 We really can't get along in English alone. And we have a linguistics expert, Lance Askildon of Shamanad. He's also of languages. He runs that department and he's also, gee whiz, he's vice president and provost. And I was gonna ask him which one of those he thinks about when he wakes up at two o'clock in the morning. Welcome to the show, Lance. Thank you, Jay. I'm happy to be here. All of the above, I'm always thinking about all of those roles and many other things at the same time. Maybe not at two in the morning, but four is usually when I wake up and start thinking about that. Now call me anytime, it's all right. Okay. So how did you get into language and linguistics? You mentioned, you speak French at home to me. That's really important in our times, whether it be French or something else, to have another language to sort of have, oh, I don't know, a bounce back if you will from another culture. And it gives you depth in your own culture because it gives you a comparison. So how did you get into that? Precisely. Well, I wish I had a grand intellectual origin story for becoming a linguist, but the reality is, Jay, I was just trying to meet some girls. And so I decided to pursue French as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. And it was through that pursuit and the ability to pursue then a study abroad here in France that I met my then girlfriend who was a French exchange student. And now wife, 20 plus years later, we've been married for almost 20 years. And that's really what got me into it. But the intellectual side of it is exactly what you just described. The fact that language is so much a part of our identity, even our thought processes has always fascinated me. And it's really what drew me to graduate study and later on doctoral studies in linguistics. And it's continued to inform my everyday interactions. I'm constantly considering, not just the linguistic elements of my interactions with colleagues and friends and people like yourself, but I'm also thinking about the cross-cultural dimensions of that because the moment you cross that Rubicon of becoming a other beyond your cultural nativist roots, you suddenly realize things about yourself and about the rest of the world that are profoundly important. And so that's been a real driver for many of my interests as well. Oh yeah, I'm sure. I had an experience on a French railway, SNCF, if you don't mind. Oh, SNCF, right, definitely. And my wife and I were traveling in France and we had to share a compartment with a couple. The guy was an accountant for SNCF and his lovely wife. And it was a long ride. It was hours and hours and hours. I had, you know, my French was incomplete. I'd studied in school. I had several years of it. I had French literature, which is reading, not so much speaking. And, you know, there I was stuck. So I decided I was gonna try my French. And, you know, very interesting. And I wanna mention this because I think there may be some truth in it. At first I was stumbling and bumbling and I could not put a sentence together. I could not remember the words. But then he spoke. And I remembered like yesterday and it's a long time ago. He spoke and then she spoke. And then, you know, I listened to that. I heard the music of that. And the vocabulary kind of came back to me. And the sentence structure, the verbs came back to me. And after a while I found that I could actually conduct a conversation with this man and talk about Rubicon. I crossed the Rubicon that day. After that day, the French became something that I could manage everywhere and anywhere. But it was only because I was forced into this crucible of the language with this one individual. So you're raising the issue of an important 19th century linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, and his positing of two different types of linguistic knowledge. He called them long et parole or language and speech. And the distinction was what you just described with your anecdote on the SNCF train. It is the understanding of the rules of the game for speaking a language and your ability to then operationalize them. So the rules are the language, the long, and the parole, the speech, is the operational knowledge that allows you to actually produce language in a meaningful fashion. And so a lot of my specialization of second language acquisition or learning other languages is focused on moving between that declarative knowledge, language in your mind, into the operational or procedural knowledge of using that language for communicative purposes. And so that's informed a lot of changes in the way that we teach languages and help students to actually make use of them. And in fact, just in the last 50 years, we moved from a literal study of formal grammars, memorization, and even behavioral response to memorizing certain phrases to a communicative approach that prizes communication even before you fully understand the grammatical systems or some of the rules of the game. And so that's a really interesting trajectory that we've been on for some time. And increasingly now, we're recognizing that cultural understanding is also essential to that procedural knowledge. So even if you don't have necessarily the lexical units, the words, and the syntactic grammatical features, if you know the culture, you can finesse the language and be understood, communicate because that cultural knowledge helps you anticipate what your interlocutor, the person you're speaking with, is expecting from you. And so that's another important facet of language learning. I'll tell you a quick anecdote that kind of speaks to the movement in language learning and development. Many years ago, I was at the University of