Hello and [bad word] to another episode of Real English Conversations from [bad word]  I’m posting this episode at the end of August, 2014, after a rainy and gray summer here in the Netherlands. If you had a vacation this summer, I hope that you had better weather than we did here!

Apart from doing a lot of reading, photography and playing with my dog, I’ve spent most of my vacation arranging and recording new conversations for you. I’ll tell you a secret: it’s scary for me to contact people I don’t know and ask them to record conversations. But knowing how much you like listening to conversations gives me the courage to do it. So thanks for helping me push myself to get out of [bad word] zone and do something scary.

In today’s conversation, you’ll meet Carsten Peters, an all-round interesting guy: He is a polyglot, a language coach, a guitarist, as well as a published author, a podcaster and an entrepreneur. His first language is German, and he’s is a great example of a successful learner of English. Carsten is also one of the founders of The Language [bad word]  and excels at helping people reach their language learning goals efficiently, sustainably, and at their own pace. You can find out more about Carsten and Language Mining at [bad [bad word] 
OK, let’s get started with the conversation!

CONVERSATION TRANSCRIPT
Carsten: Here we go, hello Lori.
Lori: Hello Carsten.
Carsten: How are you?
Lori: I’m doing great, how are you?
Carsten: Yeah, fine, fine.
Lori: Oh good, I’m so glad you agreed to talk to me.
Carsten: Yeah, I’m, like, puzzled that you wanted to talk to me so it’s on both sides.
Lori: Oh, why would you think that?
Carsten: Because it’s just like, I was amazed that you contacted me and I’m very grateful for it and I’m happy to be on your show.
Lori: Oh, well it’s a real pleasure.
Carsten: Where are you now, you are in the Netherlands, right?

Lori: That’s right, I live in the Netherlands.
Carsten: But I read something about Sweden, is that where you were based before?
Lori: Actually, to make a very long story short, I was born in the US and lived there till my mid-twenties and then I moved to Sweden, lived there for about twenty years, and then I moved to the Netherlands where I live now.
Carsten: Okay, yeah.
Lori: Yeah, one of the reasons that I thought it would be so cool to talk to you is that I think it’s inspiring for people learning English to hear people who are not native speakers but who have managed to learn really well. You know, people who are basically badass at learning languages. And I thought, you know, as soon as I found your site, I thought, “Oh, Carsten, he looks like a really cool guy to talk to.”
Carsten: Yeah, thank you.
Lori: One of the things that I wanted to ask you about is – you see, I’m not actually involved actively anymore working with real-life learners…
Carsten: Okay.
Lori: I stopped teaching English back in around 2007. And now, recently, I have decided, you know, I started my podcast back in 2006 and it would be fun to pick that up again.
Carsten: Yeah.
Lori: And I’m finding that as I’m getting back into it and, you know, and reading up on learning theory and language learning and trying to get caught up again, a lot has changed in 2006 – or since 2006. When [bad word] to the resources and things that are available for people to learn online.
Carsten: Yes, yes, definitely. There are so many things that actually the big challenge is not, is not the content itself it’s for the learner to select which content to use.
Lori: Right, exactly, it’s almost like you can get overwhelmed by so much information out there and so many different sites and people with different theories about what the best way is. I think for a learner it can be overwhelming to just know…where do I start?
Carsten: Yeah, but what you are doing at [bad word] is actually very interesting because as far as I have seen you are recording real life conversations, is that [bad word] 
Lori: Yeah.
Carsten: And then you are transcribing them, working on the vocabulary that has been used in that conversation, right?
Lori: Yeah, that’s basically what I’m able to do with the resources that I have. I would like – to me it doesn’t feel so pedagogically sound to just be putting conversations out there and then highlighting vocabulary and basically leaving the rest up to the learners to do with it what they will. But with the time I have available that’s really all I can do. Apparently people do think it’s helpful so I keep doing it. But I’m thinking, if you want to go beyond that, I mean, I hear a lot of language learning podcasters saying things like, “All you need to do is just listen a lot, listen a lot and you will learn and get better.” And I think of it – when I think back from my own perspective – I think you would have to already be at least an intermediate level to get a lot out of just listening. You need a little more [bad word] and focus especially at the lower levels. But it could be that that’s an old fashioned way of looking at things.
Carsten: It’s actually [bad word]  I mean, if you think about children, what they do is they just listen. They listen and listen and listen and listen, and over time they have a fairly good language level, like when they are six years, seven years old…
Lori: Right.
Carsten: …they are fluent and they can say everything they want to say. Probably a rather limited vocabulary – amount of words that they know – but still they are fluent. So the thing is that what is different between kids and adults, just to put it very simple [sic], is they have time.
Lori: Right.
Carsten: And they are motivated and they are enjoying life and all these kind of things. And we adults, we tend to [bad word] with things and we want to have it, we don’t have patience, we want to have it fast and it just does not work. I mean, it works and we would need such a long time to just learn the language by listening.
Lori: Yeah, of course we can learn that way as adults but I think we also have a lot of pressure. We put pressure on ourselves, we like, as you just said, we don’t have the patience and we are worried about looking bad…
Carsten: Yeah, exactly.
Lori: There’s… so I think a little bit, yeah, and here this is just my opinion, I’m not basing this on science, but it just seems logical to me that adults need to have a little more focus than just listening. That is, yeah, one of the things I [bad word] with when I’m creating my podcast is, is this really enough for people? Like, just to listen to this?
Carsten: Yeah, it’s, I mean, listening is important of course. But then if you add [bad word] to it, it gets a lot faster. There’s really an advantage that have adults over children if we continue [bad word] these two.
Lori: Right.
Carsten: Is that we adults we know how to think logically and in an abstract way and all these kind of things. So if you add that [bad word] to the content that you are providing then they will just learn really, really fast.
Lori: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I think as well. It’s great to tell people, yeah, listen as much as you can and try to get as much exposure to English as you can but at some point I think adults need to do a little more than just, like, absorbing things and taking things in. In order to learn, you know, more efficiently and faster. I think you can learn just from listening and trying to notice things and especially if you have access to the context. Because that’s another thing that little kids have, that adults don’t, is everything that is happening to them it is in the context, you know?
Carsten: Yeah.
Lori: They see mother holding a banana and saying “banana” and they are hungry and they want that banana and pretty soon, you know, they make that connection. It’s not just language sort of flowing over them with no context like you would get as an adult just, say, turning on the TV and trying to watch a TV show in English that you have no idea what’s going on.
Carsten: Exactly, exactly. The thing is that the kids, they are exposed to the language all the time and they just [bad word] away from it and what we adults do all the time, we are… we are… we have other priorities. We have things to do, we have to-do lists, and these lists have nothing to do with language learning. So what we do all the time is we do something and then we get away from it, then we do something else. So what I do really when somebody asks me about language learning, what’s the first thing to do, the first thing I always tell them is get [bad word]  [bad word] language learning with sports. Most people have some experience with sports, like they have tried it or they are doing it actually, [bad word]  So you have to do it on a regular basis. That’s the first thing that I do with them. What are you going to do in order to make sure that there is a con