 Okay, so now I need to make sure that I can find the comments. Yes. So we're just warming up right now. This is really pre-show banter, welcome, have a sip of your coffee. Yeah, well, Adam, maybe a lot of our listeners are not actually having coffee at this time. It might be like 10 o'clock or midnight for them. They might be having a nice, I don't know, what are you, cold water? Tea? Tea maybe? Tea. Nice calming tea. A nice chamomile. Is this? Anyway. A oatmeal? Chamomile. Oh, chamomile. That makes a lot more sense, Adam. Great job. Anyway, if you're watching this on either Facebook or YouTube, please make a comment. Let us know that you're seeing us. Let us know where you're from, and I am going to roll this little introduction. Send us proof of life. Proof of life. Exactly. Let's... All right, we are back. I'm still figuring things out. Truly is live here, Spotlight Live. Welcome. I am Adam Navas. I'm joined with Liz Wade. Liz, how are you today? I'm good. I have the camera set up up here, but to see your comments, I have to look down here. It looks like I'm paying attention to something else, but I actually am paying attention to your comments. Oh, we already have one. Abdera Mane says it's 3.31 p.m. from Algeria. Hello to Algeria. That's great. Yeah. We are so excited to hear where you are from. What do you like to have? Do you... I mean, the question I would say, and I'll ask this to you, is do you eat right before bed? I know in a lot of different cultures, people eat late at night. I know when I visited Argentina, they have dinner quite late. I don't sleep as well when I eat or drink right before bed, but of course, in the morning, I love coffee. Yeah. I do have my listeners have mocked me about the size of this cup before. It looks a lot bigger. Right now, it looks the size of your head. It looks like it's two feet. Yeah. See? It's this big. No. See? It's this big. Yes, it is. But this is just... Yeah. It is two layers, so there's some air in there to keep it cold, but this is my coffee. I like an iced coffee. Yeah. I am not a cold coffee drinker, but we digress. We digress. Yes. Okay. So we have our Rathana from Cambodia. We have Alexandra greetings from the Netherlands, greetings to the Netherlands. We've been there, right? We've both been to the Netherlands. Yes. I have... We went to the Netherlands. I went to the Netherlands a couple of years ago now. The same year we saw each other. So that's a funny story. I was going to the Netherlands. You were coming back and we saw each other in what airport? Oh, that's right. I think it was Detroit. Yeah. I think that's right, the Detroit airport. Yeah, that is very funny, because we were on separate trips. Separate trips. And we did not know that we were traveling, and you were traveling with someone else. Yeah. And I saw her, and I recognized her, and yeah, that is very funny. I didn't remember that until just now. Okay, so we have congratulations from Eric from Rwanda. We have Sabrina from Taiwan. We have Love from India, from Sanju, Luke Doe says hi, Willian says hi, Adam and Liz, blessing. There's Janeth from Ecuador. Wow, amazing, hello to all of you. Yeah. I'm going to check Facebook, Mexico here from Jesus, and Paulina, hi from Ecuador. So hello to all of you. Thank you. We love hearing where you are. The other way I did want to say on YouTube, there is a way that you can send us a message that we promise we will read out loud and thank you. You can get a super. It's a kind of comment where if you see there's a little like a sort of a dollar sign at the bottom of the comments, you can click on that and for just a little bit of money, your comment will appear right at the top of the comments list. We will read it and answer your question if that is what you want to use your super comment for. And we use that money to support our writers. We use it to create our videos. We use it to produce programs. So all of that, everything earned from there goes right back into making more spotlight programs. So if you want to support us that way, that is really great and we would love to see you send a super comment. We got two last live show and it was, it made my week. Yeah, very thrilling. And it's a lot of, it's just fun for us too. We love to answer your questions, but we can't get to them all. Yes, exactly. Oh, and there is another thing for our, for our YouTube channel users, which is actually really exciting. We have had a lot of people ask for PDFs of scripts. And so if you have been on spotlight for a long time, either on our YouTube program or our website or even the app, you know that we have a big archive of programs that is on YouTube, but not all of those programs are on our website. So you are not able to get the script for every program. And we have people ask us, how can I get the script for programs? I really loved this program, but I can't find it anymore. And so we have created memberships. You can become a spotlight member for a low amount of money. And then there's a couple of different levels. And depending on what level you choose, you can get access to exclusive videos. You can get PDFs of either PDFs. That's a super hard word to say. Have you tried to say that, Adam? PDF, PDF, yeah. But say PDFs. PDFs, PDFs. Yeah, there's a lot of sounds in there. Yeah. So you can get PDFs of one or three or five scripts every month. You can get a personal shout out from me or Adam, where we say happy birthday to you or congratulations on a new job or just, hey, keep going. You're doing awesome. So if you are interested in checking out a membership, we thank every member in all of our videos. So you can sign up as a member and then see your name in every spotlight program after that as long as you are a member. So I think that's pretty cool. You maybe have seen a member's names in new programs already. And if you want to be part of that action, hit the Join button below. And that will give you some more information about that. Well, I think this is a great opportunity. You've joined us here on our Spotlight Live to hear us native English speakers having a conversation. And if you really want to take your English learning to the next level, it's just an opportunity for you to say, hey, I want to take this seriously. I want more and help support us. And we're really excited about where that's going to go. But we have a lot of people saying hello. