr gute Möglichkeit sein. Zusätzlich kannst du dich über spannende Nachrichten, die in Deutschland diskutiert werden, informieren. Du findest auch einen Link zur Tagesschau in einfacher Sprache in der Beschreibung dieser Episode. Viel Spaß dabei! Ich hoffe du schaust nun auch einmal die Tagesschau. Und das war es auch schon mit der heutigen Episode. Ich hoffe, dir hat die Episode gefallen. Bitte teil Sie doch in deinem Social Media oder mit Freunden und deiner Familie! Ich hoffe du hast noch einen sehr, sehr schönen Tag und bleib vor allem gesund! Tschüss…
Hey, please share this podcast with your friends, family and neighbours or even write a review :). From now on I plan on publishing new and old episodes without english help in addition to the other episodes. I hope this way also non english speakers profit from the podcast. And for english speakers, I recommend relisten to episodes for the second or third time without english help ;). If you got feedback or ideas for topics, please write to: learngermanwithculture@web.de . Transkript:Hallo und herzlich willkommen zur heutigen Episode. Ich hoffe Dir geht es gut. Mir persönlich geht es auch gut. Ich möchte einmal die Gelegenheit nutzen, mich für die vielen freundlichen Nachrichten der letzten Wochen zu bedanken. Viele Menschen, viele Personen haben mir bei Youtube oder per Email geschrieben. Eine Nachricht kam auch von Helen. Und Helen hat sich ein ganz bestimmtes Thema gewünscht, über das wir in der heutigen Episode sprechen. In der heutigen Episode geht es um die Hauptstadt von Deutschland. Wir sprechen über Berlin. Warst Du schonmal in Berlin? Berlin ist die Hauptstadt von Deutschland. Und Berlin ist eine sehr, sehr interessante Stadt. Berlin bietet sehr viel Geschichte und Kultur. Warum bietet Berlin viel Kultur? Berlin ist sehr bekannt für seine vielfältige Kultur. Vielfältig bedeutet: Es gibt sehr unterschiedliche Kulturangebote. Es gibt viele verschiedene Kultur. Magst du zum Beispiel klassische Musik? Berlin ist ein Zentrum für klassische Musik. Aus Berlin kommen zum Beispiel die Berliner Philharmoniker. Die Berliner Philharmoniker sind ein sehr bekanntes Orchester. Oder magst du es lieber etwas wilder? Es gibt nämlich auch eine sehr bekannte Clubkultur in Berlin. Viele Menschen kommen nach Berlin, um in den Clubs und Diskotheken zu feiern. Ich glaube, dass es in Berlin besonders viele Techno-Clubs gibt. Ich mag Techno nicht so sehr. Aber viele junge Menschen ziehen nach Berlin, um sich dort auszuprobieren. Aber es wird nicht nur gefeiert in Berlin. Warum bietet Berlin so viel Geschichte? Nun, in Berlin ist sehr viel deutsche Geschichte passiert. Zum Beispiel wurde Berlin im Zuge des Kalten Krieges durch eine Mauer geteilt. In dieser Zeit gab es ein Ost und ein West-Berlin. Und zwischen Ost und West-Berlin befand sich eine Mauer! Heute gib es zum Glück keine Mauer mehr! Aber dafür gibt es viele interessante Museen. Magst Du Museen? Im Mauermuseum am Checkpoint Charlie kannst Du zum Beispiel alles über die Berliner Mauer erfahren! Es gibt aber noch sehr viele andere spannende Museen! Magst Du Internationalität? Berlin ist auch eine sehr internationale Stadt. In einigen Teilen der Stadt ist es sogar komplett normal, dass in den Geschäften nur Englisch gesprochen wird. Aber Du kannst jetzt die Berliner Hipster überraschen und Deutsch mit ihnen sprechen. Also, Berlin ist eine sehr interessante Stadt und es gibt unzählige Sehenswürdigkeiten wie das Brandenburger Tor. Hier noch ein Tipp zum Schluss: Es gibt für Touristen in Berlin eine Welcome Card. Mit der Welcome Card kannst Du alle Busse und Bahnen in Berlin nehmen. Außerdem bekommst Du Rabatt an vielen Orten. Falls Du bald nach Berlin reist, wünsche ich Dir eine ganz tolle Zeit! Und das war die heutige Episode. Ich würde mich freuen, wenn Du den Podcast teilst, in deinem Social Media, mit Freunden oder Deiner Familie. Bei Fragen oder Themenwünschen schreib mir gerne an: learngermanwithculture@web.de , noch einmal: learngermanwithculture@web.de. Hab noch einen schönen Tag und bleib vor allem bitte gesund. Tschüss!
Hey, please share this podcast with your friends, family and neighbours or even write a review :). From now on I plan on publishing new and old episodes without english help in addition to the other episodes. I hope this way also non english speakers profit from the podcast. And for english speakers, I recommend relisten to episodes for the second or third time without english help ;). If you got feedback or ideas for topics, please write to: learngermanwithculture@web.de . Transkript: Ein Haus ist der Ort zum Wohnen. Nicht alle Menschen wohnen in einem Haus. Manche Menschen wohnen auch in einer Wohnung. Ein Haus ist größer als eine Wohnung. In einem Haus gibt es viele Zimmer. Das Schlafzimmer ist zum Schlafen. Man findet dort oft ein gemütliches Bett. Es gibt große Betten und kleine Betten. Paare haben oft ein großes Bett. Im Wohnzimmer kann man fernsehen, spielen oder einfach entspannen. In vielen deutschen Wohnzimmern gibt es ein Sofa und einen Fernseher. Im Wohnzimmer kommt die Familie zusammen. Man redet, lacht oder spielt zusammen. In der Küche wird leckeres Essen gekocht. Deshalb gibt es in der Küche oft einen Ofen und einen Herd. Im Badezimmer kann man sich waschen. Deshalb gibt es im Badezimmer ein Waschbecken und eine Dusche. Hier kann man duschen oder sich die Zähne putzen. Ich putze mir drei Mal am Tag die Zähne. Wann duscht Du? Duscht Du vielleicht morgens nach dem Aufstehen? Ich dusche oft abends. Dann kann ich besser schlafen! Hast Du vielleicht Kinder? Das Kinderzimmer ist für die Kleinen, um zu spielen und zu schlafen. Arbeitest Du vielleicht im von zu Hause? Arbeitest Du vielleicht aus dem Homeoffice? Vielleicht hast Du dann ein Büro. In einem Büro gibt es einen Schreibtisch. In einem Büro kann man gut arbeiten, weil man oft seine Ruhe hat. Ich arbeite manchmal auch von zu Hause. Ich habe aber kein Büro. Bei mir steht der Schreibtisch in meinem Schlafzimmer.
Hey, please share this podcast with your friends, family and neighbours or even write a review :). From now on I plan on publishing new and old episodes without english help in addition to the other episodes. I hope this way also non english speakers profit from the podcast. And for english speakers, I recommend relisten to episodes for the second or third time without english help ;). If you got feedback or ideas for topics, please write to: learngermanwithculture@web.de . Transkript:Hallo und herzlich willkommen zur heutigen Episode. Ich hoffe Dir geht's gut? Ich bin ein bisschen krank, fühle mich ein bisschen groggy. Aber das ist kein Problem, es gibt trotzdem eine kleine Episode. Warst Du schon mal neu an einem Ort und wusstest den Weg nicht? Bist du vielleicht neu oder im Urlaub in Deutschland und suchst Dein Hotel? Wenn du in einer Stadt bist und den Weg nicht kennst, ist es gut, zu wissen, wie man nach dem Weg fragt. Hier sind einige einfache Sätze und Tipps, die dir helfen können.Der erste wichtige Satz ist: „Entschuldigung, können Sie mir bitte helfen?“ Das ist ein wichtiger Satz. Es ist eine höfliche Art, um Hilfe zu bitten. Und das ist natürlich wichtig, wenn man auf einen Menschen zugeht. Der zweite wichtige Satz ist: „Wie komme ich zum Hauptbahnhof?“ Einen Hauptbahnhof gibt es in fast jeder Stadt und diesen Satz kannst Du auch für jeden anderen Ort benutzen. Zum Beispiel: „Wie komme ich zum Strand?“ Wenn Deine Stadt einen Strand hat, könntest Du das auch fragen. Oder ein anderes Beispiel wäre: „Wie komme ich zum Hotel?“ Genau, also das ist auch ein sehr wichtiger Satz. Ein anderer wichtiger Satz ist: „Ist es weit von hier?“ Mit diesem Satz fragst du, ob der Ort weit weg ist. Und das ist manchmal sehr wichtig zu wissen. Ein anderer wichtiger Satz ist: „Welche U-Bahn muss ich nehmen?“ In großen Städten gibt es U-Bahnen. Diese Frage hilft dir, die richtige Linie zu finden. Die Frage funktioniert natürlich auch für Busse oder Straßenbahnen. Eine andere wichtige Frage, ein anderer wichtiger Satz lautet: „Wie lange dauert es, dorthin zu gehen?“ So kannst du fragen, wie viel Zeit du brauchst, um zu deinem Ziel zu kommen.Außerdem gibt es noch eine wichtige Vokabel: „abbiegen“. Man kann links abbiegen. Man kann auch rechts abbiegen. Wenn du jemanden nach dem Weg gefragt hast, könnte er oder sie vielleicht antworten. „Du musst gerade aus gehen und dann links abbiegen“ Genau, das waren schonmal Sätze. Nun habe ich noch Tipps für Dich. Erstens: „Sei höflich“ Ein freundliches „Entschuldigung“ oder „Bitte“ hilft immer. Zweitens: „Achte auf Schilder“. In Städten gibt es viele Schilder, die dir den Weg zeigen. Und drittens: Nutze eine Karte oder dein Handy. Oft kann eine Karte oder Dein Handy helfen, wenn die Erklärung schwierig ist.Tja…, mit diesen einfachen Sätzen und Tipps findest du dich an einem neuen Ort besser zurecht. Also dann sag ich mal: Viel Spaß bei Deiner Reise! Und das war es mit der heutigen Episode. Ich hoffe sie hat dir gefallen. Bitte teile sie doch in Deinem Social Media, mit Freunden oder in Deiner Familie. Vielleicht schreibst Du ja sogar ein Review. Ich würde mich sehr, sehr freuen. Ich hoffe Du hast noch einen schönen, schönen Tag und bleib vor allem gesund! Tschüss!
Hey, please share this podcast with your friends, family and neighbours or even write a review :). From now on I plan on publishing new and old episodes without english help aswell. I hope this way also non english speakers profit from the podcast. And for english speakers, I recommend relisten to episodes for the second or third time without english help ;). If you got feedback or ideas for topics, please write to: learngermanwithculture@web.de . Transkript:Olaf Scholz ist ein Mann aus Deutschland. Er ist sehr wichtig. Warum? Weil er der Chef von Deutschland ist. Das nennt man "Bundeskanzler". Der Bundeskanzler entscheidet, welche Regeln gemacht werden sollen und arbeitet mit anderen Politikern zusammen, um das Land zu führen.Olaf Scholz ist in einer Partei, der SPD, die sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. Sie steht für Dinge wie Gerechtigkeit und Hilfe für Menschen, die es schwer haben. Die Leute wählen die SPD, um Politiker in die Regierung zu bringen, die diese Ideen umsetzen sollen.Manche Leute sagen, Olaf Scholz sieht aus wie ein Pinguin. Das ist lustig, oder? Aber er ist kein Pinguin, er ist ein Mensch. Er trägt oft Anzüge und sieht sehr schick aus. Erst kürzlich hatte Olaf Scholz beim Joggen einen Unfall. Er ist hingefallen und hat sich dabei das Auge verletzt. Deshalb trägt er momentan eine Augenklappe. Nun sieht er nicht aus wie ein Pinguin, sondern wie ein Pirat. Er kommt aus Hamburg, einer großen Stadt in Deutschland. Hamburg ist bekannt für leckeres Essen, seinen großen Hafen und die Nüchternheit der Menschen. Nüchtern sein bedeutet, wenn Menschen wenig Emotionen zeigen, egal ob es ihnen gut oder schlecht geht. Olaf Scholz zeigt selbst selten Emotionen. Vielleicht mag Olaf Scholz deshalb Hamburg so sehr.Olaf Scholz spricht viele Sprachen, aber Deutsch ist seine Lieblingssprache. Er spricht auch Englisch, weil er mit anderen Leuten aus anderen Ländern reden muss. Manchmal macht er Fehler, wie jeder andere Mensch auch. Zum Beispiel hat er zugegeben, dass in seiner Regierung zu viel gestritten wird. Das liegt auch daran, dass in seiner Regierung drei Parteien sind; die SPD, die Grünen und die FDP. Seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg ist es das erste Mal, dass nicht nur zwei, sondern drei Parteien in einer deutschen Regierung sind. Olaf Scholz ist verheiratet und hat Kinder. Er ist also nicht nur ein Politiker, sondern auch ein Papa und Ehemann. Wenn du Deutsch lernst und ein Politiker werden willst, kannst du von Olaf Scholz lernen. Er ist klug und arbeitet hart. Aber vergiss nicht, immer auch Spaß zu haben, genauso wie ein Pinguin!
Hey, please share this podcast with your friends, family and neighbours or even write a review :). From now on I plan on publishing new and old episodes without english help aswell. I hope this way also non english speakers profit from the podcast. And for english speakers, I recommend relisten to episodes for the second or third time without english help ;). If you got feedback or ideas for topics, please write to: learngermanwithculture@web.de . Transkript: Hallo und herzlich Willkommen zur heutigen Episode. Hier ein kurzer Hinweis: Ich versuche in Zukunft 2 Versionen der neuen Podcast Episode zu veröffentlichen. Eine mit englischer Hilfe zwischendurch und eine ohne. So können auch Menschen, die kein Englisch sprechen, von dem Podcast profitieren. Und alle, die Englisch sprechen, können ja beim zweiten oder dritten Mal hören des Podcasts, es ohne die Hilfe versuchen. Schreib mir gerne Feedback, was du davon hältst. Wie geht es dir? Ich hoffe, dir geht es gut. Mir persönlich geht es ganz okay. In der heutigen Episode sprechen wir über die Europawahl 2024. Die Europawahl 2024 findet zwischen dem 6. und dem 9. Juni 2024 in Europa statt. Sie findet in allen Mitgliedsstaaten der EU statt. Also in allen Ländern, die es in der Europäischen Union gibt. In Deutschland findet die Wahl am 9. Juni statt. Also am letzten Tag der Wahl. Was wird gewählt? Bei der Europawahl wird das Europäische Parlament gewählt. In dem Europäischen Parlament sitzen Politiker aus ganz Europa. Insgesamt 720 Menschen! Jedes Land der EU hat eine bestimmte Anzahl an Sitzen. Die Anzahl der Sitze hängt davon ab, wie groß das Land ist. Genauer gesagt, wie viele Menschen in dem Land wohnen. In Deutschland leben, verglichen mit anderen Ländern in der EU, sehr viele Menschen. Deswegen hat Deutschland 96 Sitze. Kleinere Länder, wie zum Beispiel Portugal, haben auch weniger Sitze. Portugal hat zum Beispiel 21 Sitze. Im Europäischen Parlament gibt es unterschiedliche Fraktionen. Die Fraktionen sind ähnlich wie in den nationalen Parlamenten. Die Fraktionen zeigen eine bestimmte politische Richtung. Zum Beispiel konservativ, liberal oder grün. (Es) gibt noch mehr Fraktionen. Das sind jetzt nur Beispiele. Wie wichtig ist die Europawahl? Nun, die Europawahl ist sehr wichtig, weil sie die politische Richtung in der EU vorgibt. Das Europäische Parlament macht Gesetze und bestimmt den Haushalt. Also: Die Wahl ist sehr, sehr wichtig. Allerdings sind die nationalen Wahlen auch sehr wichtig, weil das Europäische Parlament natürlich nicht alle Entscheidungen in Europa trifft. Wenn du wahlberechtigt bist, solltest du unbedingt am 9. Juni deine Stimme in Deutschland für die Europawahl abgeben. Und das war es mit der heutigen Episode. Ich hoffe, Dir hat die Episode gefallen, bitte teile sie doch in deinem Social Media oder auch in Gesprächen mit Freunden oder deiner Familie. Vielen, vielen Dank für deine Aufmerksamkeit und ich hoffe du hast noch einen richtig schönen Tag, bleib vor allem gesund. Ciao, ciao, Tschüss.
Hanna fled the war in Ukraine in 2022, leaving behind her teaching career, community, and life as she knew it. She arrived in Australia with no English language skills and her educational qualifications were no longer recognised. Through TAFE NSW she's now been able to learn English and gain the skills needed to study and work here. She's recently graduated from a Cert III in Early Childhood Education & Care and is now working at a local preschool. - Учитель Анна Бабичева из Луганской области переехала в Сидней в 2022 году вместе с 10-летней дочерью, бежав от войны в Украине. Приехав в Австралию без знания английского языка, она пошла учиться в TAFE. Анна смогла выучить английский язык, получить сертификат III в области дошкольного образования и устроиться на работу детском саду.