Arizona and I had a cough, like a chest cold might have been bronchitis and I went to see the doctor and he's making conversation as he's checking my lungs, asking me what I'm doing. At the time I was teaching a French class. And so he said, oh, I studied French when I was in college and I said, oh, do you remember the name of it? He said, just a moment. And he goes, le mouton est sur la colline, which means the sheep is on the hill. And I was flabbergasted. I thought, why is he telling me this? I said, do you know what that means? He said, I have no idea. He said, I just remember how to say it because it was drilled into us because that's what the technique or the pedagogical approach was to teaching language as many years ago. Now we've moved beyond that. And so it's not just producing the language form, but understanding the communicative meaning, including the cultural context that surrounds it. And if I may, I'll add one more point. My wife and I, my wife is also a linguist and so we have some interesting dinner conversations. But my wife and I have taken students abroad for many years. Now, initially we took students who already spoke the language to varying degrees of fluency. But later in our college careers, our professorial careers, we started taking students who didn't speak the language. And what we found is that the learning and the transformation that occurred was even more profound as students struggled with understanding some of the cultural differences even before they began to master the linguistic form. And so this is supported in literature, but as a personal anecdote, I'll say it's very powerful to see how much individual students will learn about themselves before they ever start learning the language. They start questioning so many of their preconceived notions about what it means to be a gregarious person, to be a thoughtful person, because we use different linguistic devices to signal to our audience, our interlocutors that we are well read or we are humorous or we are intelligent or down to earth. And they lost so much of that as they began to start exploring, expressing themselves and their identities in these other languages. Yeah, we're on social media, may I say. But that actually anticipates my next point and question. You know, we do a lot of shows with people in Europe. And some of them are really, Western Europe, Eastern Europe all over. And some of them are really charming. But what makes them charming to me is that when they speak, they use more than their mouth and their head. They use their whole body to express themselves. And they become so much more interesting. You know, their head tilts and their eyes open and you have the whole structure is moving and it is not American at all. We are so, well I say, presbyterian about everything. You know, we do not, we do not move with language. But the Europeans do. And I wonder, you know, Lance, if you went with all the French you have at home with your wife and all that, if you went to Europe, could you pass? Could you pass as French, for example? Yes, on my better days I do pass as French. And I'll tell you, I become a slightly different person when I am not just immersed in the French language but by necessity, French culture and French thinking. And before I share an anecdote that speaks to your point, I'll say one of the most fascinating functions of learning another language is really driven by an old concept, old and linguistic terms, the superior wharf hypothesis. Perhaps some of your viewers have encountered this and it essentially comes in two flavors. The strong version of the superior wharf hypothesis suggests that language actually dictates how you can perceive reality. The idea that the words available in your language, the grammatical structure, even the prosody, the music of the language will actually limit or expand your perception of what's happening. And the lighter version says, well, it's not going to dictate, but it's going to strongly influence. And it's that latter lighter version of the superior wharf hypothesis that has been validated experimentally. I'll give you one just quick example. There was an experimental examination of locket of prepositions. These are prepositions of place on, above, under, over. And in some languages, there isn't a distinction made between on a table and above a table. So the distinction we make in English is, is there touch? Is there contact between an object, a pair of sunglasses and the table? And so they would show these speakers of Korean and some other languages that don't recognize as native speakers those differences. And guess what? They didn't notice a difference between images that showed contact with an object versus no contact. That's, that's literal reality being overlooked because of the language that you speak. And there are many other examples with color perception, with different types of implements and mass nouns and countable nouns. But I just find that to be a really concrete example. The implication for that is though, that when you start speaking another language, you start noticing and observing things, not just literal, you know, concrete objects, but things within the cultural milieu and social constructions that become much more pronounced. When I spend time speaking in French, I start noticing the relationships that I have, not just with my interlocutor, but the people around me because of the notion of solidarité, that it's an expanded version of what we would call solidarity, but it's got a very deep and sort of camaraderie driven meaning in French. It's what drives, you know, the union actions and the protest movements and just the active democratic phenomenon that you see