026: Balancing Life with Sleep, Sickness, and Learning a New Language

026: Balancing Life with Sleep, Sickness, and Learning a New Language

Life’s busy. How do you get everything done and remember to sleep? Especially on top of when you get sick, and the second language you’re trying to learn?

Answers to all of this, and more on this week’s edition of the Aux Cable!

Join the online conversation in our NotForum, or on the socials with the hashtag, #AuxCableLanguage. Let us know whether YOU think people should learn a second language, or how they should use their time otherwise.

Contact us with your questions!

Shownotes:

Special thanks to Gabe Miller for our intro and outro music.

53 comments

    1. I have to wait until after work, but I’m still really excited because judging by the title they may have answered one of my questions!!!

        1. …I sent that question in forever ago, I forgot what the question was…
          But it’s adult only skate. It’s like $10, and it’s cool!!!

    1. Essential oils are the best!! And also, if you are sick and have sinus problems or congestion, don’t listen to Ryan about drinking milk. Dairy makes it worse!!! Dairy causes more mucus and makes phlegm thicker!! (I have allergy problems 3/4ths of the year, trust me)

      1. Huh… I guess I missed Ryan’s milk comment. But yeah, milk isn’t great for that. It’s also why you shouldn’t drink milk before singing or doing voice work. 🙂

          1. We are the only living things that drink milk after being weened, and from other mammals at that!! That ain’t normal

          2. My bad grammar emphasizes how serious I am. Kristen, we’re also the only animals that wear clothes and can have a personal relationship with Jesus. By the logic you seem to be using, you’re saying that we shouldn’t wear clothes or become Christians.

          3. We orginally didn’t wear clothes. You don’t come out of the womb wearing clothes. We wear clothes because it would be socially unacceptable otherwise…
            As for with Jesus, we have a soul. But if you look at science, we shouldn’t drink milk. At least not the kind from the store. Milk has lead to cancer and other really bad things. Milk in the store contains so much…I ain’t gonna say it for those who don’t wish to know. Ignorance is bliss.
            If you wanna know why I stand how I do, research it.

          4. There are more important things in this world to argue about than milk. So, I propose we agree to disagree

          5. By your reasoning, distilled water is seemingly the only healthy drink… how is soda better than milk?

          6. I can agree do disagree, but I still haven’t heard a solid reason as to why milk is bad.

          7. Again, I won’t say here, because not everyone may want to hear it. You can do research for yourself, but let’s just say there’s some hot dog stuff going on with the milk that you find in stores.
            If you get your milk at whole foods or…straight from the cow, it’s different, but just from the store, that’s what I’m referencing.

          8. For clarity, Ryan drinks raw milk from grass-fed cows (and God didn’t call it the land of distilled water and honey!).

          9. Thank you for clarifying, Mrs. Matlock. That is better than the nasty stuff at Walmart!

  1. Learning other languages is SO important!!!
    America is the melting pot, which means that there are people here who don’t speak English (many more people than you think, Ryan). Your chance of running into someone who doesn’t speak English is high!

    I did 2 years of Spanish on rosetta stone. I don’t remember much of it, but I can get food, water, and to and fro.

    I did a year of teaching myself french. I know much more than I do in spanish, I just can’t speak it or write it. I can carry on a conversation in french if I practice some more, but I am much better at hearing it and knowing what is said. Each summer we host a teen from France at our house for a month. I can’t learn via duolingo, but I learn from submersion! Therefore, what I know in french is typically just what I learn when a student is here. And yes the students are here to practice English, I use it as an opportunity to practice french.

    Learning a language is so crucial!!! Yes, ASL is important, but so is Spanish and french!!! (Plus, if you know ASL or Spanish and you put it on your resumé it looks really good for you) (people who do ASL jobs make a ton of money as well).

    I disagree with Ryan a lot on this, and he needs to stop grouping homeschoolers together when he says stuff like that. I had to take 2 years of foreign language to graduate (my mom’s standards). Not all homeschoolers learn just what seems necessary. Plus, when children know more than one language, they grow up to be more quick on their feet with decision making!

    Is the pig-latin that I’m fluent in practical? No. It’s not a real language and it’s kinda stupid. But the French and Spanish I know is enough to get by. There are so many people in the USA that don’t know English, and it’s not necessarily their job to learn it, as we welcome people with open arms!!!

    Being bilingual is such a huge advantage in the workforce. If I knew Spanish or ASL, then I could be making double what I am now!

    Rant over. Concensus is I agree with Matthew

    1. I also know a tiny bit of German…less than I do in spanish. My goal is to work on my Spanish and french and even work on the little bit of ASL I know, that way I can help more people than if I only knew one language.

  2. Duolingo is good for strengthening vocabulary and preliminary learning of sentence structure, but it’s really not that great as far as grammar goes.

  3. Was it just me, or did Ryan miss a big opportunity by not saying “I’m outta hair” at the end of the commercial? Maybe he did, but if he was trying to it didn’t come out right.

  4. I agree with Matthew wholeheartedly. You’re going to need to come up with better reasons than “You’re probably not going to use it that much,” Ryan. There is a significantly greater likelihood of using a foreign language than using Chemistry, for example, practically. I think that was bad grammar.

  5. “I know technically it’s spring, but here it isn’t really.”
    Amen.