I talk to Will Mallard about social housing in the commercial property sector. Will shares insights into the complexities of the sector, including the various categories of social housing and supported housing. He discusses how he got involved in social housing and provides examples of projects he has worked on. The conversation delves into the financial aspects of social housing, including the challenges and opportunities for investors. Will also highlights the importance of understanding the needs of local authorities and care providers when considering social housing projects. KEY TAKEAWAYS The social housing sector is complex, with various categories and different interpretations and applications by local authorities and NHS areas. Lenders in the social housing sector may increase interest rates and impose stricter loan-to-value ratios due to uncertainty, making it crucial to secure a stable income stream for financing. A strategy in the social housing sector involves finding the ideal customer first, purchasing properties under market value, creating paper-based uplift, and potentially holding properties long-term for income. No English local authority has ever defaulted on long lease residential or supported housing payments, providing a level of stability for investors in the sector. For more information on the social housing sector and property investment, listeners can access the "My Property World" podcast hosted by Will Mallard on various platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. BEST MOMENTS "There's approximately 200,000 people currently in supported housing of one form or another. And there's at least another 100,000 in terms of demand." "One of the top points in this is around temporary accommodation, where there's a statutory obligation for a local authority to provide housing for anyone who presents with a housing need." "No English local authority has ever defaulted on a long lease residential or supported housing payment. Not once." "People are holding it for income, or the end owner, and that there's an appeal which is, I suppose, backable by a vision of a mortgage or some other lending product." VALUABLE RESOURCES JOIN THE NETWORK If you want to learn more about investing in Commercial Property why not consider joining the CPI Network? A community of active investors who collaborate, share experiences and empower each other in their Commercial Property endeavours. Useful Links: CPI Website - https://commercialpropertyinvestor.co.uk/ Our Sponsors - https://commercialpropertyinvestor.co.uk/podcast-sponsors/Property Investing, Commercial Real Estate, Strategies, CMO, Lease, Licence Agreement, Cashflow, Vacancy rates, Agents, Best Commercial property podcast, how to buy, Valuations, ROI, residential, assets, Flexspace, office space, How to get started: https://www.commercialpropertyinvestor.co.uk/
Hake's back from Jury Duty! Callers on Trump in courts. Kanye, judged by Christians! Child custody problems: worried fathers call! The Hake Report, Tuesday, March 19, 2024 AD TIME STAMPS * (0:00:00) Start * (0:00:53) Topics: Kanye vs Christians (not Destiny/Hasan Piker) * (0:02:42) Hey, guys-uys! Children of the Lie TFS tee* (0:04:14) Hake on Jury Duty* (0:09:56) Does she deserve justice? No English! * (0:10:58) Joel Friday, Sean, Nick, thank you! * (0:11:38) Supers from Joel Friday, Joe* (0:14:10) Super: Joel Friday, Boeing CEO Calhoun * (0:15:23) JOE, AZ: Judging Trump's character with legalese * (0:24:42) JOE: Fani Willis, Nathan Wade; Trump bond * (0:29:35) JOE: Trump NY case, masterful delays * (0:32:08) JOE Super: Lin Yen Chin (Romans 12: 19) * (0:33:17) FREDERICK, CA: Trump "bloodbath" hoping * (0:40:51) FREDERICK: Distracted, low IQ Hake, crazy * (0:45:34) Kanye on Jesus, prayer* (0:53:28) Christians judging Kanye (Donnie Darkened, anti-Trump) * (0:58:32) DAVID, NORWAY: Vaxx, daughter custody, like Kanye * (1:08:27) Bullfrogs & Butterflies (The Butterflies) - "Kid Talk" (1978) * (1:12:21) Supers: Children, Irish vs white, * (1:14:46) Super: 1 Corinthians 9: 24 Run to win the prize * (1:19:59) BRIAN, TN: son, baby mom, Army, cut girly hair, change careers? * (1:32:15) BRIAN: Custody, alpha son, possible manipulation by mother * (1:38:11) BRIAN: Counseling with JLP via BOND, 323-782-1980* (1:39:23) DANIEL, TX vs BRIAN: Advice on getting to 20 years * (1:42:23) WILLIAM, CA: Trump vs empty charges * (1:47:24) Supers: Issue with welfare (enablement, laziness) * (1:49:17) RICK, call me tomorrow! * (1:49:36) Steve Taylor - "Sin for a Season" (1988, Meltdown) BLOG https://www.thehakereport.com/blog/2024/3/19/the-hake-report-tue-3-19-24 PODCAST / Substack HAKE NEWS from JLP https://www.thehakereport.com/jlp-news/2024/3/19/supreme-court-blocks-tx-from-stopping-illegals-hake-news-tue-3-19-24-1 Hake is live M-F 9-11a PT (11-1CT/12-2ET) Call-in 1-888-775-3773 https://www.thehakereport.com/show VIDEO YouTube | Rumble* | Facebook | X | BitChute | Odysee* PODCAST Substack | Apple | Spotify | Castbox | Podcast Addict *SUPER CHAT on platforms* above or BuyMeACoffee, etc. SHOP Teespring || All My Links JLP Network: JLP | Church | TFS | Nick | Joel Get full access to HAKE at thehakereport.substack.com/subscribe
The first book is about Little Wolf, who wants to do things his own way, which is backwards. The second one is about a little girl, Blanca. Her and her family moved from Argentina. She didn't speak English, so her and her friend, Diana talked to each other through drawing pictures.
Cousin Louie explains what happened on Wednesday, Danny re-discovers fast food, and I guess we need to learn Spanish or speak Spanish.
Max Azarov created his business to meet the needs of his own children and families like his. But it was successful enough to become a major online platform – and is in the process of scaling up big time. Today on The Business of You, Max shares some of his key takeaways from scaling up and growing as an entrepreneur. Max is the Founder of NovaKid, an online language learning platform for kids ages 4-12. Novakid has been included on the Forbes Top 500 list of America's Best Startup Employers. NovaKid is currently in the expansion phase, exploring new ways to work with older children and create group language immersion experiences. Classes are 25-45 minutes depending on childrens' ages. NovaKid employs complete immersion during classes, with no English spoken, and integrates learning games into the curriculum, making language acquisition engaging and effective. NovaKid is a Series B startup that has raised $41.5 million to date and created revenue of over $18 million in 2021. This fully remote, venture-backed business has been operating since 2017, with approximately 2,500 staff and teachers in over 20 countries. Novakid is funded by well-known venture capital firms Owl Ventures and Goodwater Capital, PortfoLion, LearnStart, Xploration Capital, Bon Angels, Leta Capital, TMT Investments, all of which support innovation businesses globally. Max has a robust background in applied mathematics, software design, and digital signal processing. He worked at Google in product development and the development of Google Maps. Created out of need Max Azarov was frustrated. Living abroad in Eastern Europe, he was struggling to find teaching modalities for his older son to learn English. In a place where English was not widely spoken or accessible at the time, he attempted to find a teacher for him – but she ended up moving away. While on a trip to Shanghai in 2017, Max had an epiphany when he saw families using a popular platform called VIPKid. Wondering why there was no comparable platform in Europe, he set out to research it. While there were plenty of options for adults to learn, there weren't for children. There were widespread beliefs that children could not learn online and certainly could not acquire language skills online. Fortunately, those beliefs turned out to be false. Secrets of scaling a remote company As NovaKid extended its influence, it emerged as a prominent player in the online education sector. Max Azarov, equipped with a background in applied mathematics, software design, and experience at Google, guided NovaKid through substantial growth. Max's entrepreneurial journey, rooted in personal necessity, is a compelling illustration of how business ventures can address unmet needs and revolutionize industries, particularly in scaling online businesses and embracing remote workforces. Quotes “I was helping these big guys to help them solve a problem. That was a big moment for me – realizing that this is not just my hobby, not just my passion…it was something that I could use to make a big difference in the world.” “This was the need – how do I make them fluent in English while living in a country where English is not the first language and is not widely spoken?” “For adults, you could find a lot of choices. But for kids, there was nothing. Traditional wisdom would say that it wouldn't work for kids. But that turned out to be completely false.” “There are two things we do differently than others: We went with complete immersion! No English is spoken during the class. The second thing is that we heavily used learning games as part of the curriculum.” “It's a combination of games, to get attention, and full immersion that drives the learning.” “We are focused on deep and meaningful connections with students.” “Why do we even have language as a species? We have it to make deep, meaningful connections with each other. So we encourage that in our product as well.” “If your business model allows you to have remote workers, definitely do that!” “Without an excellent healthy culture, you cannot really build a successful company.” Links mentioned in this episode: Visit the NovaKid website at https://www.novakidschool.com See NovaKid's feature in Forbes' list of America's Best Startup Employers: https://www.forbes.com/lists/americas-best-startup-employers/?sh=60b6d5272ad7 Connect with Max on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mazarov
Being an immigrant definitely comes with its own set of unique struggles and Nicky Billou is a living example that success is attainable when your heart's desire is to be of service to others. Nicky shares how he moved as a child from Iran to Canada with his parents and did not even know how to speak English. But he learned quickly and eventually graduated from Georgetown University. He has been on the entrepreneurial track ever since, establishing a prosperous community that specializes in helping leaders and entrepreneurs who are service minded grow their businesses and succeed at making their dreams come true. His ECircle Academy offers training for those who want to have high-level networking opportunities and expand their own businesses. He has also defeated all odds by becoming a best-selling author of 10 books, including a children's book. Listen as Nicky shares how he made all of this happen and wants to be of service to you.Website: https://www.ecircleacademy.com/
Looking to sell your company? Get a free valuation at www.aaroncordovez.com/valuation Looking to take your Amazon Ads to the next level with automation - try Samurai Seller! www.samuraiseller.com/start for your 30 free trial. Dima Kubrak's journey to building a successful Amazon business is one of perseverance and adaptability. Arriving in the United States with only $900 and no knowledge of English, he started working in a kiosk selling sea products in San Diego. Despite the language barrier, Dima learned how to sell products by asking his boss to write him a script. He later became the top seller in multiple locations. Dima's success continued as a pedicab driver in Key West, where he came up with a unique approach to increase his earnings by offering tours to his customers. There, he met a client who taught him how to sell products online for free, leading him to start dropshipping on eBay. Although he faced challenges such as other sellers copying his stores and undercutting his prices, Dima's experience taught him the importance of product selection and creating visually appealing listings. Dima's journey wasn't without setbacks, however. He lost all of his inventory when Apple sent a warning letter about selling non-certified cables, and even faced a potential $2 million fine or jail time for importing copycat products. Despite these challenges, Dima continued to adapt and find success by testing and eventually selling supplements and matcha tea on Amazon. Dima's story is a testament to the power of persistence and delegation in business. He has built a successful fulfillment center and software company for Amazon sellers and encourages anyone with ideas to reach out to him. For Dima, the easiest way to gain financial freedom is through starting a business on Amazon, and he is passionate about teaching others how to do the same.
Foreign Words With No English Equivalent (3/3/23) by 96.5 WKLH
Every Word 2022 day 115: What most people don't know about Bible translations Hi there, and welcome to this bonus podcast! I will be discussing the two main types of Bible translations I recommend for most people. As a Bible translator since 1983, I feel that most Christians in the USA are not given enough information about why Bible translations differ in wording, and which kinds of Bible translations will be better for different kinds of readers. This is an important topic, so I am surprised at myself: I can't believe that I haven't released a dedicated podcast about this topic every year since 2014. ALSO, please stay tuned for the end of the podcast, because I want to recommend a fantastic new real-book Bible. Because of more difficult content in this podcast, if you are not driving a car, it would be a great idea to open the episode notes so you can visually follow along and make sure you don't miss something important. Look especially at the words I have made bold. There are actually five types of Bible translations, but I will mainly discuss the two most-used types in this podcast. But let's start with showing the two types with a translation example that is not from the Bible. Consider this sentence: Jill looked like a deer caught in the headlights when she heard Jack's proposal. Now let's imagine a word-for-word translation for some language in Africa. Since we don't know a language like that, let's pretend we do and make a word-for-word translation into English. Here is my suggestion for that: Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light upon hearing Jack's desire. What we have in this example (caught in the headlights) is a figure of speech. Americans rather frequently use this figure of speech. But a word-for-word translation for the hypothetical African audience would very likely be tricky for them to understand. They might not know what a gazelle would do if a bright light shone upon them. (For that matter, I don't know if gazelle's act like deer do when meeting with bright lights.) I think an African might understand “Jill appeared like a gazelle trapped in bright light” to be a gazelle trapped with a metal trap, in pain, and struggling to get loose when the bright light suddenly shines upon it. Our hypothetical African listener will probably get a very different idea about what is meant. For our second hypothetical translation, let's try giving the plain meaning like we would if we were explaining to an 8-year-old child. We might translate, “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” Or we might say, Jill was caught off guard and totally surprised by Jack's offer.” In this example, I've dropped the figure of speech entirely and gone straight for the meaning. These are the two main translation types that I want to explain: The first was what we call a literal translation, or a word-for-word translation. And the second is what I will call a meaning-based translation. Literal: Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light … Meaning-based: Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal. Which translation is ‘right'? Actually both translations can be considered right. But the word-for-word translation is difficult to understand for our hypothetical African listeners, because there are cultural factors involved in interpreting the figure of speech in this example. The listeners would likely come up with various interpretations about the poor, defenseless gazelle being trapped. Whereas, if Jill likes Jack, she may be thrilled at his proposal. The meaning based translation is right too: “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” That translation is easy to understand, but if you remember the original sentence, you will miss the richness of the figure of speech. The two main types of Bible translations have exactly the same problems as what I have shown in the two examples above. The advantage of a literal, word-for-word translation is that it mirrors the form of the original text. The disadvantage of a literal translation is that it cannot always clearly give the meaning in the target language. The meaning-based translation is just the opposite: The advantage of a meaning-based translation is that it shows the meaning clearly. The disadvantage of a meaning-based translation is that it cannot mirror the form of the original text. Every Bible translator starts out thinking, “I will be able to translate word-for-word and still clearly enough show the meaning.” For two languages that are strongly related to each other, a literal translation can often still be clear. But if we are thinking of translating ancient Hebrew and Greek into modern English, there is a huge gulf between the ancient and modern languages and cultures. My first example involved an English figure of speech. But let me give you a chance to experience decoding an Indonesian figure of speech: Yakobus adalah kacang yang sudah lupa kulitnya. A word-for-word translation is this: Jack is a peanut that has forgotten his shell. Now it is your turn to wonder what that could mean. You won't guess, so I will tell you. Here's a meaning-based translation of “Jack is a peanut that has forgotten his shell.” That means, Jack left his rural village to get an education in the city, and now has a good job with a high salary, but he has forgotten his humble beginnings. He never helps any of his friends and relatives in his home village. There are many literal (or word-for-word) Bible translations in English. That kind of translation is easier to make. And not all literal translations are equally literal. Some fudge to be slightly more meaning-based. But for the purposes of this discussion, I will choose what I think is the most popular literal translation today: It is the ESV (English Standard Version). It is the translation that would translate, “Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light.” It is great at showing the word-for-word form of the original text, but not so good at giving you the meaning clearly. A literal translation I like better than the ESV is the WEBBE (World English Bible British Edition). Meaning-based Bible translations are much rarer, because they require the translator to work much harder to accurately translate the meaning. For English language readers, I recommend the Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech of 1901, The Good News Bible (TEV 1966), and the New Living Translation. There are a few more, but those are my favorites, and I will focus in this podcast on the NLT. The NLT would translate our example as “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” The KJV is a literal translation, and an unfortunate part of the continuing legacy of the KJV, is that pastors often prefer using literal translations from the pulpit. But unfortunately this means that many ordinary people in the pew wind up using something like the ESV for their daily Bible reading at home. This means that many Christians who read their Bibles at home often struggle with hard-to-understand passages. If you normally read the ESV Bible and think you understand everything in it, well, I bet you haven't yet read all of it! Here is one of my most important recommendations for you: Make sure you have access to both kinds of translations. In other words, use both an ESV and an NLT Bible. That way you can quickly see the meaning (in the NLT), and you get a window into the word-for-word shape of the original text with the ESV. My Daily Bible Reading podcasts have only been of two meaning-based translations. Why? Because they can be understood by people just listening to the recordings. It would be useless to record the ESV, because listeners would often miss the meaning. Now I want to illustrate what I have been saying with a Bible passage. I wish I could spend an hour doing this, but I feel I must limit myself to only one example. I have chosen the topic statement for the book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 16-17. In the ESV verse 16 says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. If I had all the podcast listeners in front of me as a group, I would say to you, “Raise your hand if you are a Jew.” Usually in my audiences, no one raises their hand. At that point I say, “Raise your hand if you are a Greek.” Usually again, no one raises their hand. But then my question is, “Where do you fit in to Romans 1:16?” This verse says that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Sounds like you people who didn't raise your hands are not able to be saved! So which one are we?” The answer is that Paul is contrasting Jews with everyone else. Greek was the universal language of culture and commerce at that time, even under the Roman government. Now let's compare the same verse in the NLT: For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes— the Jew first and also the Gentile. Now let's look at verse 17 in the ESV: For in it (referring back to the Gospel) the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” No English reader will suspect that there is anything kind of strange about the phrase ‘the righteous of God'. The problem is that ‘of God' is a genitive in Greek, and genitives have a dozen different options for the meaning. ESV nearly always uses the word ‘of' to translate genitives. But in this verse, ‘righteousness of God' will mean that the Gospel is about revealing that God is righteous. Wait a minute! If God is righteous and I am not righteous, that is not Good News. He will punish me. Rather, in this verse, the genitive is one showing source. Just wait a moment and I will read the NLT. A second significant problem in verse 17 is a grammatical construction that forms an idiom in Greek: For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. So the literal translation has zero meaning or leaves the reader to guess at meanings, which will probably be wrong. Finally, because of the first two problems I just mentioned, it seems like the final quote from Habakkuk 2:4 doesn't fit with what came before it. So we ask, why did Paul quote, “The righteous shall live by faith.” Now let me read the NLT to you: 17 This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.” Many years ago, I had a phone conversation with a woman who was a new believer. She liked reading her KJV, and I used Romans 1:16-17 to try to show her that she would be better off reading the NLT. The KJV has the same problem in v.17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.” So I asked her what that means, and she quickly replied, “Oh, you know, the Catholic faith, the Mormon faith, the protestant faith.” Hello! None of those things existed when Paul wrote Romans. I give that story to show that a dangerous thing that happens when many people read the Bible: If we don't understand something, we may just make up a meaning that sounds plausible to us. And as time goes on, we can get more and more convinced that our guesses are true. Going back to the advantages and disadvantages of the two translation types, the ESV has made a very good literal translation of 1:17. The ESV closely mirrors the form of the Greek text, but the problem is that readers won't grasp the meaning, unless perhaps there are study notes to guide them. On the other hand, the NLT has the disadvantage that it doesn't match the word-for-word form of the Greek, but it nails the meaning. God is the source of our righteousness. NLT translates: This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. And the Greek idiom ‘from faith to faith' means, “This is accomplished from start to finish by faith.” Finally, if you take the time to read verse 17 again, you will see that the quote at the end of the verse supports what Paul claims about the Good News about Christ. I am passionate about people having access to at least one Bible that is a literal translation, and one that is a meaning-based translation. Recently an elder in our church shared that he was struggling hard to read and understand Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. He was rather bitter