in France and across continental Europe. And so when I'm in France, when I can pass, it's because I become more expressive. You talked about using your hands. I've started to, you know, this is the other thing of speaking another language. You start to meld the two. So I use my hands quite a bit because I see that my interlocutors in French respond to that and they're looking for those signals and I respond to their signals. Similarly, when they start reflecting on deeper concepts in our conversation, that's a signal to me that I should be a bit more ruminating and not be so direct and declarative. The same thing in a lot of Asian languages. We encounter this in Hawaii all the time. There's a predilection for being more indirect rather than saying exactly what you mean. You make use hedging language, use qualifying language to give people the chance to save face and to not directly disagree or to not directly contradict someone. So those are functions of conversation, but it goes beyond that into even how you can, you know, hold yourself. I'm a much more gregarious and joking person in French because the French have that joie de vivre, right? They love to, you know, laugh, hearty laugh and be, you know, very expressive. And I embrace that when I'm speaking French. To say nothing of the Italians. Yeah, I'm not even touching the Italians. I've spent a lot of time in Italy, but they're even more excited to speak to in many cases. So yes, I just, I find this to be a fascinating and very poignant reason to encourage the study of languages. It's less about the linguistic code and it's much more about the intellectual exploration of yourself as well as another culture and language that are opened up as a result of those encounters. So where does literature fit with that? You know, in my prehistoric study of French we read a lot and we read all kinds of French authors in 19th century, 20th century, everything. And you know, you learn a lot about the author, the story and you know, the environment and all that, but really what's the connection between this dynamic expression you're talking about when you speak the oral language and reading all those books to understand the characters in that time and the environment. Yeah, there's so many dimensions here. I'm gonna be concise, but you're onto something very significant here. So literature of course is and particularly canon literature what the, you know, the culture considers its most important tombs of literature that define its character. That is a roadmap to the major cultural mores, values, you know, expressions. If you think of, you know, a piece like Les Miserables and all of the despair and all of the passion and the heartache and the changing of the minds of characters and yet the resiliency and resolution of those characters that is at the heart of a, you know, traditional French identity. Now, French identity like all cultural identities are dynamic, they're changing. But if you wanna talk about some of those core, you know, mythos and legends that define the French mentality, you see that kind of, you know, cynicism mixed with a willingness to change your perspective, change your view. And that's what literature provides. And it does so for us in the English and the Anglophone environment, but what's tricky about that is there are so many cultures that have that Anglophone literary canon and it's complicated by so many different cultural perspectives, which truly makes the English literary canon. If you're looking at, you know, English as a global phenomenon, global Franco, one of the most multicultural literary canons in the world. The other interesting thing about reading in general though, and this is actually an area of specialization for me, I looked at how we actually develop literacy skills in learning a second language. And what you realize very quickly when you start studying the process of reading, a few things. Number one, everybody thinks reading is decoding, like, you know, putting individual letters and then words and then sentences together. The reality is much more messy and chaotic. We don't read in a linear fashion. Our eyes, when you look at eye tracking software, they jump all over the page, they look for certain signals, but they're actually doing a global read. They're rarely going from one direction to the other and reading every every sign. But the most important thing that connects the written word with the spoken word is that to read effectively and to actually understand complex sentences that are strung together and then deeper meeting in the paragraph, you need to avail yourself of a phenomenon called subvocalization. Now, this is a function of how the brain actually remembers everything. So there are certain images, there are certain exposures that are more salient to your brain. We see so many things. Just think about all the things your eye sees at any moment of the day. It holds on to a tiny, tiny fraction of those versus the auditory signals. Those are much more durable. They have a physical form in terms of acoustic signals. And so what we have learned helps second language learners develop reading skills faster is if they read aloud or if they just kind of mumble to themselves. So even if you're not speaking loudly, you start activating the mental processes, the neurological processes that route declarative knowledge of the language into acoustic knowledge. So you don't even have to produce it to then create a mnemonic device that helps you remember. And so as you go through that, do we all do that? We all do that as we're developing literacy, but next time you read a challenging text, find, notice, you will probably be sub vocalizing. You'll do