Daily Dose of English 213
Dabbling
Daily Dose of English 213
Intermediate
Hello, everyone! My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about dabbling. So to dabble or dabbling is a relatively common word that you can come across. And it refers to when somebody does a little bit of something, um, as like a hobby or something like that. So somebody might say to you, Oh, I dabble a bit in music or, um, whatever it is. Can you hear my cat meowing in the background? No, he stopped, okay. Oh, hello, there he is. Anyways, dabbling is, means that you're not really fully doing something, right? You're just like interested in it. You're looking at it, you're playing around with it, that kind of thing. So if somebody also, like if somebody says to someone else, oh, you like, what's a hobby? you like to paint, they might say, oh, I dabble, right? I just dabble. That means they don't really paint, but they do sometimes occasionally enjoy it and then they think it's interesting. But when I put dabbling on the list, there's a specific kind of dabbling that I'm referring to. And that's in the language learning space. It refers to when you just kind of play around with learning a new language, but don't actually like put a bunch of time or effort into it. So dabbling in a new language means like you learn some words, you watch a little bit of content, you learn a little bit about the language, something like that, but you're not fully dedicated to learning the language necessarily. And a dabbler is someone who does that a lot, right? So a dabbler is someone who learns a lot of languages, just a little bit, right? They don't really put a ton of time and energy into getting good at one language. Or they might, but they might also dabble, right? So some dabblers who might be considered a chronic dabbler is somebody who only dabbles in new languages, who only plays around with them and doesn't really put a bunch of time into one language currently or any more or whatever it is. Chronic, in this sense, is like somebody that does it a lot. And chronic is typically actually heard of as a negative context? No. It's used as sort of a negative thing, like chronic pain, chronic illnesses, or chronic dabbling is sort of seen as like they either have a problem in the case of like chronic pain or that like won't go away or it's like something that is a negative thing that they do all the time. It's not literally negative because the word does just mean like forever over time, right? Chronic comes from the root of time, of chronos. But Yeah, that's generally how chronic dabbling is seen as a negative thing. You should put more time into a specific language or try to actually get good. But that's not necessarily better or anything like that. And that's what I wanna talk a bit about today. I wanna sort of talk about my experience with dabbling, I guess, and yeah, just, I don't know, talk about it a little bit. So, I'm not really a dabbler. I don't really dabble in other languages. I kind of put all of my energy into one language and don't really get distracted. I haven't really played around with other languages since I started learning Czech and I didn't really get distracted from learning Spanish until I was already quite advanced and then I started with Czech. So, I wouldn't call myself a dabbler. Occasionally, I'll like look into some things, but more like about the language. I won't really actually try to learn anything. I'm just kind of curious, right? So I looked into Estonian the other day or a couple weeks ago now, just because I was talking about it with somebody and it seemed interesting. So I learned a little bit about it, but I wouldn't say that I even tried to learn any single word. I don't know a single word of Estonian. I just was a bit curious about like, what are the materials available? What kind of things are difficult about Estonian and that kind of thing. So I wouldn't consider that dabbling because I would not ever say that I'm learning Estonian in this case, but it is the same sort of idea of like trying something out, playing with something. I do actually want to try to dabble a little bit more. I'm going to start trying to dabble, I think, next week, actually, now that I'm recording this. There's a specific language I want to dabble and just play around with and see what happens. Um, but I don't want to say anything about it. And I'm, cause I'm curious of like the process of, of dabbling and like how it might help my, um, motivation or my other languages that I'm learning, um, more actively. And because I think there's a lot, a lot of benefit that you can get out of like trying out new things, whether it's new tools, new resources, new like shows or whatever it might be. And so that's one of the things that I'm interested in about dabbling. I want to actually try a couple of new tools and some different resources that I haven't really been able to use for Czech since they don't exist for Czech, because Czech is a pretty small language comparatively. Actually, not even that much smaller than this other language, but it's less supported, right? And many people do enjoy dabbling, right? Lamont on Days of French and Swedish, or Days of Languages now, made a video like two years ago about how his dabbling actually helped him to focus on a target language because he is interested in learning languages. He likes to learn languages. And so he always had like an interest in doing something else or new. But he didn't want to be distracted from actually making real progress in a specific language. And so he used his dabbling as like an extra hobby, right? So he had like his main language he was learning, which I think was Swedish at the time. So I think he was learning Swedish as his main language. And then he also had some time he was putting into just dabbling. And there were separate things on his in his day on his agenda or whatever. And he said that really really worked for him because it when he was terrible at these other languages that he played around with that made him more engaged when he was actually pretty good at Swedish and wanted to make more progress there. Right. So it functioned almost as a as a motivator since he could see that how good he actually was getting at Swedish and that the results were paying off because if you don't like, check yourself. No, that's not what I want to say. If you don't, it's hard to see your progress sometimes, right? There's often, people often talk about the, a boiling frog. So this is like a, I guess a thought experiment or an analogy for, imagine that you're a frog and you are put into a pot of regular water, right? You're like, cool, this is great. I'm in water. But then if the water slowly starts to raise in temperature, Supposedly, frogs don't really notice that raise in temperature, or humans might not, or whatever it is, right? So the idea is that the water is slowly getting hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter, but the frogs don't notice it, and then at some point, they start to cook. They start to be boiled in this boiling water, but they never really noticed that they were being boiled. It's like, okay, everything's fine, everything's fine. Wait, hang on, are we boiling? And that's kind of how it can feel with language learning sometimes where you just, you don't really feel like you're getting better and better and better. And so introducing some sort of check to be like, hey, how hot is this water? How good actually am I at this language? Can be really, really helpful. So if you've ever watched something and you go, God, this is such an easy show. Anybody could watch it. I'm not even very good at this language. I'm just guessing what everything means. And I've thought that many times when I'm watching things. And then I actually like think about it and I sort of look at what's being said. I go, oh no, I am actually understanding this in a way that a person who's not learning this language could not do. Like I am actually doing something that is not easy and that is cool. Or in the case of like dabbling, you play around with a language that you're terrible at, and then you do the same thing or a similar thing in the language that you're okay at, and you go, oh, it's okay, right? So in this case, you might listen to a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your... French and go, wow, that was really hard. I didn't understand like anything. And then you come back to this podcast and you realize that you can understand pretty much everything or maybe 80%, 90%. I don't know. How good are you? Or how good is your comprehension of my simple podcast here? Um, I'd be curious to know, do you understand everything that I say? Or do you understand just most things? Do you understand all the words, but then there's just some new words that you don't know? I'm very curious to know what level your English is. I mean, your comprehension. And this is not a judgment by any means. If you're only understand one sentence every single episode, that's totally fine. You're just still learning. I'm just sort of curious to know what people's level are who listen to this podcast. No, I'm just curious to know the level of people who listen to this podcast. There we go. That's how you say that phrase. And so yeah, put down in the comments below how much you understand of these podcasts, just because I'm curious. But that's everything for today. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little something. If you are a dabbler, you can also add that to your comment and be like, yeah, I also like to learn German or whatever it is. But that's everything for today. I'll see you tomorrow.
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