in his complaints, saying, “Why did Jeremiah write like this? I can't penetrate this stuff!” This is just one example of many I could share. Normal Christians like you and me who try to use a literal translation for devotional reading, and attempt to read every book in the Bible, will not enjoy the experience. This can clearly be seen in Indonesia, where the people have only had wide access to one literal translation since 1974. Indonesian Christians have been discouraged from reading their Bibles for too long, and that has seriously weakened the church throughout that country. Now, with our Plain Indonesian Translation, thousands of people have discovered that they enjoy reading the Bible. But now, through our 90-day Bible reading challenge, teenage kids and adults are rejoicing to find that they enjoy reading the New Testament, finishing it in 90 days, and many immediately start over to read it again. Any Christian who wants to glorify God should read the whole Bible. And if we really want to glorify God, then we should read a translation that we understand. Reading a translation that you don't understand fully will not help you or encourage you. I need to give two important clarifications: Some people think that the NLT is a paraphrase because the first edition still contained some words or phrases that sounded like the Living Bible. The Living Bible deserves to be called a paraphrase, because it occasionally adds ideas not found in the original text, or fails to translate other things. But the New Living Translation is a highly researched and revised meaning-based translation. My second clarification is that The Message is an extreme paraphrase. Please don't think it is a faithful translation. Please don't quote it. Please don't give it to a new Christian to read. Here is the information about real-book Bibles I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. I want you to know that no one at Tyndale House asked me to promote their products, and I am not getting paid anything for giving out this information. Gale decided to give NLT Bibles to members of her Bible study groups, and I decided to give them to my small group. It has been a long time since we bought Bibles, and so we made some delightful discoveries. Tyndale House has several cool NLT Bibles right now. The NLT Illustrated Study Bible is incredible! Beautifully illustrated with maps and charts and many study notes and supplemental information. The hardcover edition is only $36.66. You might like the leather-like edition which is a bit more. However, at more than 2,500 pages, you won't want to carry this Bible around. Here's what I am giving to some young people in our church, including our grandkids: There is a new kind of Bible developed by Tyndale House, called a Filament Enabled NLT Bible. This real-book Bible comes without study notes and maps, making it practical to carry and providing an uncluttered reading experience, but it has a companion cell phone app that gives you all the stuff you would get in a study Bible and even much more. You download the Filament app for your phone or tablet, and then you can take a picture of the page number or type in the page number for which you want to get more information. The app then gives you study notes, charts, timelines, and devotional material, including videos and even worship songs. There is a premium-value edition with a leather-like cover for just $15. For the person who wants to make notes, there is a beautiful wide margin edition available for $38. A large print Filament enabled Bible is about that same price. A genuine leather thin-line edition of the NLT Filament Bible is only $35. I highly recommend an article linked at the very end of the episode notes entitled How Not to Argue About Which Bible Translation Is Best by Andy Naselli. And may the Lord bless you ‘real good'. LINKS: https://sites.google.com/clarinetpages.net/read-the-bible-in-a-year/read/start-with-a-good-plan See the second part of this page: Recommended Bible translations for devotional reading Fantastic article: How Not to Argue About Which Bible Translation Is Best June 13, 2017 | Andy Naselli
Every Word 2022 day 115: What most people don't know about Bible translations Hi there, and welcome to this bonus podcast! I will be discussing the two main types of Bible translations I recommend for most people. As a Bible translator since 1983, I feel that most Christians in the USA are not given enough information about why Bible translations differ in wording, and which kinds of Bible translations will be better for different kinds of readers. This is an important topic, so I am surprised at myself: I can't believe that I haven't released a dedicated podcast about this topic every year since 2014. ALSO, please stay tuned for the end of the podcast, because I want to recommend a fantastic new real-book Bible. Because of more difficult content in this podcast, if you are not driving a car, it would be a great idea to open the episode notes so you can visually follow along and make sure you don't miss something important. Look especially at the words I have made bold. There are actually five types of Bible translations, but I will mainly discuss the two most-used types in this podcast. But let's start with showing the two types with a translation example that is not from the Bible. Consider this sentence: Jill looked like a deer caught in the headlights when she heard Jack's proposal. Now let's imagine a word-for-word translation for some language in Africa. Since we don't know a language like that, let's pretend we do and make a word-for-word translation into English. Here is my suggestion for that: Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light upon hearing Jack's desire. What we have in this example (caught in the headlights) is a figure of speech. Americans rather frequently use this figure of speech. But a word-for-word translation for the hypothetical African audience would very likely be tricky for them to understand. They might not know what a gazelle would do if a bright light shone upon them. (For that matter, I don't know if gazelle's act like deer do when meeting with bright lights.) I think an African might understand “Jill appeared like a gazelle trapped in bright light” to be a gazelle trapped with a metal trap, in pain, and struggling to get loose when the bright light suddenly shines upon it. Our hypothetical African listener will probably get a very different idea about what is meant. For our second hypothetical translation, let's try giving the plain meaning like we would if we were explaining to an 8-year-old child. We might translate, “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” Or we might say, Jill was caught off guard and totally surprised by Jack's offer.” In this example, I've dropped the figure of speech entirely and gone straight for the meaning. These are the two main translation types that I want to explain: The first was what we call a literal translation, or a word-for-word translation. And the second is what I will call a meaning-based translation. Literal: Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light … Meaning-based: Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal. Which translation is ‘right'? Actually both translations can be considered right. But the word-for-word translation is difficult to understand for our hypothetical African listeners, because there are cultural factors involved in interpreting the figure of speech in this example. The listeners would likely come up with various interpretations about the poor, defenseless gazelle being trapped. Whereas, if Jill likes Jack, she may be thrilled at his proposal. The meaning based translation is right too: “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” That translation is easy to understand, but if you remember the original sentence, you will miss the richness of the figure of speech. The two main types of Bible translations have exactly the same problems as what I have shown in the two examples above. The advantage of a literal, word-for-word translation is that it mirrors the form of the original text. The disadvantage of a literal translation is that it cannot always clearly give the meaning in the target language. The meaning-based translation is just the opposite: The advantage of a meaning-based translation is that it shows the meaning clearly. The disadvantage of a meaning-based translation is that it cannot mirror the form of the original text. Every Bible translator starts out thinking, “I will be able to translate word-for-word and still clearly enough show the meaning.” For two languages that are strongly related to each other, a literal translation can often still be clear. But if we are thinking of translating ancient Hebrew and Greek into modern English, there is a huge gulf between the ancient and modern languages and cultures. My first example involved an English figure of speech. But let me give you a chance to experience decoding an Indonesian figure of speech: Yakobus adalah kacang yang sudah lupa kulitnya. A word-for-word translation is this: Jack is a peanut that has forgotten his shell. Now it is your turn to wonder what that could mean. You won't guess, so I will tell you. Here's a meaning-based translation of “Jack is a peanut that has forgotten his shell.” That means, Jack left his rural village to get an education in the city, and now has a good job with a high salary, but he has forgotten his humble beginnings. He never helps any of his friends and relatives in his home village. There are many literal (or word-for-word) Bible translations in English. That kind of translation is easier to make. And not all literal translations are equally literal. Some fudge to be slightly more meaning-based. But for the purposes of this discussion, I will choose what I think is the most popular literal translation today: It is the ESV (English Standard Version). It is the translation that would translate, “Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light.” It is great at showing the word-for-word form of the original text, but not so good at giving you the meaning clearly. A literal translation I like better than the ESV is the WEBBE (World English Bible British Edition). Meaning-based Bible translations are much rarer, because they require the translator to work much harder to accurately translate the meaning. For English language readers, I recommend the Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech of 1901, The Good News Bible (TEV 1966), and the New Living Translation. There are a few more, but those are my favorites, and I will focus in this podcast on the NLT. The NLT would translate our example as “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” The KJV is a literal translation, and an unfortunate part of the continuing legacy of the KJV, is that pastors often prefer using literal translations from the pulpit. But unfortunately this means that many ordinary people in the pew wind up using something like the ESV for their daily Bible reading at home. This means that many Christians who read their Bibles at home often struggle with hard-to-understand passages. If you normally read the ESV Bible and think you understand everything in it, well, I bet you haven't yet read all of it! Here is one of my most important recommendations for you: Make sure you have access to both kinds of translations. In other words, use both an ESV and an NLT Bible. That way you can quickly see the meaning (in the NLT), and you get a window into the word-for-word shape of the original text with the ESV. My Daily Bible Reading podcasts have only been of two meaning-based translations. Why? Because they can be understood by people just listening to the recordings. It would be useless to record the ESV, because listeners would often miss the meaning. Now I want to illustrate what I have been saying with a Bible passage. I wish I could spend an hour doing this, but I feel I must limit myself to only one example. I have chosen the topic statement for the book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 16-17. In the ESV verse 16 says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. If I had all the podcast listeners in front of me as a group, I would say to you, “Raise your hand if you are a Jew.” Usually in my audiences, no one raises their hand. At that point I say, “Raise your hand if you are a Greek.” Usually again, no one raises their hand. But then my question is, “Where do you fit in to Romans 1:16?” This verse says that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Sounds like you people who didn't raise your hands are not able to be saved! So which one are we?” The answer is that Paul is contrasting Jews with everyone else. Greek was the universal language of culture and commerce at that time, even under the Roman government. Now let's compare the same verse in the NLT: For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes— the Jew first and also the Gentile. Now let's look at verse 17 in the ESV: For in it (referring back to the Gospel) the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” No English reader will suspect that there is anything kind of strange about the phrase ‘the righteous of God'. The problem is that ‘of God' is a genitive in Greek, and genitives have a dozen different options for the meaning. ESV nearly always uses the word ‘of' to translate genitives. But in this verse, ‘righteousness of God' will mean that the Gospel is about revealing that God is righteous. Wait a minute! If God is righteous and I am not righteous, that is not Good News. He will punish me. Rather, in this verse, the genitive is one showing source. Just wait a moment and I will read the NLT. A second significant problem in verse 17 is a grammatical construction that forms an idiom in Greek: For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. So the literal translation has zero meaning or leaves the reader to guess at meanings, which will probably be wrong. Finally, because of the first two problems I just mentioned, it seems like the final quote from Habakkuk 2:4 doesn't fit with what came before it. So we ask, why did Paul quote, “The righteous shall live by faith.” Now let me read the NLT to you: 17 This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.” Many years ago, I had a phone conversation with a woman who was a new believer. She liked reading her KJV, and I used Romans 1:16-17 to try to show her that she would be better off reading the NLT. The KJV has the same problem in v.17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.” So I asked her what that means, and she quickly replied, “Oh, you know, the Catholic faith, the Mormon faith, the protestant faith.” Hello! None of those things existed when Paul wrote Romans. I give that story to show that a dangerous thing that happens when many people read the Bible: If we don't understand something, we may just make up a meaning that sounds plausible to us. And as time goes on, we can get more and more convinced that our guesses are true. Going back to the advantages and disadvantages of the two translation types, the ESV has made a very good literal translation of 1:17. The ESV closely mirrors the form of the Greek text, but the problem is that readers won't grasp the meaning, unless perhaps there are study notes to guide them. On the other hand, the NLT has the disadvantage that it doesn't match the word-for-word form of the Greek, but it nails the meaning. God is the source of our righteousness. NLT translates: This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. And the Greek idiom ‘from faith to faith' means, “This is accomplished from start to finish by faith.” Finally, if you take the time to read verse 17 again, you will see that the quote at the end of the verse supports what Paul claims about the Good News about Christ. I am passionate about people having access to at least one Bible that is a literal translation, and one that is a meaning-based translation. Recently an elder in our church shared that he was struggling hard to read and understand Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. He was rather bitter in his complaints, saying, “Why did Jeremiah write like this? I can't penetrate this stuff!” This is just one example of many I could share. Normal Christians like you and me who try to use a literal translation for devotional reading, and attempt to read every book in the Bible, will not enjoy the experience. This can clearly be seen in Indonesia, where the people have only had wide access to one literal translation since 1974. Indonesian Christians have been discouraged from reading their Bibles for too long, and that has seriously weakened the church throughout that country. Now, with our Plain Indonesian Translation, thousands of people have discovered that they enjoy reading the Bible. But now, through our 90-day Bible reading challenge, teenage kids and adults are rejoicing to find that they enjoy reading the New Testament, finishing it in 90 days, and many immediately start over to read it again. Any Christian who wants to glorify God should read the whole Bible. And if we really want to glorify God, then we should read a translation that we understand. Reading a translation that you don't understand fully will not help you or encourage you. I need to give two important clarifications: Some people think that the NLT is a paraphrase because the first edition still contained some words or phrases that sounded like the Living Bible. The Living Bible deserves to be called a paraphrase, because it occasionally adds ideas not found in the original text, or fails to translate other things. But the New Living Translation is a highly researched and revised meaning-based translation. My second clarification is that The Message is an extreme paraphrase. Please don't think it is a faithful translation. Please don't quote it. Please don't give it to a new Christian to read. Here is the information about real-book Bibles I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. I want you to know that no one at Tyndale House asked me to promote their products, and I am not getting paid anything for giving out this information. Gale decided to give NLT Bibles to members of her Bible study groups, and I decided to give them to my small group. It has been a long time since we bought Bibles, and so we made some delightful discoveries. Tyndale House has several cool NLT Bibles right now. The NLT Illustrated Study Bible is incredible! Beautifully illustrated with maps and charts and many study notes and supplemental information. The hardcover edition is only $36.66. You might like the leather-like edition which is a bit more. However, at more than 2,500 pages, you won't want to carry this Bible around. Here's what I am giving to some young people in our church, including our grandkids: There is a new kind of Bible developed by Tyndale House, called a Filament Enabled NLT Bible. This real-book Bible comes without study notes and maps, making it practical to carry and providing an uncluttered reading experience, but it has a companion cell phone app that gives you all the stuff you would get in a study Bible and even much more. You download the Filament app for your phone or tablet, and then you can take a picture of the page number or type in the page number for which you want to get more information. The app then gives you study notes, charts, timelines, and devotional material, including videos and even worship songs. There is a premium-value edition with a leather-like cover for just $15. For the person who wants to make notes, there is a beautiful wide margin edition available for $38. A large print Filament enabled Bible is about that same price. A genuine leather thin-line edition of the NLT Filament Bible is only $35. I highly recommend an article linked at the very end of the episode notes entitled How Not to Argue About Which Bible Translation Is Best by Andy Naselli. And may the Lord bless you ‘real good'. LINKS: https://sites.google.com/clarinetpages.net/read-the-bible-in-a-year/read/start-with-a-good-plan See the second part of this page: Recommended Bible translations for devotional reading Fantastic article: How Not to Argue About Which Bible Translation Is Best June 13, 2017 | Andy Naselli
No English translation of the Bible has had more influence on the world than the King James Version. But have you read its preface? A lot of people haven't because for years it has usually been left out of printings of the KJV. Our guest in this episode, Josh Barzon, wants to make sure more people listen to what these legendary translators had to say, so he's written a book called The Forgotten Preface which aims to shed more light on this overlooked historical document. What did these men actually believe about inspiration, preservation, and translation? workingfortheword.com | my books | twitter | music | Hebrew | academic articles | facebook | contact | download all episodes for offline
Imagine that you are hiring a new English teacher. None of the people who apply have any of the qualifications to teach English. No teaching degree. No English degree. No experience in the classroom. Would you hire any of them? Probably not. Now here is the irony. Many of the people making curricular and legislative decisions about education don't have the qualifications to be hired within education. This is a problem. In this episode, we hear how standardization, high-stakes testing, and policy decisions made by non-educators may be contributing to teachers' decisions to leave education. Music: Theme Song By Julian Saporiti “So Stark (You're a Skyscraper” by Matt LeGroulx is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license. “Cat and Mouse” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY license. “Space (Outro)” by Andy Cohen is licensed under a CC BY license. “Home Fire” by Nul Tiel Records is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license. “Press Conference” by Blanket Music is licensed under a CC BY-NC license. “Things Change” by HoliznaCC0 is in the Public Domain. “Living Life” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY-NC license. “Boulevard St Germain” by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license. “Hungaria” by Latche Swing is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license. “Business Getaway ” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY license. Transcript: I used to listen to the Dixie Chicks's song “Wide Open Spaces” before wrestling matches because I would get too wound up. It helped me slow down my breathing and relax. In junior high and high school, I was fixated on winning and losing. I'd get a pit in my stomach, psyche myself up and out, all to my detriment. I was terrified of failing, of being a disappointment or an embarrassment. Then I went to college. I walked-on to the University of Wyoming's wrestling team. During my meeting with Steve Suder, the head coach, he told me, “You know, you'll be walking into a room with a bunch of state champs. Are you worried about that?” I told him, “No, I'm not” because those were the guys that I wanted to be wrestling against. I was a two-time state placer and I had nothing to lose. Suder said, “Good,” and then told me that he never won state either, but he ended up being an All-American for the University of Wyoming, so there was hope for me. During our conversation, in between adjusting this chewed up yellow cushion he used as a back support, he told me that I was like the pretty girl's funny friend at a party. I'm not someone he noticed right off the bat, but once he got to know me, he was happy to have me around. He meant this in the best way possible, and I didn't mind. I made the team, worked my butt off, won some matches, and lost more than I won. And I hate losing, but it felt different. I was excited to be wrestling, not nervous. Suder made it clear that his expectations were low, but he was happy to have me. I focused on gaining experience and the process and growing as a wrestler and a person. And I got to wrestle a guy named Brent Metcalf, who is the only person I wrestled that had a documentary made about him. When someone asked Metcalf why he didn't celebrate wins, he said, “I don't want to give my opponent the satisfaction of watching me celebrate, which would make it look like a big deal that I beat him.” This dude is a monster. It was an extraordinarily humbling match. I had no control of my own body - his fingers were in my mouth at one point, but I learned what it was like to wrestle the best. It was eye-opening. My tenure as a collegiate wrestler only lasted that year,but I remained in contact with Coach Suder off and on until his passing in 2019. And I had changed. My priorities shifted from valuing product to process. When I became an assistant high school wrestling coach, the head coach had also wrestled for Coach