it to help you remember the onset that you just read. I do, I for one, I do that. And it's a natural process, but it's even more important when you're learning a second language for the first time. And so that's why we've started to very intentionally teach people to sub vocalize as they're learning, as they're reading literature, as they're reading even early script so that they can begin to overcome the biggest challenge to any second language learner. And that is working memory. So the biggest problem when you're learning, whether you're speaking or you're reading a second language, it takes so much concentration. It sabotages your working memory and you forget. You might produce beautiful prose, but you get to the end and you don't even remember what you said or you've lost something that was said during the conversation because you're getting the headache thinking so hard about it. And so that's why you need to have lots of communicative practice. It starts with these aids like sub vocalization and then you just get lots of practice so it becomes automatic. And so there's a phenomenon called automaticity where you basically just speak the language without thinking. The problem is if you haven't learned that language carefully and you haven't worked out all the mistakes or errors, you will also get what we call fossilization, which are errors that stay with you for the rest of your life. And that's why you can meet someone who's been speaking a language for 30 years and still make very basic errors. They can't even notice that they're making them because they've already moved from that careful practice to automaticity. And you can undo it, but it's a very painstaking process to undo automatic language. I hear you saying that the conversation is the best teacher. The conversation we were engaging with someone else, me and the accountant for SNCF, for example, that was the best example. But I'm not thinking of grammar. I'm just thinking of getting through it well enough so that he knows what I'm talking about and I'm listening to him so I get a word here and a word there and I know what he's talking about. So in a way, I'm kind of compromising on the formal requirements of the language. And I think that if you focus on the vocalization, which I think is absolutely right for me anyway, then somehow you'd better think about the grammar and the spelling and the syntax and the sentence structure, or you'll always be a Malahini, you know? That's right. Oh, that's absolutely right. And it's what I think a function of that is also making sure that your interactions aren't just practice, right? But that they're meaningful. That you're actually, and this is the more ephemeral part of learning a language. It's not just practicing the words. It's practicing having a meaningful conversation with another human being. And this is where all of the wonderful tools that exist for learning languages online through software, I'm not gonna name any of them, but we all know that they exist. They're great tools for practice, but there's no substitute for meaningful human-to-human interaction because psychologically that's a signal to your brain to remember and to store that information. And more than that, the best correction that you can get that you will remember. Again, we get correction all the time, but the most important correction is when you're having that conversation on the train and somebody says, oh, you mean this? And suddenly that becomes a really meaningful memory that you store and that you operationalize. So that communicative practice with real people, ideally in real world situations, is so powerful and so important to language development. Well, you know, I imagine from this discussion that when you're teaching a language at Shamanad, you're doing interactive, you're throwing everybody in the room in a conversation which presumably is meaningful. And you know what? It builds not only understanding of yourself and that person, it builds a relationship. It does. You can't be in love with somebody although either people claim you can't without having some kind of communication. Absolutely. Communication is the mother of love, they say, right? Exactly right. And the best way to learn language is the romantic method, but I digress. The real power of language learning, it's one of the most fundamental human interactions that you can have is to engage in a dialogue, a back and forth, not a monologue, right? Not a screed like we see so much on social media, not a one-way conversation that just happens to have two people involved. But what Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philologist calls dialogism or meaning making between two people where you're actually coming to a conversation and you're creating meaning in between the two of you that is unique to each individual. And that is the magic of language and it's exciting when it's done right, it's exciting and fun and poetic and musical. Well, you're telling me we'd have a better world if people crossed that Rubicon. If I'm speaking to a Russian, for example, even for five minutes and I tell him his war is wrong, in his language or his language to my language, we're having citizen diplomacy. Absolutely. If you're meeting somebody on the language barrier, it's citizen diplomacy. And that's where the language and even the in-person language in particular, the gestures, the eye contact, the fine nuance that helps you convey a sense of empathy and intellectual curiosity to understand allows you to transcend these policy level issues and get down to human issues. And this is, as you said, not just how citizen diplomacy occurs. I've had the good fortune in my work with the United