          1. Good gravy, 5’9″ Josiah, FORTY DEGREES??????? That is frankly torrid.

  6. Ryan, I’m sorry but if you think you would more likely come in contact with more opportunities to speak ASL than Spanish…you need to open your eyes to the real world outside of your home schooled classroom. Spanish is 2nd to English in the USA. I looked up the top 10 languages spoken in the US, and it is English, Spanish, Chinese, and Tagalog or Filipino in the top 4 with ASL falling in between 3rd and 4th. Although ASL is very good to know, in the business world you are going to be interacting in, I believe Spanish would be far more useful. Just go shopping or hand out in a mall and see how much Spanish you hear opposed to how much ASL you see. Sorry to sound so harsh but I was quite surprised (as bright as you are) to hear you make this statement.

    1. Grandma Matlock – are you suggesting that Ryan did not spend the last 20 years in “the real world”? Because in his life, he HAS known more ASL speakers than Spanish speakers. And yes, the 2nd language in the US is Spanish, but the percentage of residents who speak only Spanish is SIGNIFICANTLY lower than those speaking English. Also, Spanish-only speaking US residents tend to form their own communities, instead of integrating into the larger community (for some, simply because they don’t want to learn English). In that respect, most Spanish-only speakers will seek out another Spanish speaker for their business needs, so the likelihood that Ryan would need to learn the language to be successful in his chosen field is pretty slim.

  7. Ryan’s argument is about as dumb as me saying, “I want to learn braille, so I can blindfold myself, drive to the ATM, and still make a deposit.”

  8. I think of learning a new language a bit like college, it can be worth it, but it’s probably not good to do it just for the sake of doing it. I am learning Spanish, because there are a lot of Spanish speakers in my world, so it would be useful, and I find it relatively easy to grasp.

    1. Welcome to the comments, Tim! You’re welcome to join us in the Notforum!

  9. Love the episode 😀 (essential oils are fantastic! I made infused oils for my family one year. Then I got a still and tried to make essential oils which didn’t work 🙁 )

  10. Fiiiiiinally caught up! This was a great episode. ASL definitely counts as a language credit, Ryan. I took it at coop in HS and went on to take two quarters of it in college. I miss it! It’s very fun and comes in handy when your mouth is full…if only the people around me knew what I was saying…? I now work at a school with tons of Hispanic people. Oh well… can’t win them all I guess.

    1. Welcome to the comments, Victory! You are welcome to join us in the Not-Forum!

  11. Can I straddle the fence and suggest that Ryan AND Matthew both have valid points in the whole foreign language debate?

    Matthew: You are 100% correct that growing up bi-lingual hard-wires the brain uniquely and not only makes one mor creative, but also makes learning more languages easier, no matter when you begin. However, in the US at least, foreign language (as a school subject) is rarely taught early in life, and in nearly every state, only mandated in high school (2-4 years depending on the school system). The brain has already been hard-wired by the time foreign language is introduced to the vast majority of US students, and of those taking a full four years, very few retain any functional knowledge or ability to speak/read/write beyond the absolute basics. From my generation on (about 30 years) the ONLY people I know who learned a second language AFTER the age of five who still are able to speak conversantly in it are the people who both lived abroad and learned the language by immersing themselves in it, AND still use it regularly. [Curiously, people from my parents’ (Ryan’s grandparents’) generation and older, who were taught Latin instead of a “current” language are able to decipher more speech from foreign languages than any of my generation can (almost all US schools dropped Latin as a “dead” language in the 80’s). So taking Latin as a foreign language option can be more useful than an actual language.]
    The best time to teach/learn a 2nd language is before the child is fully verbal, ideally beginning in the first 18 months of life. Not only will the brain have more elasticity for learning new languages when the child is older, but the child can also develop the throat/tongue/cheek/lip muscles necessary to correctly form words in both languages flawlessly (the examples, though possibly stereotyping, that comes to mind would be Asian-born speakers being unable to pronounce the hard “r” as in rice, radio, read, while most English-born speakers are unable to roll their “r”s as is necessary for Spanish).

    Ryan: You are 97.5% correct that there is NO justification to take a foreign language in high school “just because”… I dock 1% for my caveat that even if there is no “life’s work” skill gained, you still can achieve better character by forcing yourself to do something well, even if for no reason than “because you are told to”. The next 1% I am docking because I do want to account for my own bias toward not using your formative school years to sit and do things you’ll promptly forget because 150 years ago some industrial tycoons figured out the best way to create a population full of docile doers and buyers was to make everyone learn the same thing, at the same pace for 12 years. And the final .5% was docked because I know that when/if you do discover you need to learn another language, I know you will find a way to do so, just as you have always figured out how to learn the things you want to know, and how to do the things you want to do, but don’t deny that had I forced you to learn 2-4 years of that particular language (even though I had no ability to predict what it was), you would have some small head start on it.

    tldr: Learn a 2nd language when you’re little or it will be nearly impossible to be fluent; use your primary (k-12) education to learn things you’re actually interested in and I’ll retain, not what “everyone says” you should. And Ryan’s mom can’t entirely step outside her own bias to objectively support her son’s arguments.

  12. The episode where Ryan has lived in California long enough to forget that other parts of the world have seasons other than “mid-spring”.

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