Suder, and so we continued his tradition of emphasizing process. And what I noticed is that the wrestlers felt less pressure. They only tried being better today than they were yesterday. And when they have that mindset, success, though not guaranteed, is more likely. They are wrestling to compete and to score points. And even if they don't have success, they do the best they can do at that moment, and that's always worth being proud of. In education, we focus on the product, on assessment. There is an obsession with passing or failing and we seem to have forgotten the value of process, which is where many teachers live. So today, we are going to look at how a structure of education that values standardized assessments could be contributing to teachers deciding to leave the profession, and because some of the frustrations with standardized assessment is a federal issue, which is too much to address here, we'll explore a possible solution to the high stakes assessment issue in Wyoming, which would hopefully keep teachers in education. This is Those Who Can't Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I'm Charles Fournier. Here is part 5: “Education has a Tourist Problem” Mark Perkins: I do think that for a lot of teachers who are leaving, and this is speculative, but I think it's reasonable to assume that if you alleviated some of the assessment requirements within their schools, their satisfaction would increase. I don't think that that's a jump. This is Mark Perkins, he is an Assistant Professor of Education Research Methods at the University of Wyoming and he is talking about the survey results he gathered about teacher attrition in Wyoming. So many teachers, both teachers leaving and teachers staying, reported that they were not happy with assessments. As we've heard from teachers that left teaching, there wasn't one thing that pushed them out of teaching. It was the layering of factors. And if we want to keep more teachers from leaving, it would be worth trying to address some of the most consistent factors. Aside from overall well-being and feeling supported, assessment is one the most consistent teacher frustrations. Now before we get into what specifically teachers don't like about assessment, I think it's important to think about why education currently has assessments, and this goes back to what we talked about last episode: the purpose of education and needing to be able to measure success for whatever that purpose is. Simply put, we need to reflect on what we want kids to know and how we can measure what they know. Mark explains. Mark Perkins: And so what does school success really look like? That sounds like an interesting, easy question. It's like, Well, kids know how to do math. Well, okay. What does that look like? Well, they can add, subtract, divide. All right. So what? When you start drilling into the actual requirements to exist and inhabit the world, the factors become much more latent than what we measure. But we fixated ourselves purely on content. During our conversation, Mark explained that there are a ton of other things that we want for students: self-awareness, identity development, civic consciousness, the ability to have some gumption and as Mark phrased it, drag a horse through the mud. But none of those qualities are easy to measure, which means it's more difficult to measure a teacher's overall effectiveness. This brings us back to the focus on content. Mark Perkins: But all of the focus has been on reading math, science and somewhat government. How does a teacher who navigates let's call it the multivariate universe of being an educator. How do you evaluate teaching for the holistic aspects of the job? While we don't? It would be difficult to assess students and teachers in the Multivariate Universe of education, as Mark puts it, so we assess a few content areas, and only a few things in those content areas. Many mission statements want to acknowledge the whole student, but we only assess a fraction of the student. For example, I have a grant application unit for my sophomores. They do research and write a grant to receive hypothetical funding that they can use to address a real problem within our community. I don't limit students on what kinds of problems they want to address, so students have looked at drug use or homelessness or access to sports or social justice issues. When students submit their grant applications, we go through a selection process. Students read each other's grants anonymously and identify ones that meet all of the grant requirements and would, in their minds, best serve our community. By the end of the process, all of my classes vote on the one grant that should receive the hypothetical funding. Every year I've done this, the grants that make the final vote, the ones that all of my students have pushed forward, are philanthropic and genuinely kind. And I tell my students this, usually as I tear up, that this project gives me hope for the future because through their research, writing, discussions, and voting, they prove that they are empathetic humans. I learn much more about what my students can do through this project than any standardized assessment that I've been required to administer. And this is a frustration echoed by teacher after teacher. If the thing that is used to reflect a district's success is a bubble-sheet test, that can feel pretty disheartening. Because from the teachers' perspective, the results of those tests, the results that are reported in the paper and raise community questions like, “What are they even teaching kids in school?” those tests lack validity. They're not the best way to measure whether the kids are alright, and Mark has questions about how well these tests show what kids know and how well they predict the future success of students, which is often how standardized tests are used. Several teachers pointed to the frustration that rather than getting students ready for life beyond high school or to be a life-long learner, they are forced to think that the be-all-end-all was the ACT or SAT. So engaging and authentic instruction gets replaced with teaching to a test. From Mark's research and work in assessment, he sees that those assessments might not be worth the time we are putting towards them. Mark Perkins: And I have a suspicion that the predictive validity of these tests is not that good. And my suspicion comes from a very large body of literature that has looked at ACT/SAT versus high school grade point average and college level English math and general college grade point average. And yet, we invest an amount of time, pressure and money on these measures. What this means is that a grade point average, though imperfect in its own right, is a better predictor of future student success, whether they are college or career bound, than a standardized assessment. So what a teacher measures in their classroom is a better indicator of future success than what a standardized assessment shows. And if this isn't enough, the amount students are tested is tremendous. This saps their energy and the energy of teachers who have to say, “I know this is the 573rd test, but you've got this.” Mark Perkins: We need to simplify and make assessment parsimonious. We do need to assess, but we certainly only need to take our temperature one time and evening, maybe two, when we have a cold because we know that it's going to say the same number every time. Measuring is not teaching. I want to reiterate what Mark just said - measuring is not teaching. I also want to clarify something about assessment. Teachers use informal assessments all of the time. And these are different than the high-stakes standardized assessments. Good teaching makes use of valid and authentic assessments often. When I was writing this episode, I got talking with my wife, Jennie, about assessment, because this is what you do when you marry another teacher. When she taught Advanced Biology, she created these elaborate group tests that students would get excited about. She used assessment as a learning tool. Her thought is that you don't know what you know until you need to apply your knowledge. This is why I like the writing process because it's an act of creating and synthesizing. It's a great form of learning. So the right assessment can be an informative learning tool, but the high stakes, fill-in-the-bubble, standardized assessments that teachers are frustrated with are not that. Mark explains that in order for those standardized assessments to be more valid, there should be some adjustments. Mark Perkins: I think that we could more wisely use measurement, and education. I think one of the first problems with high stakes testing, is the fact that the majority of these tests have no impact on students. Now. You don't have to be draconian about it .But we make intelligent decisions based off of test scores. And we provide students with logical and rational incentives. From the teacher's perspective, it's hard to convince students that the tests matter because students don't see how they are relevant to their lives. I try to give students some perspective before tests, like “No it doesn't impact your grade, but if you go through and randomly click answers to finish early, the people who care about these tests will think you're not learning anything, and then they will change curriculum and make you guys only learn from a textbook. Do you want that?” They usually shake their heads no, but that doesn't mean they care any more about the test. Many teachers struggle to care about the tests as well. They don't like the kind of standardization the tests force that does not allow for freedom in the classroom. Shane Atkinson, who we heard from in the first episode, left teaching after 13 years, and part of his decision to leave had to do with a lack of autonomy, some of which is tied to standardization. He pointed out that there are some districts that are so standardized, their days are mapped out in a binder. Shane Atkinson: This is what you do, then you do this, here's the question you should ask, have them fill out this worksheet. Day two… I think that's been done under the guise of equity. You don't want a kid in this classroom at this school to get a much different or better education than a teacher in the classroom next door. And I get that. So the idea is, well, to keep it equitable, they should be doing the same thing in both of those classrooms during that period of their US History class. Again, you're making decisions based on a minority and applying them to everybody, even if you're doing good work. That does everybody a disservice. The hope is that every kid will receive the same quality of education, so teachers are expected to stick to a curriculum, and in some instances, stick to a script. Much of the push towards national standardization came from the George W Bush Administration's, 2001, No Child Left Behind Act. Jaye Wacker, whose voice we heard in the first episode and who quit teaching after 31 years, felt like the No Child Left Behind Act did a lot to undermine public trust in education. And it did it through standards. Jaye Wacker: No Child Left Behind set impossible targets. And basically year after year after year, it undermined public confidence in education. So then we needed the standards we needed to prove that we're doing something and yeah, I get it and I agree with it. You know, let's prove what we're doing. But this homogenization that we've talked about _____ High School in their curriculum, the most diverse curriculum in the state, and their kids are outperforming all these homogenized curriculums. Part of the impossible targets from the No Child Left Behind Act included a 100% proficiency rate for all students by 2014 - this meant that all students would be able to perform at grade level by 2014. This sounds nice, it is great rhetoric because of course no one wants to leave any kids behind, but this goal disregards so many variables. Many students are below grade level because of severe physical and or learning disabilities, and some will never make it to grade level. This doesn't mean an effort to get all students to proficient is a bad goal, it's a great goal, but not reaching this goal made it look like schools were failing. But the Act made it so schools were destined to fail. Though this Act has since been replaced, along with the unrealistic proficiency rates, its negative impact on the view of education is still present. Wacker also pointed to the reality that homogenized education doesn't necessarily produce the best results. This is a pretty common view of standards. A teacher who wanted to remain anonymous said. "On a societal level, I think standards are the worst thing about education, and that's a wide-open race... In my opinion, standards have lead to a homogenization that is stunting our growth, and solve problems that don't exist. I don't want education to be the same everywhere; I want to be a local restaurant, not a McDonald's." For a more scientific point of view, my wife, Jennie, who left teaching after 7 years compares standardization to evolution. Jennica Fournier: So I think that standards homogenize things. So I don't know if your high school teacher was too afraid to teach you about evolution. But in general, we evolve best as a species if we have a really diverse gene pool. Basically if our education system was a gene pool, we'd be fucked. So from an evolutionary perspective, species that are standardized or homogenous, don't survive adversity very well. Diversity is necessary for survival, and this includes diversity of curriculum. Jennie explained that we might struggle as a country to solve problems when everyone has been exposed to the same standardized curriculums. Jennie points out that there would be benefits to having students prioritize local issues. Jennica Fournier: So essentially we need kids to have a set of skills that match their environment at a local level in order to solve problems at their local level versus everyone in the US only knowing how to solve a generic set of problems. So many teachers see standards as an impossible bar to be reached that stifles their ability to be creative in their classrooms. Another part to the frustration with standardization and standardized assessments comes from the preparation required to take them and the pressure associated with the results. This is preparation and pressure that Mark, who discussed assessment earlier in this episode, says might be unnecessary. Molly Waterworth, who we heard from in a previous episode and who left teaching after 8 years, explains how frustrating that process of preparation was. Molly Waterworth: ACT/SAT prep, hated that. Totally hated it. And I never really figured out a way to do it super meaningfully. It just felt really meaningless because I just couldn't connect it to anything relevant. I just have to say to the kids, “I'm doing this so that you know the format of the test, and that's why we're doing this.” It's not fun. There's no way to have a discussion about whether or not somebody answered the correct question on ACT/SAT practice. My biggest motivator and the thing that brought me the most joy in teaching English was discussion and parsing through complexity and finding our collective way through something big and doing ACT/SAT prep just didn't ring that bell. Having to teach towards a test that doesn't seem valuable, or to work towards standards for the sake of standards can leave teachers feeling powerless. I don't know that anyone likes to feel powerless, to feel like their hands are tied behind their backs. Several teachers decided to leave education for jobs that gave them more autonomy, where they didn't feel like they were jumping through hoops. I personally have never been a fan of doing things just because. If I am required to give a test, I want to know that it matters. I do the same for my students, I want all of their work to feel relevant beyond the classroom. Most teachers are the same. They want to know that what they are doing is relevant, and many don't feel like the layers of standardized tests are relevant.Students, like most other humans, want to feel like what they do matters. At least that's what Anjel Garcia wanted from her education. Anjel Garcia: Kids just don't have any respect or like reason to care about school, and I think that connects back to they don't know what they are doing there. Anjel took my college-level English class and graduated last year. She is a phenomenal artist - I have one of her paintings hanging in my classroom - and she is going to college for art. For Anjel, she thinks school should help students find a direction for their lives. Anjel Garcia: I think it's to find a passion and to find something that you want to pursue in life. But we're at the point where you're only doing it so that you can cram and learn that information, and then forget it the day after the test. They're not actually doing it in a way that's teaching kids how to find interests. Which is something that many teachers enjoy. Engaging students in the joy of learning to find their interests is such a gratifying part of the job. And helping students identify interests means teachers would be able to individualize education for students. As we heard last episode, this is what many students want in their education - individualization. So a shift in the mission and a deprioritization of standardized assessment could create a structure that ends up valuing individualization. If we don't make this shift, we will continue with a structure that devalues individualization and does not promote the joy of learning. This is what that feels like to Anjel. Anjel Garcia: It's kind of extreme…with the prison system, they treat everyone the same way. They treat them like animals. They aren't treated in a way that rehabilitates them to be better people or to be prepared in the world, and I think that sort of connects to school. Students shouldn't feel like this, and teachers often feel powerless when it comes to assessment. To ease student pushback they rely on the district, state, or national mandate. The “Sorry guys, we have to do this.” So a shift to prioritizing the joy of learning will be a positive shift not only for keeping teachers but for making education something that students find joy and value in. Still, despite teacher frustrations and the possible lack of validity of standardization and standardized tests, they are present because there has been a historic problem with equity in education in the United States. This is why Marguerite Herman sees value in standardization. Marguerite has a master's degree in education, has some experience teaching, and served two terms as a School Board Trustee. And she agrees that there are some downsides to the standards, but she was pretty adamant that they are necessary. Marguerite Herman: To standardize things, you lose a lot, but you also have these assurances that again… I use the term bean counter. I don't want to be dismissive of that responsibility - bean counters have to answer themselves to others. I've known Marguerite since I was in Kindergarden - she used to help with religious ed when I was little, and I went to high school with her kids. When she was on the school board, I could always count on her to attend events I put on for my students - author visits or student projects. Marguerite is involved and someone I knew would be well-informed and honest with me about her role on the School Board and about education policy. When I told her that teachers are frustrated with standardization and assessments, she acknowledged teacher frustration but defended assessments because they offer quality assurance and a way to make educational funding decisions, even if the standardized assessments are imperfect. Marguerite Herman: You know, with funding comes accountability. And to some extent, people want a number, especially legislators who are not educators. They want to know, what's your competence here, what's whatever you're proficient in. Anytime you index a number, there's just a lot of data that's lost because you're reducing, you're obscuring, a lot of nuance. You don't get any nuance, frankly. It's imperfect, but you need something, and I'm not challenging that. Marguerite explains that something is needed to ensure that all students are benefiting from their public education. And her job as a Trustee on the School Board was to ensure that. Marguerite Herman: Well, once again, the statute kind of lays it out. At the school board, we are elected as trustees, and let me just dwell a moment on the word trustee, which is that you have undivided loyalty to a beneficiary. That word was picked. It's not like a delegate and something like a representative. You don't represent a sub constituency. You represent every child in this district - they are the beneficiaries. So everything you do, you should have in your mind, “I am using all the possessions, the assets of our district, to provide for the educational benefit of every child.” I want to pause on this definition for a moment because there has been some divisiveness on school boards across the country. Marguerite's definition is succinct - Trustees serve their beneficiaries, so Board Members serve kids. This means the tribalism that has moved into school boards across the country should get left at the door. School boards serve students and no one else. And when I say students, I mean all students across the religious, racial, sexual, gendered, intellectual, and political spectrums. This is no small feat to serve such a diverse spectrum of students, but that should be the goal despite what interest groups think or who is in the capital. And this is why Marguerite is adamant that even if our current system is imperfect, we need something. I agree, we need something, but I don't think what we have currently is that something. And Marguerite explains that the data that the legislators want don't come from what a teacher sees. Marguerite Herman: The feds want their numbers, and the legislature wants its numbers. “This is the teacher's honest opinion of the learning that went on” and said, “Yeah, that's fine. But you know, show me the test score, show me the performance I want to see”. And so, you know, we dance to a lot of different bean counters. So the people that want to track progress, as Mark pointed out earlier in this episode and Marguerite reiterates here, don't necessarily want to hear what a teacher has to say about a student's success - even though a teacher is an expert and is highly aware of their students' capabilities. And even though, as we heard Mark explain earlier, a student's gpa, made up of teacher grades, is often a better indicator of a student's future success than the results of a standardized assessment. But teachers aren't trusted. The feds, the legislature, whoever it is that is running quality assurance wants an easily read progress report that covers a few content areas. Remember the idealism about the purpose of education from last episode - it often fizzles at the feet of a standardized structure that takes the word of a test over that of a teacher, the human who actually knows the kid. Idealism and authentic learning and genuine human growth are harder to measure than the few content areas that can be measured on a bubble sheet. Still, I know Marguerite is right - the assessments and the standards are a way to document, in an easily measurable way, that an effort is being made to assure an equitable education for all. That does not mean the way we assess nor the assessments themselves are valid, good for kids, or good for teachers. So let's change them! Let's make our purpose of education, our assessments, our measurements good for kids and good for teachers! Right? It should be easy! We know that kids want to feel like what they do matters, that they want curriculums that are more individualized. Right? So we need to talk with someone who understands how these things work, and how changes could be made to the current system. Here's Chris Rothfuss. Chris has been a college professor, he has run a college summer program for high school students, and he is the father of kids in the public school system. He is also the Senate Minority Floor Leader in the Wyoming State Senate and a member of the Joint Education Committee. Chris was one of two Wyoming legislators to get back to me, and the only one who agreed to meet with me. Chris Rothfuss: The intent of that Accountability Act, as it ended up looking, was to figure out which districts and specifically which schools were struggling, and then provide them with the resources, a system of supports, to build them up and make them better. The Wyoming Accountability in Education Act was adopted in 2013. It took over federal accountability requirements established by the No Child Left Behind Act and preceded by