Nations and others to see real nation-to-nation diplomacy and it works the same way. Two leaders connect on a human level. Obviously they're dealing with larger policy issues but before they can really come to any sort of compromise and understanding, they need to transcend some of those linguistic barriers and they need to share in each other's humanity. And that is the dialogueism, the meaning-making that we're after in every conversation. We've lost so of that art here. A world now where more and more people are learning English, using English. I had a conversation with somebody in Rome yesterday. He was Hoppe Italian and Hoppe German. Oh, wow. He spoke English so well, it was amazing. All the idioms, he had them all. And he hasn't really left the schools he went to in Europe. That's where he learned this. So what I'm saying is that we seem to be finding a common denominator of English and there's a loss there. What you and I have been talking about for the last 20 minutes, we don't have that if everybody speaks the same language. So the message that I would leave and I think you would leave is that those kids, those students in whatever grade of school they're in and right up to the PhD, they should be learning other languages for any number of reasons. But the question I put to you Lance is what languages? How many languages? And in what way, in the Monterey fashion, in Shamanad fashion, how do I do that so that all these lessons you've described, these benefits you describe will actually work? Yeah, those are excellent questions and I get them all the time from cocktail parties to classroom encounters. And this is my response. So in terms of what language, it is absolutely critical that you have a fundamental, intellectual human curiosity about the culture of the language that you wish to study. If you are studying a language for purely utilitarian reasons, because you think it'll help you on your job applications because you're being forced to, that's going to be a barrier. I'm not saying you can't learn that language. I'm saying if you have the ability to choose, you should choose a language that is used in a culture that you want to understand better and you want to engage with people representing that culture. So it gives you the opportunity to pursue that meaningful practice. And really the reality is learning a language is a lifelong commitment. I've been speaking French for 20 plus years. I still learn new things all the time. My wife, she has a PhD in English and she learns new things all the time. It gives you a natural sense of humility, but you have to recognize that really as a non-native speaker, as an adult, learning a second language, it's something that you're going to be working on for the rest of your life. And in terms of the methodology that you pursue, again, I don't think there's a single one-size-fits-all, but the best approach is one in which you have opportunities to learn face-to-face with other students who can practice with you. You need someone who approximates your level. They can be a little bit above or a little bit below, but the idea of being in a classroom or in a community group or a reading group or a French language table or a Chinese language table and interacting with other human beings, not only is that going to maintain your intrinsic motivation to learn more about the culture, it's going to give you that meaningful practice and it's going to move that declarative knowledge into procedural. Is that what they do in Monterey? I'm sorry? Is that what they do in Monterey? That is exactly what they do in Monterey. I used to work very closely when I was at the University of Notre Dame running the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures with the Defense Language Institutes. Monterey hosts one of those, but there are several others, including some for the clandestine services. We would all use the same pedagogical techniques and they began with a formal study of the linguistic system. Even like intro to linguistics, you understand how languages work and proceed to meaningful practice right in that first semester, those first few weeks. And the more immersive you can be, if you can take time out for two weeks of immersive study, that will oftentimes give you more procedural knowledge to use the language, which will then help you continue in that study for many years to come. So I think pedagogically, you want to have a teacher, even if that teacher isn't credentialed, right? Even if they're just a more advanced native speaker or a native speaker themselves, having another person to guide you in that and then someone to practice with as well. Those are the fundamental building blocks for effective language learning. You know, you meet people from Europe, especially the generation that survived World War II and they tell you that they speak five languages or more. And maybe it's because the language next door in the next country is so close that they had connection with people just in the ordinary course. And maybe it's because I'm quoting this because they have a talent in languages. So my question to you is, do only some people have a talent in languages or do we all potentially have a talent in languages? And should we all try to learn more than one, more than just French, French, Italian, Germans, you know, Swahili, Spanish, it's all. So what's your answer? So the answer to both questions is yes, but a qualifier. So there is a natural aptitude for language learning. And guess what? It's highly correlated with the amount of working memory you have. So we understand that aptitude for language learning actually has a lot to do with how much you can hold in working memory and remember