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Suleiman from Burkina Faso on Facebook, hello. Abdullah Hassan, watching from Sudan, hello. Seida from Turkey, another country I've been to. Vesalza says hi. That is a person who's usually, I see a lot of comments from that person on YouTube. So hello to you. Hi from Saudi Arabia and Abdullah Said. Hi from Vietnam, Longhawk. And from Yakutia. I've never heard about that. We do also love to answer questions from you on this live show. So if you have a question for either me or Adam or about a recent program, we would love to answer your question. So write it down here. It's also a good way for you to practice English writing in a comment. And so, yeah, do that. So we do have one question, Adam. It says, please, this is from H. Hamdi. Please talk about speaking and how to improve it. Yeah. Well, I think one of the, so I have two answers to that. The first is you just have to do it. You have to just not be afraid and just try it. Put yourself in situations where you are forced to speak English. The other is we would love if you record a short video and post it. I don't think that you can post a video in comments, can you? I don't think so. You'd have to either send it or link to it. If you have a YouTube channel, even if it's your personal one, we'd love to watch that, share that video, and even get a few people who are trying the same sentence or paragraph. And we'd be happy to talk about how your English pronunciation is, what you could do to improve in a certain word. If you have a certain word, even now, if you just asked, how do you pronounce if you have a certain word, we're happy to help you pronounce that word here. Yeah, we did that last time, didn't we? Speaking is a really challenging way. We've often talked about accents as well. People want to not only know what the word is, not only know how to pronounce it, but to pronounce it and sound like a native English speaker. We're toying with creating a course all about accents and how to... Because, of course, even native English speakers have different accents depending on where you live. Well, but it's more about, for example, the sound TH is not in every language. And this is for English speakers who learn a different language as well, where there are not sounds that we make. But how do you move your mouth and use your mouth and throat muscles to make that sound? Right. So that is, yeah. That's what we would really love to be able to share with you. Yeah. Oh, go ahead, Adam. Did you second part of your answer, or did I miss it? No, that was the first part of his try. The second part is, yeah, find little ways using technology, even if you can't be with a native English speaker, make a video. Even in audio recording, we could listen to and talk about. Yeah, it's true. Well, and you can record yourself and listen to yourself as well. We do have a program that I recommend to people who may not feel confident speaking English or who really do want to practice their speaking. It's called Crazy English, and it is on our website. And it actually talks about a person's method for learning English. And it is a little funny, but a lot of people say that it works, and it can give you confidence. But it is about making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. The other thing I wanted to say is that we also recommend that if you want to improve your speaking, you can listen to one of our classic spotlight programs with the script with you and read along as we read, trying to copy the accent of the person who is reading the program. And if you get really good at that, you can advance to our advanced program where it will start to sound more like a native speaker. So it will have phrases that are together and words that kind of flow into each other. So there is a way for you to start sort of at a beginning level and then go up to another advanced level. So I think that's a lot of good tips. Hey, Liz, we got a question. That is very legitimate. Nasser asks, are you guys going to complete the series of 10 Ways to Fight Hate? Because there's only four here on YouTube. Yes. Well, OK, so we have been running that series. We don't want to just run just that series. We do have the fifth program coming up. And probably over the next year, we will be adding them, I mean, not a year from now, through 2021. But yes, we will be continuing that series. I think we started running it maybe in January. So really, that is something to look forward to. There's still a lot more. There's teaching tolerance. There's Dig Deeper, Create an Alternative. See, it's there. They are coming. We haven't forgotten. I'm really glad that you have enjoyed that series and are looking forward to more. Yeah. There's another one. Hi, Adam and Liz. How to recognize difference between