the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA. ESSA requires states to give annual statewide tests in reading/language arts and math to every student in third through eighth grade and once when they are in high school, and in science at least once in each of grades 3-5, 6-9, and 10-12. So the Wyoming Accountability Act, through the Legislature and Wyoming Department of Education, interprets federal requirements and sets goals for student and school achievement. So what assessments are used, how students are assessed, and how many assessments are given beyond the federal requirement is dictated by the state. And Chris acknowledges that there might be an issue with assessments. Chris Rothfuss: We may be overtesting. If there were a way that we could do sampled testing if we could be a little more thoughtful about how we're doing it, if we're not using it as a direct educational instrument, then we don't need every student tested, we really just need a statistical representative sample. But at this point, testing for a statistical representative sample is not how assessments are being used. Federally we have to test every student in most grades at least once a year, but many students are tested much more than this. Even so, I like the idea of shifting to a statistical representation especially if it means less tests. Statistical representative sample testing is already used at the federal level by the National Center for Educational Statistics - an entity of the US Department of Education. The National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP tests, also known as the Nation's Report Card, are given every two years to randomly selected fourth and eighth graders to test English and Math. So we already have a model for using these statistical representative sample tests, and it might be worth seriously considering how to do this - to quit overtesting. Chris calls the amount of tests part of the unintended consequences of standardization. Chris Rothfuss: So we in Wyoming adopted some world class standards. The unintended consequence, though, as you set that as your mission, teach all of these students all of these standards, is that you've only got so much time in a day. And you've got more standards than you're capable of teaching in a school year. So when that becomes your priority, and you know, you're going to be tested on your knowledge of those standards, and you know, you're expected to improve your knowledge of those standards. As you're thinking through our well, what are we going to do with each of our days, you don't think head to the mountains? I think about heading to the mountains on a daily basis, but that doesn't mean we get to go to them. These unintended consequences of standards and assessments are a reality. The individualization of instruction and the exploration that teachers talked about last episode are often a casualty of an overwhelming amount of standards that must be covered. But a move towards individualization, and less emphasis on standardized assessments is possible. But it will require a legislature that is informed and understands what adjustments should be made in education. Chris Rothfuss: I don't think there's necessarily a misconception that the folks that are making decisions about education, don't understand education. That's regrettably probably accurate. Chris points out that many of the people with the power to make policy decisions about education think they are qualified to make decisions about education because they once went through the education system. Many of these people want to run education like a business, like a factory. They use words like stakeholders and incentivize, and they want annual progress reports. These are people that don't necessarily acknowledge or make decisions about education based on best practices. Chris Rothfuss: I spent the first I don't know how many years of my time in the legislature trying to ensure that our Wyoming education model did not utilize that pay for teacher performance. Because the literature makes it very clear that that is the wrong approach. Best Practices make it very clear that that's the wrong approach. But policymakers so often choose that approach because they don't take the time to really understand why it's an awful approach. Folks like legislators disregarding best practice or research-based practice is a foundational aspect of why teachers are leaving education. Teachers are experts in their field, but education has a tourist problem. You know, those people who are close enough to education to feel like they are a part of the system, but the actual educators, the educational locals if you will, don't see it the same way. And teachers are tired of being dismissed or treated like they aren't experts. The educational tourists assume that their time as students makes them an expert in education - policy is put into motion by folks who aren't informed enough about education to be making decisions. This is so frustrating as an educator. Nothing irritates me more than a non-educator, upon finding out I'm a teacher, starts telling me how I should do things. It's almost as bad as sitting next to an arm-chair quarterback trying to explain how Josh Allen should be throwing the ball differently. Chris is aware of this frustration of having unqualified people making decisions about education, and he is at a loss as well. Chris Rothfuss: Education is certainly not a business. But at the same time, imagine you were a business and you were hiring for the job. Instead of electing for the job, you would immediately eliminate the entire slate. And this would be true of so many of the things so many of the positions, so many elected officials. If it were a list of applicants and you were the hiring officer, you'd just be like not qualified, not qualified, not qualified. How did we get to the point where our elected officials And the folks that we put in charge could never even get a job at the institution they're being put in charge of. Think about that. Many of the people in positions to make policy decisions about education do not have the qualifications to be hired within the education system. Why do we accept this? When the people in charge of the institution aren't involved in the institution, they aren't informed enough to be making decisions that are in the best interest of those people, the students and teachers and administrators, that are in that institution daily. This results in bad policy or policy fueled by animosity towards education or animosity towards any federal institution. Chris Rothfuss: We've moved away from having a supportive team of pro-education legislators on the education committee that was struggling and working to do what was best for K-12 public education and really working hard to now over the last few years, embracing this mentality that our public schools are failing, and that somehow, for profit, religious charter schools from out of state will solve our problems, or decreasing funding will solve our problems, or belittling teachers and calling them out. Maybe holding them responsible for tiny actions or making them post everything that they're doing every single day online for parents to nitpick is somehow going to help. We haven't really in the legislature seen anything that I would call a strong positive pro education proposal in probably the last four years, But what we have seen are policies that attack educators or education as a whole, and this is exhausting as a teacher. For many this adds to the feeling of being disrespected. If our elected officials, people who are seen as community leaders, are attacking education from an uninformed platform, it perpetuates a devaluing of education, thus a devaluing of teachers. And teachers are tired of it, and it's contributing to why they are quitting. Chris Rothfuss: We have some of the least informed policy makers shouting the loudest about their beliefs in education, that they're entirely unqualified to bring forward and promote. And yet, by being the loudest voice in the room and an angry voice, it's just easy to generate a mob mentality of support behind you, and to advance what is effectively bad policy and bad legislation, so we're seeing that. And what's scary is that these poorly informed policymakers are in positions to make policy change, to make lasting impacts on education that will further ostracize teachers, hurt students, and likely make more teachers leave the profession. Marguerite gave an example of a policymaker putting a footnote in a budget bill that tried to reject teaching Next Generation Science standards, which, as Marguerite put it Marguerite Herman: Which is like modern science. We hear about evolution, you know? I think we kind of got that one settled. Let's question gravity, shall we? Okay. I'm making fun of it, but it was, teachers had no idea it was awful. That's what happens when the legislature, which is politics, let's face it, folks, gets into the curriculum, they do not have the expertise. And then Pollock's politics doesn't always produce the greatest results, let's just say. Chris had examples of bad bills too. Chris Rothfuss: Teachers Not in Legislature In fact, when we hear when we when we bring legislation when we got some horrible bill that's coming before us in the legislature, like the horrible bill we had last year that would have required everything that teachers were doing, be posted on the web. Awful bill, bad premise, and certainly awful motivation. As far as I can tell, the only motivation is, you know, we don't know which books to burn if we don't have a full list. So that awful bill, we didn't have a lot of teachers come up and provide public testimony against that bill, you think the whole classroom would be full, right up until you realize that no, all of those teachers were teaching at that moment in time, and would have had to take time off from teaching to come provide testimony against that lousy bill. So we don't hear the chorus of voices from the expert educators, we hear the chorus of voices from the folks that have the free time to come and yell at us. This is a great irony. Teachers who would have strong opinions about such a bill and who would be impacted by the bill, are not able to advocate in person because they are doing their jobs. And at a moment when substitutes are in short supply, leaving school to attend the legislative session is even more difficult. Still, teacher advocacy was something that both Chris and Marguerite pointed to in terms of making a difference in policy. Policy includes curriculum choices and assessment choices. But for a teacher to speak up about assessment or curriculum requires a level of vulnerability that many teachers don't feel comfortable with. Chris Rothfuss: Well, it's certainly understandable that when the teaching community has its strong supportive views for diversity of educational materials that are and that view is effectively contrary to a school board that again, is usually not expert, or particularly proficient in pedagogy or or education. It's going to be disconcerting for the teachers to step up and advocate because again, they're in fear for the protection and preservation of their job, and it's a flaw with our system. I have felt this constantly over the last eight months as I've interviewed folks, researched, written, and produced this podcast. I don't know who I might offend or upset - Wyoming has a mighty small population And I don't know what impact this series could have on my job. It's a risk, but dammit, I'm tired of seeing teachers at the end of their tethers. I'm tired of being a teacher at the end of my tether. Something has to change. We need to fix this. We need to listen to the experts, to teachers who know what they're doing, who know what good assessment looks like, who know what engagement looks like, who know the power of relationships, and who know that teachers are stretched thin. And Chris says, teacher voices could make an impact. Chris Rothfuss: And public testimony does make a difference. And believe me if those 250 educators were able to show up and weren't obligated to be teaching at that point in time. That'd be very compelling. Beyond speaking up in legislative sessions, part of the solution to retaining teachers, might require some reflection on the roles of everyone in the multivariate universe of education. So my question to both Chris and Marguerite was if teachers should have more of a role on school boards. I asked this because many teachers point to the reality that school boards are made up of non-teachers. Not many other professional boards are run by people outside of the particular field. Marguerite was adamant that teachers should not be on school boards - she explained that's not how the statute is written. And Chris worked through the question in a very diplomatic manner, but he acknowledges a problem with people getting on school boards who are there for the wrong reasons. Chris Rothfuss: This gets back to the question of who should govern whom and how. You'll have some people on an average school board, typical school board, that know something about education, hopefully. And then you've got people that are just mad about education. And then you've got people that are pointedly trying to slant education towards specific interest groups interests, that might be fully counter to K-12. Chris sees value in teacher expertise, but like Marguerite, he points to the possible conflict of interest with having teachers on the board. Chris Rothfuss: It is hard to have someone on a governing body that is in the role that the body is governing as a voting member, although that can be dealt with, you can have some votes that they're there for, like the policy decisions they are included in, but maybe not the personnel decisions, there's a lot of possibilities there. So I'm one that certainly is concerned that we do not have anywhere near enough expertise on our school boards. There's no obligations for qualifications. So a lot of the problems we have stem from that lack of expertise. And ideally you want to balance. Having some balance is a step towards a system that will retain teachers. In order to keep teachers in education, it will be important that teachers have a voice in education policy and decision making. Teachers shouldn't be a scapegoat when things go wrong, nor should they be excluded or put in positions where they exclude themselves from decision making positions because they fear retaliation or because they are so busy that they can't make room for something else. We need to reimagine and consider the roles of everyone tied to the education process because right now, the teachers working with kids and engaging in the education process are often left out of the conversation. Dylan Bear, a teacher we heard from a few episodes ago, had the best analogy for how we should think about everyone's role in education. Dylan Bear: Imagine, a fence, you know, like a round pen for a horse. The respect has to come from all angles for someone to learn. And you have to have the community showing respect of the education system, you have to have parents showing respect, you have to have the students show respect to the teacher showing respect for that. And so this ring of respect has to be there, of the education system. Or else if one of those falls out, like have a parent, dad or mom say, I'm not dealing with my kid at school, I call the principals and then once that happened, that kid got out of the pen because now he goes the path of least resistance to leave the education system. The key image that Dylan is presenting here is the ring of respect that requires everyone associated with education to have a role, and trusting each other to cover their role. And for Dylan, even though he points to an analogy of a horse pen, he says this could take place anywhere. Dylan Bear: And it doesn't have to be four walls and bricks and the fence at the school. I think that's such a weird way to learn. I love going to the mountains and going on trails where now you're vulnerable, and you want people to respect you and trust you. You look at the different environments for education, so different. But yeah, trying to get what needs to change to me is you have to have communities that value teachers that don't want to use that negative language. You have to have kids who value it. So education has to be a collective of support with and around kids. To gain that support and trust and collectivity we need to have a clear purpose of education - this echoes last episode. Right now, we base the purpose of education on how we evaluate students or how we can cover a tremendous amount of material. An unintended consequence of having so much material to cover is that education might feel like a grind to students. A grind without a sense of purpose makes it difficult for students to care. So to shift what is happening in the classroom and to create a structure in which roles are clear and supportive of one another in education, Chris thinks legislators should start by listening to teacher concerns. Chris Rothfuss: So when we hear from our teachers, what their real concerns are right now, and when they come back to me as a legislator and say, mental health is the problem for both students and teachers. We should listen. And we should adjust because at the end of the day we're not these rulers that are supposed to be at a distance and making proclamations. Our job is to listen and to learn from folks that know what they're talking about. And then try to put in place policies that affect change that enable everyone to do what they want to do and are trying to accomplish. And particularly in the public education system, we have that constitutional obligation to provide this high quality education for all. For Chris, the role of legislators is to seek out experts to inform their decisions about policy that will impact those experts. So, for policy about education, legislators ought to speak to educators. And to do so in a way that is welcoming and doesn't just put more work on teacher plates. Chris also pointed out that to help mental health, which would contribute to keeping teachers, he thinks there should be a push to shift our priorities away from developing workers, which ideally means a shift away from high stakes assessment. Chris Rothfuss: Honestly, if our first priority was joy in learning. As job number one, just imagine how much more we would learn. And that's the message that comes if we want to set it at the legislative level, we want to set it at the school district level. It does come from the policy leaders setting what is the mission? And right now our mission is develop workers. Chris explained that the role of legislators is to set the education mission, which could be seen as a purpose of education. And he thinks, especially at this present moment of teacher attrition and teachers and students both struggling with mental health, that the mission should prioritize the joy of learning. And if that mission is set, evaluative practices and accountability models can be adjusted. This will then dictate how school boards will work to achieve the new mission's objectives. It's a top-down shift, but if the top (legislators) consult the bottom (teachers and students) then it's more of a down-top-down shift? Whatever it is, it might help. Chris said that he would even be willing to take a drop in proficiency if we have happy kids and happy teachers. Chris Rothfuss: My absolute ideal is to heavily prioritize joy in the classroom, and to focus our efforts, our resources, our activities, and our prioritization towards building joy in the classroom, with the expectation that with that joy, you would be addressing mental health issues, both for the teachers and for the students. And I'd love to see where that takes us. And what that means is ratcheting back this prioritization to build robots and the prioritization of score high on tests. And I'll take a 10% less proficient happy group. I will. At the end of the day, they can learn a little more math later. And if they're happy about education, then I think they'll have an opportunity to learn a little more about math later. This mission would also shift the roles of us, the collective us, parents, teachers, administrators, legislators, community members, everyone, to not think of our K-12 experience as the only time we should be learning. If there was an assumption that learning was a lifelong process, Chris believes that we might have a cultural shift that results in valuing and enjoying learning, which would have a major impact on how teachers are viewed. Chris Rothfuss: We think that you have an education phase in life. We've built a system around the idea that you have an education phase, phase one. Phase two and beyond never get any more education. Avoid, if possible. I would love a system where everyone just kind of keeps going back to school. The move towards life-long learners that Chris is proposing would be a conceptual shift, but it could be supported concretely by a move away from overtesting or overemphasis on testing. Because our current system requires testing, this might mean we reimagine what testing looks like all together. Could it be a conversation? Something more authentic than a bubble sheet? Federal regulations have some flexibility there. Either way, the amount of attention given to Summative or End of Course testing is focusing on a product and not the process. Focusing only on the product is not creating a culture that loves learning - it's kind of the opposite. It's creating anxiety and pressure around learning. So if we can lessen the stress by drastically cutting back the amount and pressure of assessments, maybe we can focus on process and create a joy of learning. So, by shifting priorities away from high stakes testing, we can stop structuring education in a way that prepares only for tests. This might mean loosening the grip on what curriculum can look like or what courses can be offered. For example, I once taught a course at the University of Wyoming called the history of Swing Dancing. We looked at the correlation of historic events and their impact on popular culture. When the class ended, a group of girls continued their final project and created a club on campus called Real Women Real Bodies. This class encouraged students to continue learning beyond the restrictions of the semester. When I proposed to create this class for the high school setting in my district, it was declined because it didn't fit within the Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum. So a shift might allow us to create new, novel courses that might inspire students to continue learning and growing well beyond the course. Such a shift will likely reinvigorate teachers who almost all have unique expertise and would love to incorporate such things into a course. So, as Chris pointed out, to adopt a new educational direction, it must start with a shift in mission at the legislative level - hopefully fueled by teacher input. And I think it can happen, especially in a state like Wyoming that wants to be a national leader in education - it even says so in the Wyoming Accountability Act. So creating a mission that prioritizes the joy of learning by focusing on process over product could happen. Then how the decision is implemented should trickle down. Hopefully, this would result in teachers wanting to stay in education. And if all of this happens, if we can make that allegorical ring of respect and support that Dylan mentioned, just imagine how much better the education will be for our students. Students will ideally feel that joy of learning and feel like what they do in school has purpose because that's what many of them want from school. This is idealistic. But when making changes, we need to strive for idealism and not be guided by fear. Because what we have now is not working. Many people are aware of this and are already taking steps to make changes that will hopefully make education better and help keep teachers in education. Next episode, we're going to take a look at what people are doing to help keep teachers in education. This includes Task Forces, Mentoring Programs, Fellowships, and more. That will be next time on Those Who Can't Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of. This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Jennica Fournier. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Anjel Garcia, Mark Perkins, Shane Atkinson, Jaye Wacker, Jennica Fournier, Marguerite Herman, Chris Rothfuss, and Dylan Bear for taking time to sit down and chat with me. If you are interested in seeing Mark Perkins' full report, “Teacher Attrition in Wyoming: Factors to Consider” you can find the link in the transcript for this episode and on our instagram page @thosewhocantteachanymore. This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship.