as you're having a conversation. But to answer your more fundamental question, can anyone learn any language? Absolutely yes, particularly as a native language. So you can take a baby that was born to parents in any country, in any culture, move them to another country and from birth, they will learn what are considered challenging languages. You know, Chinese with its tone and logographic writing system, Swahili and other non-alphabetic scripts, those are all capable for any human being to learn. Now, when it comes to learning a second language, you should study a variety of languages even if you don't study some of those languages to fluency. I've studied Arabic and I can barely speak any Arabic anymore. I used to have a little more procedural knowledge but that study of Arabic sticks with me in terms of my perception of not just the language but some of the cultural references, some of the cultural idiomatic conventions that give great insight into thinking in that part of the world. And that is the fundamental value of studying a language. It's not necessarily your ability to even remember or hold on to that linguistic system. It's the fact that you get insights into your own language as well as that other language and culture. The other factor here is if you study a language as a child to any level of fluency, you are automatically more predisposed to language learning success in adulthood. That said, there's something called a critical period and it really happens around the time of puberty. There's some physiological and there are a lot of changes in the brain. Is it too late for me, Lance? I'm sorry? Is it too late for me? It's not too late for you. No, but there are some differences that happen and so basically once you go beyond that critical period, you can no longer, without having extremely good luck and good aptitude, you can no longer perfectly approximate the pronunciation of those phonemes in that language. And so that's an enormous limiting factor for many people. Some of the more advanced syntax or grammatical rules are also very difficult to master. That said, any adult can learn any language to communicate fluency. You won't be mistaken for a native speaker, but you will be welcomed and appreciated and understood as a fluent speaker if you put time and effort into it. And everyone at any age, doesn't matter if you're 80 or 100, you can learn a foreign language to maximum levels of fluency and work just fine in that other language. I know if I applied myself, I could. I actually could because I really love the sound of some of these languages. A lot of these languages. I love prosody as well. Before the show began, I told you that I had some familiarity with the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. And I'll tell you what it was and see your reaction. There's a clothing manufacturer in Hawaii called Tori Richard, T-O-R-I. And there was another clothing manufacturer who copied the designs and the marketing. And they called themselves Charlie Richard, C-H-A-R-L-I-E. Charlie Richard. Got it. And we represented Tori Richard. We went to court in the federal court for a violation of, I guess it was trademark. And we brought in evidence that made the defendant a suspicious actor. But what crunched it was, we brought in a linguistics expert. And he testified from UH. And he testified that the two, the Japanese tourists, who was the largest market at the time between these two brands, the sound Tori and the sound Charlie were identical in the IPA. And so an average Japanese ear could not tell the difference. And that made the case all the better for us. And we won. That's a beautiful illustration of linguistics. Many tools and insights, even I would not have guessed that that would be testimony in a trial of trademark. But it makes perfect sense because really there are a variety of sounds that don't mean anything in one particular language but are very meaningful in another. And then there are a variety of sounds that really have tremendous overlap. So in French, for example, there are three different kind of sounds. There's O, E, and E. And to the average English speaker, those didn't really sound that different. Certainly there's no meaningful difference because we don't have a distinction with particular words that have one sound or the other and otherwise are pronounced or spelled the same. So like your example, the IPA, the International Phenetic Alphabet, which was developed I think in the late 19th century, 1880s there, spent around for a long time. And it was an attempt to codify all of the meaningful sounds that the human vocal track can produce that then can be used to transcribe other languages. Now, that's not all the sounds a language can make. Those are called phones. There are hundreds of those. There's only about 120, 130 phonemes. And that is what we use to create the International Phenetic Alphabet. And it shows us all of these incredible distinctions. And here's an example. In French, there is no aspirated ha, the H sound, like in happy. So a French person doesn't have a phoneme in French for ha, an aspirated H. And so they struggle with that as learners. So we can use what we call contrastive analysis to study what one person's native language doesn't include to anticipate what they're gonna have trouble learning. And so that's where the International Phenetic Alphabet can actually be an enormous tool to language development and language learning. And oftentimes with more common language courses for English speakers, for example, there'll be some contrastive analysis that forms the first part of that syllabus and that development of language learning because of those common differences. Phonetic