can't and can't in pronunciation. Ooh. That is a really difficult one. I think that mostly it is the context, right? But even now, sometimes I will ask a native English speaker, did you say can't or can? Yeah. Yeah, that's such a small difference. Words that are, why am I blanking? Conjunctions? No, contractions. Contractions, yeah. Contractions, which is, if you don't know what a contraction is, it's two words that get pushed together and become one word. And they are some of the hardest English words to figure out. Right. Because can't, can't, I'm. Can't and wouldn't. There's like something could be made of would and be wouldn't. Or it could be you don't want to do something, so you wouldn't do it. Well, and one of the things is in spotlight, we don't, well, we don't teach English. We are a practice program. But we do not use contractions in our program because they are difficult. I wonder if people even knew that. Yeah, it's a good point. We have one contraction in our whole program. It's in every program. So maybe people know what it is. If you know what one contraction word we use in our program, every program, right? Every single program. Yep. That's probably a pretty big hint. What? Do you know what it is? Hold on. I'm guessing it's from the introduction. Well, I wasn't going to have you answer it, Adam. I don't know what it is. I'm just saying. Oh, OK. Yeah, I would be curious. If you can recognize, not you, Adam, but our listeners. Yeah, put it in the comments. Yeah, put it in the comments. What's the one contraction we use in every program? Yeah, that would be interesting. I'm sure it's, they've snuck through somehow, but I don't know why they would. Well, I love this comment from Anatole, too, on YouTube. We were talking about improving your speaking. And Anatole says that, yes, I try copying your pronunciation. And then, maybe I don't understand, but I'm copying. And I love that. I think it's great. One of my favorite stories, and I think this is a great tip, too, for learning English, is of someone who told this story on YouTube, or not YouTube, Facebook. Someone who wrote to us on Facebook and said that they would listen to spotlight programs every morning as they made breakfast. So they would just have it on in the background. And they would not understand a lot of it. And then one morning, I forget if this was a man or a woman, this person was listening to a very sad program about a person who lost their family and then found their family again. And they were listening. And they just suddenly noticed that they were crying because they realized they were understanding the program as it was going on. So maybe they did not understand programs before. But with all of that practice, just in the background, they began to recognize more words until they just kind of understood, I am understanding this program now. So I think that's a great tip. And you know what, Anatole? Keep going because that work will pay off, that copying and that reading and that consistency that will help you. Yeah. It is, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this. And I haven't talked to you about this, Liz. I watched a video the other day where someone was talking about social media. They were talking about should you make a nice big video, use cinematic, use editing, music, sound effects, high production values, or should you pull out your phone, throw it up on TikTok, just like what do people want? People obviously want the easy short things. But you and I are working to try to help people practice English. That is a hard thing to do. Oh, yeah. I'm sure there are people on TikTok helping people learn English, maybe a word of the day. But we really are committed to a long-term journey of learning English. So when you say, keep doing it, learning a language is not something you can do with just a swipe, or whichever way you're going to swipe on your phone. Yeah, it is consistency. Yes. And so we're committed to that. And I think you should be too, because there are certain things in this world you can't learn quickly. It just takes time. And I do want to bring up again for anyone who missed it at the end, at the beginning, that we do have memberships now on our channel, where you can get access to more resources for practicing your English. So you can get exclusive video content, which we have a lot of exciting things coming out just for members, additional content, shorter spotlight programs, vocabulary videos, all of those things. So check that out for members. Mistakes that we make. Yeah. We never make mistakes. Things that we, behind the scenes stuff, you get to see what really happens when we try to record these things. Yeah, you can get PDFs of scripts. You can get access to our just members-only Facebook group. So really, I hope that you click that join button below if you want some more resources. And yeah, learn some more about it. You know, I'm going to give people a little watch this. Like this is the kind of behind the scenes stuff. You can see, oh, look, huh? You get to see that kind of high quality. That kind of realness. Realness. There's no studio here. Adam, I want to point out that we have a member here right now. And you can see there's a little badge behind Quok's name. I think that's how you say it. I'm very sorry. But Quok says, your English accent is very clear to listen to and understand. So great job. And thank you for being a member. It's so amazing. Yeah. Well, we have worked hard over many years to make sure that when we talk in the spotlight method, there is a little space between our words. Because