This week: D's story about a rude dude in the barbershop. Tom was broke as hell in the Marine Corps, but so was everyone else. D and his wife's prank calls. Phone calls are the worst way to get a hold of someone, just send a text. Tom has a 2-hour time limit before he's going back home....unless it's game day. Dealing with spam calls. And more stuff I don't remember right now! Thanks for listening, tell yo friends. Follow our socials, Instagram/Twitter/Tik Tok Videos on YouTube & Spotify, audio everywhere else.
An abrupt start to the episode catches the trio off guard. The three then dig into a substantive episode of past Spotify polls, Daniel's new job, bad band names, and Daniel's mumbling movie quotes game "No English-y".
HR2 No English, No Driver License? | Early Death? | Sports: NFL and MLB | Car Reviews 7/25/22 by John Rush
Dobar dan svima,We are happy to share some fun and useful phrases that exist only in Serbian. We got this idea from Maja Stojanović's book called 'Kod Nas Se Kaže' (We Tend to Say). Did you know that if Serbians find a person very kind, they want to spread him/her on bread? Or can you find any similarity between a serious person and a peeing pig? If you would like to learn more, listen to our final episode of Season 6 and enjoy.Nadamo se da ćete uživati i učiti srpski sa nama.Veliki Pozdrav,Ivana i MakiHere is Maja's Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/zmajastHere is our Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/mozekafapodcast Support the show
Hi there, and welcome to this bonus podcast for day 115. I will be discussing the two main types of Bible translations I recommend for most people. As a Bible translator since 1983, I feel that most Christians in the USA are not given enough information about why Bible translations differ in wording, and which kinds of Bible translations will be better for different kinds of readers. This is an important topic, so I am surprised at myself: I can't believe that I haven't released a dedicated podcast about this topic every year since 2014. ALSO, please stay tuned for the end of the podcast, because I want to recommend a fantastic new real-book Bible. Because of more difficult content in this podcast, if you are not driving a car, it would be a great idea to open the episode notes so you can visually follow along and make sure you don't miss something important. Look especially at the words I have made bold. There are actually five types of Bible translations, but I will mainly discuss the two most-used types in this podcast. But let's start with showing the two types with a translation example that is not from the Bible. Consider this sentence: Jill looked like a deer caught in the headlights when she heard Jack's proposal. Now let's imagine a word-for-word translation for some language in Africa. Since we don't know a language like that, let's pretend we do and make a word-for-word translation into English. Here is my suggestion for that: Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light upon hearing Jack's desire. What we have in this example (caught in the headlights) is a figure of speech. Americans rather frequently use this figure of speech. But a word-for-word translation for the hypothetical African audience would very likely be tricky for them to understand. They might not know what a gazelle would do if a bright light shone upon them. (For that matter, I don't know if gazelle's act like deer do when meeting with bright lights.) I think an African might understand “Jill appeared like a gazelle trapped in bright light” to be a gazelle trapped with a metal trap, in pain, and struggling to get loose when the bright light suddenly shines upon it. Our hypothetical African listener will probably get a very different idea about what is meant. For our second hypothetical translation, let's try giving the plain meaning like we would if we were explaining to an 8-year-old child. We might translate, “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” Or we might say, Jill was caught off guard and totally surprised by Jack's offer.” In this example, I've dropped the figure of speech entirely and gone straight for the meaning. These are the two main translation types that I want to explain: The first was what we call a literal translation, or a word-for-word translation. And the second is what I will call a meaning-based translation. Literal: Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light … Meaning-based: Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal. Which translation is ‘right'? Actually both translations can be considered right. But the word-for-word translation is difficult to understand for our hypothetical African listeners, because there are cultural factors involved in interpreting the figure of speech in this example. The listeners would likely come up with various interpretations about the poor, defenseless gazelle being trapped. Whereas, if Jill likes Jack, she may be thrilled at his proposal. The meaning based translation is right too: “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” That translation is easy to understand, but if you remember the original sentence, you will miss the richness of the figure of speech. The two main types of Bible translations have exactly the same problems as what I have shown in the two examples above. The advantage of a literal, word-for-word translation is that it mirrors the form of the original text. The disadvantage of a literal translation is that it cannot always clearly give the meaning in the target language. The meaning-based translation is just the opposite: The advantage of a meaning-based translation is that it shows the meaning clearly. The disadvantage of a meaning-based translation is that it cannot mirror the form of the original text. Every Bible translator starts out thinking, “I will be able to translate word-for-word and still clearly enough show the meaning.” For two languages that are strongly related to each other, a literal translation can often still be clear. But if we are thinking of translating ancient Hebrew and Greek into modern English, there is a huge gulf between the ancient and modern languages and cultures. My first example involved an English figure of speech. But let me give you a chance to experience decoding an Indonesian figure of speech: Yakobus adalah kacang yang sudah lupa kulitnya. A word-for-word translation is this: Jack is a peanut that has forgotten his shell. Now it is your turn to wonder what that could mean. You won't guess, so I will tell you. Here's a meaning-based translation of “Jack is a peanut that has forgotten his shell.” That means, Jack left his rural village to get an education in the city, and now has a good job with a high salary, but he has forgotten his humble beginnings. He never helps any of his friends and relatives in his home village. There are many literal (or word-for-word) Bible translations in English. That kind of translation is easier to make. And not all literal translations are equally literal. Some fudge to be slightly more meaning-based. But for the purposes of this discussion, I will choose what I think is the most popular literal translation today: It is the ESV (English Standard Version). It is the translation that would translate, “Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light.” It is great at showing the word-for-word form of the original text, but not so good at giving you the meaning clearly. A literal translation I like better than the ESV is the WEBBE (World English Bible British Edition). Meaning-based Bible translations are much rarer, because they require the translator to work much harder to accurately translate the meaning. For English language readers, I recommend the Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech of 1901, The Good News Bible (TEV 1966), and the New Living Translation. There are a few more, but those are my favorites, and I will focus in this podcast on the NLT. The NLT would translate our example as “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” The KJV is a literal translation, and an unfortunate part of the continuing legacy of the KJV, is that pastors often prefer using literal translations from the pulpit. But unfortunately this means that many ordinary people in the pew wind up using something like the ESV for their daily Bible reading at home. This means that many Christians who read their Bibles at home often struggle with hard-to-understand passages. If you normally read the ESV Bible and think you understand everything in it, well, I bet you haven't yet read all of it! Here is one of my most important recommendations for you: Make sure you have access to both kinds of translations. In other words, use both an ESV and an NLT Bible. That way you can quickly see the meaning (in the NLT), and you get a window into the word-for-word shape of the original text with the ESV. My Daily Bible Reading podcasts have only been of two meaning-based translations. Why? Because they can be understood by people just listening to the recordings. It would be useless to record the ESV, because listeners would often miss the meaning. Now I want to illustrate what I have been saying with a Bible passage. I wish I could spend an hour doing this, but I feel I must limit myself to only one example. I have chosen the topic statement for the book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 16-17. In the ESV verse 16 says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. If I had all the podcast listeners in front of me as a group, I would say to you, “Raise your hand if you are a Jew.” Usually in my audiences, no one raises their hand. At that point I say, “Raise your hand if you are a Greek.” Usually again, no one raises their hand. But then my question is, “Where do you fit in to Romans 1:16?” This verse says that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Sounds like you people who didn't raise your hands are not able to be saved! So which one are we?” The answer is that Paul is contrasting Jews with everyone else. Greek was the universal language of culture and commerce at that time, even under the Roman government. Now let's compare the same verse in the NLT: For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes— the Jew first and also the Gentile. Now let's look at verse 17 in the ESV: For in it (referring back to the Gospel) the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” No English reader will suspect that there is anything kind of strange about the phrase ‘the righteous of God'. The problem is that ‘of God' is a genitive in Greek, and genitives have a dozen different options for the meaning. ESV nearly always uses the word ‘of' to translate genitives. But in this verse, ‘righteousness of God' will mean that the Gospel is about revealing that God is righteous. Wait a minute! If God is righteous and I am not righteous, that is not Good News. He will punish me. Rather, in this verse, the genitive is one showing source. Just wait a moment and I will read the NLT. A second significant problem in verse 17 is a grammatical construction that forms an idiom in Greek: For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. So the literal translation has zero meaning or leaves the reader to guess at meanings, which will probably be wrong. Finally, because of the first two problems I just mentioned, it seems like the final quote from Habakkuk 2:4 doesn't fit with what came before it. So we ask, why did Paul quote, “The righteous shall live by faith.” Now let me read the NLT to you: 17 This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.” Many years ago, I had a phone conversation with a woman who was a new believer. She liked reading her KJV, and I used Romans 1:16-17 to try to show her that she would be better off reading the NLT. The KJV has the same problem in v.17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.” So I asked her what that means, and she quickly replied, “Oh, you know, the Catholic faith, the Mormon faith, the protestant faith.” Hello! None of those things existed when Paul wrote Romans. I give that story to show that a dangerous thing that happens when many people read the Bible: If we don't understand something, we may just make up a meaning that sounds plausible to us. And as time goes on, we can get more and more convinced that our guesses are true. Going back to the advantages and disadvantages of the two translation types, the ESV has made a very good literal translation of 1:17. The ESV closely mirrors the form of the Greek text, but the problem is that readers won't grasp the meaning, unless perhaps there are study notes to guide them. On the other hand, the NLT has the disadvantage that it doesn't match the word-for-word form of the Greek, but it nails the meaning. God is the source of our righteousness. NLT translates: This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. And the Greek idiom ‘from faith to faith' means, “This is accomplished from start to finish by faith.” Finally, if you take the time to read verse 17 again, you will see that the quote at the end of the verse supports what Paul claims about the Good News about Christ. I am passionate about people having access to at least one Bible that is a literal translation, and one that is a meaning-based translation. Recently an elder in our church shared that he was struggling hard to read and understand Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. He was rather bitter in his complaints, saying, “Why did Jeremiah write like this? I can't penetrate this stuff!” This is just one example of many I could share. Normal Christians like you and me who try to use a literal translation for devotional reading, and attempt to read every book in the Bible, will not enjoy the experience. This can clearly be seen in Indonesia, where the people have only had wide access to one literal translation since 1974. Indonesian Christians have been discouraged from reading their Bibles for too long, and that has seriously weakened the church throughout that country. Now, with our Plain Indonesian Translation, thousands of people have discovered that they enjoy reading the Bible. But now, through our 90-day Bible reading challenge, teenage kids and adults are rejoicing to find that they enjoy reading the New Testament, finishing it in 90 days, and many immediately start over to read it again. Any Christian who wants to glorify God should read the whole Bible. And if we really want to glorify God, then we should read a translation that we understand. Reading a translation that you don't understand fully will not help you or encourage you. I need to give two important clarifications: Some people think that the NLT is a paraphrase because the first edition still contained some words or phrases that sounded like the Living Bible. The Living Bible deserves to be called a paraphrase, because it occasionally adds ideas not found in the original text, or fails to translate other things. But the New Living Translation is a highly researched and revised meaning-based translation. My second clarification is that The Message is an extreme paraphrase. Please don't think it is a faithful translation. Please don't quote it. Please don't give it to a new Christian to read. Here is the information about real-book Bibles I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. I want you to know that no one at Tyndale House asked me to promote their products, and I am not getting paid anything for giving out this information. Gale decided to give NLT Bibles to members of her Bible study groups, and I decided to give them to my small group. It has been a long time since we bought Bibles, and so we made some delightful discoveries. Tyndale House has several cool NLT Bibles right now. The NLT Illustrated Study Bible is incredible! Beautifully illustrated with maps and charts and many study notes and supplemental information. The hardcover edition is only $36.66. You might like the leather-like edition which is a bit more. However, at more than 2,500 pages, you won't want to carry this Bible around. Here's what I am giving to some young people in our church, including our grandkids: There is a new kind of Bible developed by Tyndale House, called a Filament Enabled NLT Bible. This real-book Bible comes without study notes and maps, making it practical to carry and providing an uncluttered reading experience, but it has a companion cell phone app that gives you all the stuff you would get in a study Bible and even much more. You download the Filament app for your phone or tablet, and then you can take a picture of the page number or type in the page number for which you want to get more information. The app then gives you study notes, charts, timelines, and devotional material, including videos and even worship songs. There is a premium-value edition with a leather-like cover for just $15. For the person who wants to make notes, there is a beautiful wide margin edition available for $38. A large print Filament enabled Bible is about that same price. A genuine leather thin-line edition of the NLT Filament Bible is only $35. I highly recommend an article linked at the very end of the episode notes entitled How Not to Argue About Which Bible Translation Is Best by Andy Naselli. And may the Lord bless you ‘real good'. LINKS: https://sites.google.com/clarinetpages.net/read-the-bible-in-a-year/read/start-with-a-good-plan See the second part of this page: Recommended Bible translations for devotional reading Blog post: https://dailybiblereading.libsyn.com/website/more-about-bible-translations Fantastic article: How Not to Argue About Which Bible Translation Is Best June 13, 2017 | Andy Naselli
Hi there, and welcome to this bonus podcast for day 115. I will be discussing the two main types of Bible translations I recommend for most people. As a Bible translator since 1983, I feel that most Christians in the USA are not given enough information about why Bible translations differ in wording, and which kinds of Bible translations will be better for different kinds of readers. This is an important topic, so I am surprised at myself: I can't believe that I haven't released a dedicated podcast about this topic every year since 2014. ALSO, please stay tuned for the end of the podcast, because I want to recommend a fantastic new real-book Bible. Because of more difficult content in this podcast, if you are not driving a car, it would be a great idea to open the episode notes so you can visually follow along and make sure you don't miss something important. Look especially at the words I have made bold. There are actually five types of Bible translations, but I will mainly discuss the two most-used types in this podcast. But let's start with showing the two types with a translation example that is not from the Bible. Consider this sentence: Jill looked like a deer caught in the headlights when she heard Jack's proposal. Now let's imagine a word-for-word translation for some language in Africa. Since we don't know a language like that, let's pretend we do and make a word-for-word translation into English. Here is my suggestion for that: Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light upon hearing Jack's desire. What we have in this example (caught in the headlights) is a figure of speech. Americans rather frequently use this figure of speech. But a word-for-word translation for the hypothetical African audience would very likely be tricky for them to understand. They might not know what a gazelle would do if a bright light shone upon them. (For that matter, I don't know if gazelle's act like deer do when meeting with bright lights.) I think an African might understand “Jill appeared like a gazelle trapped in bright light” to be a gazelle trapped with a metal trap, in pain, and struggling to get loose when the bright light suddenly shines upon it. Our hypothetical African listener will probably get a very different idea about what is meant. For our second hypothetical translation, let's try giving the plain meaning like we would if we were explaining to an 8-year-old child. We might translate, “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” Or we might say, Jill was caught off guard and totally surprised by Jack's offer.” In this example, I've dropped the figure of speech entirely and gone straight for the meaning. These are the two main translation types that I want to explain: The first was what we call a literal translation, or a word-for-word translation. And the second is what I will call a meaning-based translation. Literal: Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light … Meaning-based: Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal. Which translation is ‘right'? Actually both translations can be considered right. But the word-for-word translation is difficult to understand for our hypothetical African listeners, because there are cultural factors involved in interpreting the figure of speech in this example. The listeners would likely come up with various interpretations about the poor, defenseless gazelle being trapped. Whereas, if Jill likes Jack, she may be thrilled at his proposal. The meaning based translation is right too: “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” That translation is easy to understand, but if you remember the original sentence, you will miss the richness of the figure of speech. The two main types of Bible translations have exactly the same problems as what I have shown in the two examples above. The advantage of a literal, word-for-word translation is that it mirrors the form of the original text. The disadvantage of a literal translation is that it cannot always clearly give the meaning in the target language. The meaning-based translation is just the opposite: The advantage of a meaning-based translation is that it shows the meaning clearly. The disadvantage of a meaning-based translation is that it cannot mirror the form of the original text. Every Bible translator starts out thinking, “I will be able to translate word-for-word and still clearly enough show the meaning.” For two languages that are strongly related to each other, a literal translation can often still be clear. But if we are thinking of translating ancient Hebrew and Greek into modern English, there is a huge gulf between the ancient and modern languages and cultures. My first example involved an English figure of speech. But let me give you a chance to experience decoding an Indonesian figure of speech: Yakobus adalah kacang yang sudah lupa kulitnya. A word-for-word translation is this: Jack is a peanut that has forgotten his shell. Now it is your turn to wonder what that could mean. You won't guess, so I will tell you. Here's a meaning-based translation of “Jack is a peanut that has forgotten his shell.” That means, Jack left his rural village to get an education in the city, and now has a good job