and otherwise, not just limited to- I hear the word artificial intelligence behind what you say. And I feel that an AR program could learn exactly how our Frenchman says happy. Absolutely, absolutely. That may be for other languages. But my last area I wanted to ask you about is this. So we have, say, the US and China, okay? Mandarin's not an easy language by any means. And a lot of people have said over the past 20 years, maybe less lately, because of political considerations, that, you know, go West young man or woman, go West and study Mandarin. It will help you in your life to know Mandarin. At the same time, in China, and this may be declining also, they say study English young man or woman, go East. And, you know, take a graduate degree at an American university or a European university, okay. So my question is, it's kind of utility. How does I learn a few languages? Suppose I learn them at Shamanad or UH or any other Monterey, wherever in the military would have you. And now I have the benefit of that. But query, you know, we have automatic translation systems. We have this flattening world of English. And, you know, more to the point, I want to have a bullpen of languages that will make money for me. You mentioned that you have consulted with various governmental agencies. And that's very impressive because that's kind of confirmation of all that we've been talking about. But query for the young student, whether or not he has a special aptitude for language. Is this worthwhile for him to develop skill in several languages in a world, in a world like today? It absolutely is. And you're certainly correct that there are some languages that are going to provide far more utilitarian advantage than others. And my only caution there would be to try to find a genuine intellectual curiosity to drive your learning of the language because if it's purely utilitarian, you're going to have a lot of difficulty engaging in that meaningful practice that is a pathway to fluent language development. I think, you know, here's the broader context that endorses learning multiple languages. Every language will give you exposure to certain linguistic features that are not present in your native language. More importantly, they will give you insight into how other people representing other cultures think. And I will tell you that that is prized by organizations from business and nonprofit all the way to the intelligence and, you know, defense industries. And I will tell you, I'll keep this vague but say that, you know, I used to be approached frequently for recommendations of students to be nominated for intelligence agencies, not because they spoke a language that was critical to national defense, but rather because they were high aptitude language speakers who had observational skills that they wanted for other purposes. And so being able to master a language and begin to notice things cross-culturally and extra sensory beyond your own categories of perception is valuable in and of itself. And that's why if you have language skills on a resume, that will be an immediate value add. That's one thing I emphasize with all of my students and have for years. That's an immediate value add to have another language because it tells that employer much more about you than just the language itself. It talks about your disposition, your willingness to engage globally, internationally, your cross-cultural sensitivities or competencies. And perhaps if they have a deeper appreciation, your nuance and sophistication for pattern recognition and the ability to observe field independent phenomenon is what we call them. So there's tremendous value monetarily, utilitarian-wise for young people to maximize familiarity with a variety of languages. Even if they never reach a level of communicative fluency with them, there's still tremendous value in that exposure. I always tell people at the very least, learn how to introduce yourself and engage in political niceties or diplomatic niceties because that will endear you to anyone of that country or that culture to see that you're showing them signs of respect. And that's just good human dignity to practice, but it also gives you tremendous advantages and oftentimes opens up conversations that may be in English, but still give you an entree that foreign language competency provides. I can see the scene in the spy movie on Netflix where the intelligence chief says to his young recruit, he says, look, I know you know how to speak Arabic, but don't speak it. Just use your skill of that culture to understand what the other guy is saying. Watch his body language. That's right. Don't tell him. Well, yeah, I have found that one of the most utilitarian skills that I've developed for some of the language I speak in particular Arabic. My Arabic is in particular good, but I'm a great negotiator because I know how to go to the market and engage in the back and forth and the good nature of ribbing and the outrageous statements. That's all a part of the dance of the language and it has a lot less to do with the language you're speaking than the cultural expectations that people have. And that's how I always get a good price on my rugs for Morocco. You know, Lance, I think this show has been a tremendous success because over the course of our half hour together, more and more I've noticed that you're using your hands. I've learned to emphasize with my hands. It shows my excitement for the show, Jay. I won't say au revoir, but I will say à tout à l'heure. À tout à l'heure. Thank you very much, Jay. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Lance. I hope to see you soon. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.