obviously, in English, you run your words together when you normally speak. But we work really hard in our programs to make sure each word is clear, each word is understandable. And it's good to know that works. It's good to know that you're understanding us. Yeah. And I want to apologize. Because many of our listeners or viewers might recognize that I'm in a different space today. It was just so sunny and beautiful outside that I decided to go on to the porch. But unfortunately, my neighbor is building something. So he is using a saw. It's not as loud for us as maybe it is for you. Maybe you heard that. We can just hear it a little bit. But you know what? I think that's a, that is an experience that many people have, maybe a neighbor making noise. That happens here, too. Sometimes we are the neighbors making noise. So, yeah. Let me see. We have an upcoming program we wanted to talk about. Let's make sure we talk about that. We do. Well, don't we want to talk about it? Which program? Which program? I thought we were going to talk about the COVID program. Oh, that's this week. Oh, that's already out. Yeah, that's this week. I hope that you have had a chance to listen to our program this week about life and loneliness during COVID-19. And there's also a conversation, a real conversation, between Adam and I where we talk about this program. But I really think this is such a universal feeling and experience that I think we'll be talking about this for a long time. Not maybe like at Spotlight, but people in general will be talking about COVID for a very long time. And we did, we asked people to tell their stories. And you can read through some of them on the COVID programs, on the life and loneliness during COVID-19 programs. And it was really heart-breaking to read some of them about one person who had planned to visit their friend in Canada, but the friend died of COVID-19 this year and they were not able to visit their friend. Some of them were just acknowledging, yes, COVID-19 has changed all of our lives or it's going up in my country or it's coming down in my country. And yeah, until we can vaccinate everyone and until everyone has access to those vaccines, it's going to be a while. Yeah, yeah, it is. And I think the loneliness is one of the worst things. If bad things happen and you're with it and you go through those suffering with other people, it's still bad. But even good things, when good things happen, if you're all alone, they don't feel good. And so, I mean, you might be watching this video and you might have tuned in because you want to improve your English or you want to practice English, but I want to say we see you. You are not alone and the little community we have here that you can be a part of, that I'm happy to be a part of and I know Liz is as well. I'm more than happy. Yes. I'm overjoyed to be a part of this spotlight community. We say it all the time, there's no better community than people who listen to spotlight. There really isn't. You are wonderful, you are kind, and you are motivated. And we feel privileged to be able to participate in this with you. So thank you. So I just didn't want to end on a downer note of talking about a tough program, a tough topic, but a good one. But I want to ask one more time, if anyone has any more questions, throw them in the chat right now. We'll try and answer them. And yeah, thanks everyone for joining us. It's so cool to see people from all around the world joining in here. Like, how amazing is that? Yeah. I think it's amazing. I think it's, yeah. So if you have not, if this is maybe you're new to Spotlight, I think you should just check us out. We know we're streaming to Facebook and to YouTube right now. So subscribe and like, and all the things you're supposed to do to help us out. But also, please, just like this video. Check out the Join button. You can subscribe. That would be super great. And then hit the little bell so that you always see when we have a new video out. You won't miss any live chats then, or any of our conversation or advanced or classic videos. Yeah. So yeah, do all that. And we will continue to make programs that look for that 10 ways series. We have great playlists that we're constantly adding to. So maybe you found a topic or a subject that you are interested in. So make sure to dive into the playlist section on our channel. Liz does an amazing job managing that and curating that. So there's going to be some programs that maybe if you're new, you should go back and check out. Hey, and I want to give one challenge as we close here. And if that is everyone watching this right now, could recommend Spotlight either on Facebook or YouTube or post about it on YouTube or Twitter or Instagram. That would be awesome. Or walk to your neighbor's house and knock on the door and tell them about Spotlight. Yeah. My challenge to you is to share the Spotlight website or YouTube channel or Facebook page with someone that you know today who is practicing English. And who knows, maybe you and that person can start using Spotlight to practice your English together. And that is one way that you can form a community and that you can practice your English. So that's my challenge to you. Share Spotlight with somebody today right now as this live show ends. And we want to say thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our members, those of you who have really committed to studying and practicing English and using our resources. We really appreciate you. We appreciate you as a whole community, all of you watching right now. Thank you so much. Thank you.