with a high salary, but he has forgotten his humble beginnings. He never helps any of his friends and relatives in his home village. There are many literal (or word-for-word) Bible translations in English. That kind of translation is easier to make. And not all literal translations are equally literal. Some fudge to be slightly more meaning-based. But for the purposes of this discussion, I will choose what I think is the most popular literal translation today: It is the ESV (English Standard Version). It is the translation that would translate, “Jill appeared like a trapped gazelle in bright light.” It is great at showing the word-for-word form of the original text, but not so good at giving you the meaning clearly. A literal translation I like better than the ESV is the WEBBE (World English Bible British Edition). Meaning-based Bible translations are much rarer, because they require the translator to work much harder to accurately translate the meaning. For English language readers, I recommend the Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech of 1901, The Good News Bible (TEV 1966), and the New Living Translation. There are a few more, but those are my favorites, and I will focus in this podcast on the NLT. The NLT would translate our example as “Jill was stunned by Jack's proposal.” The KJV is a literal translation, and an unfortunate part of the continuing legacy of the KJV, is that pastors often prefer using literal translations from the pulpit. But unfortunately this means that many ordinary people in the pew wind up using something like the ESV for their daily Bible reading at home. This means that many Christians who read their Bibles at home often struggle with hard-to-understand passages. If you normally read the ESV Bible and think you understand everything in it, well, I bet you haven't yet read all of it! Here is one of my most important recommendations for you: Make sure you have access to both kinds of translations. In other words, use both an ESV and an NLT Bible. That way you can quickly see the meaning (in the NLT), and you get a window into the word-for-word shape of the original text with the ESV. My Daily Bible Reading podcasts have only been of two meaning-based translations. Why? Because they can be understood by people just listening to the recordings. It would be useless to record the ESV, because listeners would often miss the meaning. Now I want to illustrate what I have been saying with a Bible passage. I wish I could spend an hour doing this, but I feel I must limit myself to only one example. I have chosen the topic statement for the book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 16-17. In the ESV verse 16 says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. If I had all the podcast listeners in front of me as a group, I would say to you, “Raise your hand if you are a Jew.” Usually in my audiences, no one raises their hand. At that point I say, “Raise your hand if you are a Greek.” Usually again, no one raises their hand. But then my question is, “Where do you fit in to Romans 1:16?” This verse says that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Sounds like you people who didn't raise your hands are not able to be saved! So which one are we?” The answer is that Paul is contrasting Jews with everyone else. Greek was the universal language of culture and commerce at that time, even under the Roman government. Now let's compare the same verse in the NLT: For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes— the Jew first and also the Gentile. Now let's look at verse 17 in the ESV: For in it (referring back to the Gospel) the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” No English reader will suspect that there is anything kind of strange about the phrase ‘the righteous of God'. The problem is that ‘of God' is a genitive in Greek, and genitives have a dozen different options for the meaning. ESV nearly always uses the word ‘of' to translate genitives. But in this verse, ‘righteousness of God' will mean that the Gospel is about revealing that God is righteous. Wait a minute! If God is righteous and I am not righteous, that is not Good News. He will punish me. Rather, in this verse, the genitive is one showing source. Just wait a moment and I will read the NLT. A second significant problem in verse 17 is a grammatical construction that forms an idiom in Greek: For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. So the literal translation has zero meaning or leaves the reader to guess at meanings, which will probably be wrong. Finally, because of the first two problems I just mentioned, it seems like the final quote from Habakkuk 2:4 doesn't fit with what came before it. So we ask, why did Paul quote, “The righteous shall live by faith.” Now let me read the NLT to you: 17 This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.” Many years ago, I had a phone conversation with a woman who was a new believer. She liked reading her KJV, and I used Romans 1:16-17 to try to show her that she would be better off reading the NLT. The KJV has the same problem in v.17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.” So I asked her what that means, and she quickly replied, “Oh, you know, the Catholic faith, the Mormon faith, the protestant faith.” Hello! None of those things existed when Paul wrote Romans. I give that story to show that a dangerous thing that happens when many people read the Bible: If we don't understand something, we may just make up a meaning that sounds plausible to us. And as time goes on, we can get more and more convinced that our guesses are true. Going back to the advantages and disadvantages of the two translation types, the ESV has made a very good literal translation of 1:17. The ESV closely mirrors the form of the Greek text, but the problem is that readers won't grasp the meaning, unless perhaps there are study notes to guide them. On the other hand, the NLT has the disadvantage that it doesn't match the word-for-word form of the Greek, but it nails the meaning. God is the source of our righteousness. NLT translates: This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. And the Greek idiom ‘from faith to faith' means, “This is accomplished from start to finish by faith.” Finally, if you take the time to read verse 17 again, you will see that the quote at the end of the verse supports what Paul claims about the Good News about Christ. I am passionate about people having access to at least one Bible that is a literal translation, and one that is a meaning-based translation. Recently an elder in our church shared that he was struggling hard to read and understand Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. He was rather bitter in his complaints, saying, “Why did Jeremiah write like this? I can't penetrate this stuff!” This is just one example of many I could share. Normal Christians like you and me who try to use a literal translation for devotional reading, and attempt to read every book in the Bible, will not enjoy the experience. This can clearly be seen in Indonesia, where the people have only had wide access to one literal translation since 1974. Indonesian Christians have been discouraged from reading their Bibles for too long, and that has seriously weakened the church throughout that country. Now, with our Plain Indonesian Translation, thousands of people have discovered that they enjoy reading the Bible. But now, through our 90-day Bible reading challenge, teenage kids and adults are rejoicing to find that they enjoy reading the New Testament, finishing it in 90 days, and many immediately start over to read it again. Any Christian who wants to glorify God should read the whole Bible. And if we really want to glorify God, then we should read a translation that we understand. Reading a translation that you don't understand fully will not help you or encourage you. I need to give two important clarifications: Some people think that the NLT is a paraphrase because the first edition still contained some words or phrases that sounded like the Living Bible. The Living Bible deserves to be called a paraphrase, because it occasionally adds ideas not found in the original text, or fails to translate other things. But the New Living Translation is a highly researched and revised meaning-based translation. My second clarification is that The Message is an extreme paraphrase. Please don't think it is a faithful translation. Please don't quote it. Please don't give it to a new Christian to read. Here is the information about real-book Bibles I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. I want you to know that no one at Tyndale House asked me to promote their products, and I am not getting paid anything for giving out this information. Gale decided to give NLT Bibles to members of her Bible study groups, and I decided to give them to my small group. It has been a long time since we bought Bibles, and so we made some delightful discoveries. Tyndale House has several cool NLT Bibles right now. The NLT Illustrated Study Bible is incredible! Beautifully illustrated with maps and charts and many study notes and supplemental information. The hardcover edition is only $36.66. You might like the leather-like edition which is a bit more. However, at more than 2,500 pages, you won't want to carry this Bible around. Here's what I am giving to some young people in our church, including our grandkids: There is a new kind of Bible developed by Tyndale House, called a Filament Enabled NLT Bible. This real-book Bible comes without study notes and maps, making it practical to carry and providing an uncluttered reading experience, but it has a companion cell phone app that gives you all the stuff you would get in a study Bible and even much more. You download the Filament app for your phone or tablet, and then you can take a picture of the page number or type in the page number for which you want to get more information. The app then gives you study notes, charts, timelines, and devotional material, including videos and even worship songs. There is a premium-value edition with a leather-like cover for just $15. For the person who wants to make notes, there is a beautiful wide margin edition available for $38. A large print Filament enabled Bible is about that same price. A genuine leather thin-line edition of the NLT Filament Bible is only $35. I highly recommend an article linked at the very end of the episode notes entitled How Not to Argue About Which Bible Translation Is Best by Andy Naselli. And may the Lord bless you ‘real good'. LINKS: https://sites.google.com/clarinetpages.net/read-the-bible-in-a-year/read/start-with-a-good-plan See the second part of this page: Recommended Bible translations for devotional reading Blog post: https://dailybiblereading.libsyn.com/website/more-about-bible-translations Fantastic article: How Not to Argue About Which Bible Translation Is Best June 13, 2017 | Andy Naselli
Nathan and Travis have been really busy this week and unable to record a regular episode, but they did carve out some time for a special report on the new Shin Ultraman trailer! This film from director Shinji Higuchi and producer/co-screenwriter Hideaki Anno releases May 13 in Japan, and your intrepid hosts “pull a YouTuber” and break down the trailer in meticulous and nerdy detail. They theorize what the story may involve—aliens manipulating world governments against Ultraman?!—and make many comparisons to Shin Godzilla. You betcha if and when this film gets a stateside release, they'll cover it!You can watch the trailer here. No English subtitles.Follow Henshin Men on Twitter: @HenshinMenPod. Join the official Facebook fan page for this and The Monster Island Film Vault, The Markalite Lounge.Listen to Travis's main podcast, Kaiju Weekly, and Nathan's podcasts, The Monster Island Film Vault and The Power Trip.Henshin Men is a proud member of the Kaiju Ramen Podcast Network.MUSIC: -“Not Your Above-Average Joe [Standing Ovation]” by Ivan Hakštok
Episode 115 of our beloved podcast is here! Featuring Marcus, Sid, Ulrich, and a super secret special guest later on in the show. Enjoy!(Originally released 3/29/2018)
英語禁止の回！！No English allowed! 普段は日本語を全く喋らないエミリーとアミが日本語のみで日本語の難しさを語ります。笑 __________ Send us requests, questions, or comments here! IG: @bilingual.buzz / @teamflowusa
On today's episode, Edi (@Kekeli_E) and Peaches (@musingatmidnite) discuss: In The News (00:40): Accra has been named UNESCO World Book Capital for 2023, and a Swedish Professor has created a sustainable Plant-based Milk Alternative from potatoes. Songs Of The Week (06:28): featuring music from Skillz 8figure, Capella Grey, The Beatles, Anthony Hamilton, and Nana Kwame Ampadu. WTF?! (18:45): Wealthy Victorian Brits used to pay people to live in their gardens as Hermits, and a Ghanaian police officer coerced a woman into sex in exchange for release from jail. Two Pesewas (25:00): On being a Barbara the Builder and dating a Joe Pote, and fascinating Words that have No Equivalent in English. 2 Pesewas broadcasts from Ghana ✌❤. For more information visit: Website: https://2pesewas.wixsite.com/2pesewas Other Platforms: https://elink.io/p/come-find-us
Reflecting on her experience as a child immigrant from Korea; what she went through, what it felt like to have a heavy responsibily with the most important people in her life - her family. She also gives us incredible tips on how to sell ourselves in an interview and why its so important to be authentically us during that interview. Enjoy!
Mason finds his high school trumpet, and then introduces the new game, "Wrong Song Singalong." Then Daniel stops by his corner before introducing a babbling game he calls, "No English-y." Finally, Danny collects some advice questions from our listeners for a game of, "Good, Bad, Worst Advice."
Kevin and Rudy introduce the world to the Scattered Roots Podcast. Discussing the concept and motivation behind the podcast and exploring cultural identity and how theirs came to be. Get to know the host of the show and what's to come from the two guys from Dallas, TX.
The Russians are a people who are serious about their rail travel. I began to grasp this point with a certain nuanced clarity as we took the train north. Our car was, to put it modestly, well-appointed. The bathrooms were spacious, nicer than anything I encountered in any building in Russia. It was so clean and inviting I felt inclined to lay down on the floor and take a brief nap inside. I could lock the door, so no one would disturb me.The Russian countryside passed out our window like an old-fashioned movie background circulating on a loop. It was difficult to know what we were looking at except lots of pine trees and a few minor villages interspersed throughout. The foreground pines zipped by, while the background pines lingered in the picture.Upon getting into the city we checked into our new residence, called Cuba Hostel. We were informed that we had not gotten the proper paperwork from our previous hostel (no surprise there). The Russian government likes to keep tabs on the lodging arrangements of tourists. We had apparently failed to register with the appropriate authorities. Once you move on from your initial residence, you cannot gain this paperwork. This was a little disconcerting given that we were going to skip around from hostel to hostel every two days or so for next few weeks. The girls at the front desk gave us a slight reprimand but told us that it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. Surely we weren’t the only World Cup tourists who had the misfortune of initially lodging with a Russian host who couldn’t be bothered to fill out the correct paperwork.We spent that first afternoon wandering from pub to pub watching the games. Our first stop was at the bar next door to our hostel, where we ordered Chicken Kiev with a Kasteel Rouge. We were gratified to discover that every entrée comes with a gratis shot of whiskey—a practice which should no doubt be more widely adopted. Argentina and Iceland played to a tie. We made friends with the Iranians sitting next to us. We also became friends with the drunk Germans, though it wouldn’t be accurate to say we made friends because a drunk German typically considers anyone close enough to share a Prost or two as a natural alliance. We decided to move to another bar for the next game. We ended up underground in a sweaty “traditional English” pub. Every room in St. Petersburg boasts a mysteriously higher level of humidity than the world outside. The best outcome is a bit of additional moisture, the worst outcome is the scent of warm cheese and Russian body odor. We sat at a table with some Americans, from the midwest, who had spent the last four years teaching in Korea and Shanghai. As we left, we nodded goodbye to the Socceroos behind us.Aussie #1: “Go Australia!”“That’s right, mate!” I replied in a good natured, moderately drunken spirit.Aussie #2, obviously a very clever lad: “Good luck to USA in the tournament. Oh, wait…”To which I replied, “Good luck remaining influential in world politics.”Oh, wait.We went out to get a feel for St. Petersburg. If Moscow is arrayed as nested circles, then St. Petersburg is arranged as intersecting lines. Moscow’s center of gravity is Red Square, and everything emanates out from it. St. Petersburg features a number of main drags along which the prominent landmarks are scattered. We walked now along one of the most touristed main drags, then up toward the Church of Savior on Spilled Blood. The extravagant architectural sensibilities that produced St. Basil’s Cathedral—the one topped with exotic sour cream and dumplings—are more prominent in St. Petersburg than they are in Moscow, as Spilled Blood attests. It isn’t nearly as dire as it sounds. Though less celebrated than St. Basil’s, it is every bit as enchanting. It’s a church conceived by Pixar animators, with improbable spires plopped upon decadent columns. A magnificent, blood red brick structure festooned with elaborate dashes of color. It is a curious mix of eastern and western, resisting easy categorization—just like Russia itself. We stood for a few moments to take in it.The church was situated right next to the FIFA Fan Zone, which we went to investigate afterward. The Fan Zone was a large concrete swath of city set aside for fans to watch the game. They served beer there, as well as some game food. The most that it had to recommend it was that the television screen was large, the alcohol was attainable, and the venue was public. It was exclusively standing room. None of these were inducement enough for us to hang out around. So we retired for the evening.We awoke the next morning at 5am with the sun high overhead and spilling into our room. We heard the sound of partying on the streets, straining to perpetuate the festivities in transition from the wee hours to more substantial ones. There were chants in Spanish. We heard someone york in the bathroom adjacent to our room. Then we fell back asleep.When we had risen for the day we set off for St. Petersburg’s ethnography museum. We found it on a street several removed from one of the cities main arteries. We were the only people on the block. Thinking the museum might be closed, we approached its vast wooden doors, standing ten feet high, and tugged on them experimentally. They opened in an empty room with high ceilings, at least three stories tall. We walked over to the ticket booth. No one in line. I cheerfully engaged the ticket clerk, testing how far English would get me if I delivered it with a gracious smile. The lady, however, seemed indifferent to whether or not a warm body found its way into the museum. She mechanically slid us a ticket and a map, then we went to explore the exhibits.The display gave accounts of the various indigenous ethnic groups of the former Russian empire: Moldovan, Ukranian, Belarussian, etc. Each display featured a tidy alcove of life-sized figurines engaged in activities, such as fishing or weaving. Importantly, the figurines were not intended to be representations of what the people looked like—with ungainly carvings and over-exaggerated features—but just to give the feeling that a scene was taking place, with a person and an action. Each display had a wall of labeled paraphernalia germane to the societies in which the peoples lived. The displays were clearly put together with great care and admiration for their subjects. The little old ladies monitoring the exhibits, unlike most museum security, seemed like they would have responded with passion and knowledge if you had asked them about the exhibit they oversaw. Of course we couldn’t because we didn’t speak Russian. The exhibits were labeled in Russian, so we were unable to understand the specifics of them. We discovered a stash of laminated cards explaining what we were looking at, but we were disappointed to find that they too were in Russian. One of the monitors observed us looking over the card and explained to us, in Russian, something lengthy and involved that amounted to the effect of “Put the card back when you’re done.”We were unable to learn all that much about the indigenous peoples of Russia, except that they were more various than we might have supposed. But it was clear from the exhibits that each of these people groups, along with the contemporary brand of Russians, were a people who payed exquisite attention to detail. Their traditional garbs without exception were complex and ornately decorated, as if they had had all winter with nothing to do but spend it sewing and had used that time productively. Whoever constructed the exhibits shared the same keenness for nuance as the people depicted. My favorite were the dioramas. These weren’t your elementary schools constructions in a cardboard box. These were fantastic beyond anything I could have ever imagined a diorama to be. They were built in such a way as to convey the appearance of linear perspective. In a typical diorama, the figures in a scene are all the same size, and looking over it as a being of larger magnitude, you have the privileged perspective to view the scene as God would, everything all at once uncommitted to any particular vantage point. This description is merely factual and does nothing to give you the sense of how much goes into executing such an effect in three dimensions. Not so with these displays. One diorama showed a seamstress workshop. The sewing stations in the back were smaller than those in the front, like they would be in an oil painting, giving the scene an appearance of depth. I was hugely impressed.Another of the dioramas was of an entire town. Every detail was carefully implemented, all the way down to the texture of the thatched roofs. I got the feeling that I was seeing the same pride in the presentation of a model city that I had observed in the presentation of a real one in Moscow.My one regret from the museum was that I got the feeling that I was looking at a varied and diverse set of people groups, but I was unable to distinguish between them. I couldn’t even contextualize them geographically, because I couldn’t read the inscriptions. They didn’t have maps, either, which would’ve been a big help. Even with that in mind, it was a delightful showcase of, in the words of the museum’s introductory video, the “universal and synchronism of culture of the Russian empire.”We were ready for a coffee break and presently found a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on our walk back toward the main drag. I got a cup of coffee and a donut. It is well known that Europeans give Americans s**t for their croissants. And they’re right. Americans just don’t have the wherewithal to make croissants like Europeans do. I don’t care how good the bakery is. They’re not gonna make a croissant like you could get at even a mediocre boulangerie in Paris. What is less well recognized is that a symmetrical inability applies to Europeans attempting to make donuts. They just don’t get it. The proper execution of a donut is beyond them. Just as Americans don’t have the proper cultural legacy to do a croissant with that je nais se quoi, it’s not within the cultural repertoire of Europeans to get the significant details of a donut correct—from the springiness of the dough, to the proper surface tension when you bite into the epidermis, to a committed distinction between cake and raised donuts, to icing that doesn’t immediately call to mind molten plastic that is in the process of setting. Europeans couldn’t make a donut that competes with even a meager offering from Dunkin. This was, at any rate, the theory I emphatically related to Haily as I scarfed down my donut.Caffeinated and reveling in cultural superiority we made our way to the Fabergé museum. I must admit I didn’t expect much from a gallery whose most celebrated attraction is a collection of nine eggs. Big deal, right? But as soon as we walked in I was struck by a feeling of recognition. This was the same love of ornateness and convolution that had inspired the exhibits in the ethnography museum. Whereas the indigenous Russians developed complex ornamental clothing, the imperial Russians developed complex ornamental eggs. If the Moldovans or the Ukranians had had the proper equipment, no doubt they would’ve been churning out fantastic eggs all winter long. These eggs were the centerpiece of the collection, obviously—colored in glowing azures and low-on-the-horizon sunset, studded with diamonds and other baubles that made you comprehend why these ornaments are so expensive. They looked substantial enough that if you tried to pick them up your hand would immediately be pinned to the floor, like a mortal attempting to wield Thor’s hammer. They were ornate without giving the impression of being overly busy. Nothing was superfluous; if one pattern were removed, it would feel like it’s missing something. Even the rooms that housed the eggs were spectacular: gold-laced fenestration, moulding that commanded attention, and a chandelier that was, well, one big ass chandelier, which is the only thing that can separate one chandelier from another in my mind. The museum featured more than eggs, too. One case was filled with tea sets that would make Queen Elizabeth blush. This all felt like the logical extension of what we’d previously seen, and it was superbly satisfying.Now it was time for a drink. We repaired to a bar which we had identified as suitable establishment for day drinking (it was about 2:30). We were the only customers. We like being the only customers. Partially, it's about service. We don’t want to wait. Nor do we want to compete for the bartender’s attention. But we also like to get to know the person making our drinks behind the bar. That’s the difference between a chef and a bartender. The position of a chef is not customer-facing. A bartender plies her craft in the open. But these bartenders—Russian bartenders—were there solely to conduct business. They had no interest in banter or introductory dialogue, as is customary in America. Our relationship was transactional—what do you want? I’ll get it for you. You drink it. That’s it. We’d hoped instead that we might’ve made friends with the gentlemen before their shifts began in earnest and knocked back a couple convivial shots of vodka initially at our behest, then a round on the house, as a sort of celebration of a life and all that it has to offer. Alas.That night we went to the Fan Zone again. This time for the Mexico versus Germany game. Now the Moroccans and the Egyptians were out en masse. Both of these groups endeared themselves to us throughout our time in St. Petersburg. In the case of the Moroccans, you could not possibly imagine a friendlier group of people. I went around the city in my Portuguese Ronaldo jersey. The Portuguese and the Moroccans were slated to play one another the following week. Seeing my jersey, dozens of Moroccans came up to me and asked to take a picture. We may be adversaries tomorrow but today we are comrades, drawn together by the mutual respect inherent in a competition. It is an amazing sight of the World Cup to see people representing different cultures taking pictures together and acting in a congenial manner expressly because they come from opposing factions. The world can use as much of that as it can get, wouldn’t you say? The Egyptians, for their part, are very good at cheering. I didn’t meet a single North African who wasn’t a remarkably warm and agreeable person.Afterwards we went to Orthodox, the preeminent craft cocktail venue of St. Petersburg. Orthodox specializes in traditional Russian alcoholic beverages. We sampled Polugar (the Russian national drink, also known as "bread wine"), Chacha (a type of brandy, also know as "grape vodka"; Russians don't have command over an especially large array of alcoholic templates), and Khrenovukha (vodka made from horseradish root; this one infused with wasabi). Each of these base spirits was paired with a unique flavor profile, such as sea buckthorn. Afterward our stomaches felt as if they’d been experimented on by a Russian chemist. We felt finally felt culturally grounded in Russia.On our way back to the hostel, staggering jauntily through the streets of St. Petersburg, we stopped for funnel cake. Vendors are scattered throughout the streets of the city selling these absurdly delicious treats. The essential idea is to take dough, and wrap it around a tube which looks more or less like what you'd use to repaint your living room. Then you cook it on a wall of spits. After that, douse it in something sweet, like cinnamon sugar. Happiness ensues. While waiting for funnel cake, we chatted up some Moroccans. I can't honestly remember what they said, but I can tell you they were, as always, very nice.Crossing the street in Russia is like crossing Las Vegas Boulevard. The destination might only be 20 yards away, but it could take you 45 minutes to get there. It seemed we spent whole days waiting at walk signals.We walked to the Hermitage, which is known as a building of historical significance in St. Petersburg. What is less known is that it is also the world’s largest and most well-appointed doll house. It looks as if the architect was inspired by the finest playhouses available to young girls in 1950s America. It is so big that it is impossible to take in the whole façade in one view. It is also painted teal. Specifically, it’s the teal that a thirteen-year-old girl chooses when she’s bored of whatever the original color of her room was. It is a grand, feminine, and slightly surreal building.We made the long walk across the city's main bridge. It was hot enough to set brownie batter. After wandering streets that felt increasingly suburban, we chanced upon a vast, open compound. The compound, it turned out, was something of a lost and found bin of monuments and attractions. My favorite was a series of still shots celebrating Putin's presidency. They were printed out on posters the size of a large television. Each depicted a memorable moment of Putin’s term. Some of the events seemed significant, such as Putin gravely signing a document, German chancellor Angela Merkel nodding approvingly in the background. Other events commemorated seemed significant but in a different way. Take for instance a shot of ol' Vlad riding a horse bare-chested exposing the fleshy expanse of his upper body. It looked like someone had taken the kinds of pictures that a normal person would post on social media and printed them out and stuck them in the ground at the entrance to this fortress. I loved it.Among the other attractions on the premises was a tall and pointy church, several remarkable statues of giant, human-sized rabbits, like something out of Alice in Wonderland, a world-record-holding bug, and an exhibit on King Tut. We were unable to figure out what was remarkable about the bug, other than it certainly was a doozie.Then we went to the State Museum of Russian political history. Russian museums in general have the delightful benefit of being astonishingly cheap and of commendably high quality. They do on the other hand tend to have the drawback of being almost entirely in Russian. This is not especially helpful if this is not a language over which you have a solid command. They feature lots of details, not a lot of narrative. What was clear was that Russians have for most of their history been at the mercy—or lack thereof—of their rulers.Sated on Russian history, we made our back toward the city center. At length we passed a bus with the slogan for the Egyptian national team: “When you say Pharoahs, the world must get up and listen.”Oh, must they?The thing is, I’m sure this makes perfect sense in Arabic. Unfortunately it’s quite unsuitable for English. I think this is something that we tend to forget about unless expressly reminded of—just how differently sentiments can be expressed in different languages. Only when we are faced with the problem of translation (which we rarely are) does it become apparent. That being said, most World Cup national slogans are stupid, or at the very least lack wit.Poland’s for instance is, “Go Poland!” That must’ve required a lot of thought.But at least it’s a coherent thesis. Some countries are just not to be trusted in this respect. Consider Australia’s in 2014: "Socceroos: Hopping Our Way Into History!" Maybe it's best not to indulge the creative itch for sloganeering, if that’s not your strong suit.Here’s one that’s not so terrible, Senegal in 2018: “IMPOSSIBLE IS NOT SENEGALESE.” (Note that it’s not uncommon for teams to opt for all caps, presumably because it’s a more intimidating way of delivering the content than simply stating one’s slogan.) However, the slogan becomes a bit more suspect in light of the 2014 French motto: "Impossible Is Not A French Word.” See any similarities? Maybe the French wiped out the notion of impossibility during their colonial rule, who’s to say.Here’s a couple good ones from 2010. Denmark’s rather provocative claim: "All you need is a Danish team and a dream.” New Zealand’s rather casual: “Kickin’ it Kiwi style.”In the evening we set off to find an appropriate venue to watch the Belgium game. We stumbled upon a Belgian brasserie. We poked our head in and were disappointed to find that the establishment was full. Then a table in the back noticed my Belgium jersey and beckoned us over. We graciously joined them. The occupants were Belgian Moroccans, or Moroccan Belgians—at any rate ethnic Moroccans who lived in Belgium.“You Belgian?” asked one of them.“No,” I replied. They eyed me suspiciously.“Why Belgium?”I didn’t have a particularly strong answer to this.One of the Moroccans was a drinker, loud and emphatic. He pounded the table when an opportunity was missed by the Belgian national team. His friend, not a drinker, was stolid and gestured for his compatriot to calm the hell down. The non-drinker didn’t have a strong command of English. We made a brief attempt at an exchange in Spanish, and then in Dutch, both of which were more successful. It’s a rare moment on planet earth that someone is worse at English than I am at those languages. But there you are.After the game we went in search of further drink, unconstrained by association with the European lowlands. We found our way into an alley in which we had identified a cozy bar of interest the night before. We had declined to stay then since it didn’t have a TV to watch soccer. We took a couple seat along the back wall. The bar counter was three sides of a rectangle, each face with three or four seats. There were about half a dozen seats along the back wall. It was intimate. You could listen in to any conversation in the establishment if you were so inclined. Everyone there was Russia. No English menu, either. The bartender suggested some local fare: a Moscow Mule and a White Russian. We declined those offers. We managed two negotiate a couple mystery drinks—whatever the bartender found himself into at the time. We got the drinks. They were served high in sugar content, in accord with Russian preference. News spread through the bar that we were Americans. One of the men sitting at the bar leaned over to me. “My friend Roman wants to know," he asked, as if soliciting an illicit substance. "Why Belgium?”The cocktails frankly were not good but the people were and that’s just as well. That’s really the most that I can tell you because my notes from the night were not that helpful and my memories were not well retained in any more natural form. When a couple spots opened up at the bar we moved over to sit next to everyone else. We did eventually order a couple White Russians. It's a delicious drink, really. The barkeep served us another dealer’s choice, this time a Sambuca and cream (our new friends were not sophisticated palates).We saw the bartender serve a set of shots to another group of patrons. They were in vials. The set included a dozen shots in total. We ordered a round. We liked the look of it—real Russian chemistry—but it was far too much for us. We were pretty knackered at this point. So we shared with the bar. Needless to say, this act endeared us to the locals. To our left were a couple gentlemen with whom I got along with very nicely. They took a great interest in me. We suspected them to be homosexuals, so I won’t disclose their identities here since the Russian government doesn’t look kindly on that sort of thing. We spent most of the night conversing with them and then also, sitting perpendicular to us at the bar, with Roman and Roman’s friend. I impressed them all with my ability to spell Polugar in Cyrillic.Then we went back to Orthodox. We tried to convince our new friends—those of the unsophisticated palates—to come with us. It was, after all, traditional Russian alcohol. They politely had one drink, exchanged perplexed glances while they thought we weren’t looking, then took off. We ended up making friends with some Belgians. We discussed the Congo and the United Nations, or something like that. They were a very worldly pair. But we were not, suffice to say, in the best state to entertain nuanced political discourse.The previous evening I had filed a request for laundry service with the front desk of our hostel. Judging from her expression, I could not have saddled the young woman at the front desk with a weightier imposition. That morning I asked her if our laundry was done. She told me it wasn’t. “But we saw it in the drier with an hour left last night.” She gave me a pained look to confirm that I was going to make things difficult. The two of us went in search of my clothes. When after a couple minutes we were unable to locate them she sort of shrugged said, “don’t worry.”“I’m not not going to worry,” I told her. “I have no faith in you.”“It’s here,” she said indicating toward the dryer.“But these aren’t my clothes,” I said as I rifled through someone else’s delicates.She disappeared for a moment to do something else. I couldn’t tell what. I stood there and researched places I had already searched a couple times. She came back. “Don’t worry,” she repeated. “In here.”Then she reached into the dryer and pulled out a drawstring bag, which upon inspection was full of our clothes. This seems like it might perhaps have been worth mentioning at the outset.Laundry progress verified, we presented ourselves next at Kazan Cathedral. This is the most notable cathedral in St. Petersburg. It take up an entire city block, in two directions. Most of the building is a series of extended wings supported by columns, as if designed for a raised air strip, rather than a sanctuary. Entering the cathedral, you’re not struck with the same gravity that often comes with these kinds of churches. The difference is that Kazan feels that it has been preserved in a way other cathedrals are not. It is like walking into a living room where all of the furniture is covered in plastic. Everything might as well be covered in Saran wrap. The interior showed the same commitment to detail as every other cultural landmark in Russia. A long queue formed to offer a prayer in front of a small picture of Jesus. It seemed an extremely individualized experience. The visages of saints and important people in portraits hanging on the wall were noticeably different than they are in Catholic or Protestant traditions. There's something slightly unorthodox about Russian orthodoxy.Our main attraction for the day was a museum called the Kunst Kamera, the main anthropological museum of St. Petersburg. It proved difficult to enter. When we approached it from a main street, there was a small door marked “group entrance.” There was no one coming in or out, and it was too undistinguished of an entrance for such a large and significant building. We followed the building around down a side street. There was another, more conspicuous entrance. It too was labeled “group entrance.” We weren’t sure if the entrance was designed for us or for buses full of Russian school children. The queue was only a half dozen people or so, but they were lined up outside of the building waiting to get in so there were no officials to ask. We didn’t want to wait in line only to find that we didn’t qualify as a group. So we continued to walk around another side of the building down an even smaller street—a back alley, really. We found a small door marked “exit.” I’m not sure why it seemed to us that an exit was more promising than either of the entrances we’d found, but I think we were tired of inspecting doors. We tried it. The door opened, and we entered. At least that way we’d be inside.We wandered all the way through the lower level of the museum by the restrooms and the coat check only to eventually find our way back to the second “group entrance” we’d come across. This was what the people outside had been waiting to get into. We inquired with the guard, thinking it might be possible to sneak out through this door and join the line outside. Of course, it wasn’t. This was an entrance and therefore it is not in its nature to be utilized as an exit. So we walked back through the museum, back down the alley, and onto the side street. By the time we got back to the appropriate entrance the line was several dozen people long.The Kunst Kamera’s take on “anthropology” was more like a sort of human zoo or natural history museum. Each wing considered a different geographical area, and behind the glass of each case was a different tribe or people group. It was similar to the ethnography museum featuring the indigenous people of Russia in the contents of its displays, but it lacked the obvious sense of respect and admiration for its subjects. There were plastic life-sized figurines of people with exotic features and brown skin. Tools and primitive implements were arranged on the wall. It all had the feel of “isn’t this a curious specimen of a savage?” Not a good look for anthropology.Granted, material culture is difficult to interpret out of context (“What do you supposed they did with this baseball bat looking thing?”). But it really wasn’t put together in any compelling manner. The overall thesis of the museum was, “There are a great many places in the world and in each one of them the people make objects of various forms and complexions.” Not a terribly interesting or nuanced insight. It was like looking at a pile of bones and with an inscription that says, “Together these bones make a dinosaur. Use your imagination.” You don’t actually learn anything about the dinosaur from taking a casual look over an unstructured collection of femurs and teeth. It’s the same problem as a “Great Books” course you’d take in Freshman English. Yes, the collection is impressive. But it’s not about anything in particular. Really the only thing it successfully conveys is to exoticize the groups of people it features. It was heavily populated by tourists, too.I’d heard tell that there was an exceptionally peculiar exhibit in the museum but wasn’t availed of any details. I hadn’t thought much about it when I entered a wing innocuously labeled “First Scientific Collections.” I entered unaware. Before I could make note of the collection my attention was arrested by a thud and then an emerging circle of onlookers. A young girl, maybe thirteen or so, had just fainted. She was blond. Her mother was able to collect her off the floor and usher her into a chair by the window. A museum attendant came over to see if she was alright. I looked on at the excitement with interest. At first I didn’t actually associate the fainting with the display. I just figured that the girl had a condition in which she just keeled over from time to time. Or maybe she was eminently hung over. Who knows?But then I looked at the case that had temporarily relieved her of conscious bodily control. It was an exhibit featuring deformed fetuses, preserved in formaldehyde. I looked around and saw that the room was full of shelves with dead babies in jars, each with some striking defect, such as a comprehensive absence of limbs, or six eyes, or a hand where its ear is supposed to be. I would like to report that it’s not the single most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen. But I can’t. It was the single most disturbing thing I've ever seen. However the Russians and the tourists alike seemed unmoved. They looked on with a certain detached curiosity, as if they were staring at a collection of exotic flowers rather than pickled dead babies. “Tasteless” seems like a harsh critique for a venerable institution such as the Kunst Kamera. But the presence of judicious and thoughtful presentation by the museum’s curators was very hard to detect.And with that imagery to contemplate, we took leave of St. Petersburg and boarded a night train bound for Moscow.Next Episode:Thanks for checking out Season 1 of Notes from the Field. 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