I would say you can do a lot with languages–things you wouldn’t expect–and that is what I have tried to do in my life. It’s not simply reading, writing, speaking and listening. You find a niche that works for you. You find the thing you like, where you think you have a future, and you pursue it.
Gregory Nedved
“Analysis paralysis” combined with “need for control” can lead to missing out on the humanity-expanding role of languages in our lives.
Greg’s conversation reminds us: language is the one human phenomenon, and when we encounter our own through being exposed to another the windows we never knew were in the room fly open, the doors we never knew lined the corridor fly open, and the light and air of a whole world full of knowledge stream in to awaken, delight, and – sometimes – overwhelm us, even in anticipation.
Actually, especially in anticipation.
Many reading this post are blessed to have some measure of control over their daily lives. When we do — I count myself among that tribe — we can get into the habit of expecting a mental map of where we will end up if we start out.
“Why are we learning this?” Students in middle and high school say this right out loud. Older students and post-formal education adults think it but have learned to not speak the thought to instructors or bosses. It is important to know there is purpose in how we spend our time! But…
…the question can also assume that there is one answer, that we will know how we will use information and skills, that there is a path that opens up for us to follow to purposefulness.
Greg shares that language reminds us once again that human life is open to so many possibilities, no matter our backgrounds and situations.
Maybe you use a heritage language from your life to connect with others; maybe you learn an additional language at some point, well or poorly; maybe you apply the language at a job, or you use the language to play video games with friends across the world, or you create alphabets or help save endangered ones; maybe you use language for play; maybe you use your knowledge of how languages work to strengthen your own writing; maybe you save lives and to lift others out of dire circumstances; maybe you just plain old use the invitation to language and cultural awareness to find out cool things about others.
Jump in.
There’s no one answer, there’s no one path, there’s no expectation except that, as a human being, you come even more profoundly into what it means to be human — what it means to be you, what it means to be each person in the world.
Enjoy the podcast.
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Greg Nedved’s Bio and Resource links
Gregory J. Nedved has been affiliated since 2008 with National Museum of Language (NML), where he has served in various capacities (exhibit designer, docent, newsletter editor, associate, trustee, secretary, and most recently, president (2018-2023). He led the effort to create NML’s International Flag of Language in 2008, the world’s only flag dedicated to recognizing languages. An award winning U.S Defense Department historian, he has nearly 30 years of experience with Chinese-Mandarin as a military and government linguist, translator, interpreter, instructor, and freelancer.
He has been a two-time president of the Defense Department’s Crypto-Linguistic Association (CLA), a professional language organization, and edited the organization’s newsletter, the CLArion for roughly 30 years. He is interested in the preservation of Native American languages and culture. For example, he financed a Mi’kmaq (Nova Scotia/New Brunswick/Prince Edward Island) language preservation DVD (cartoon) in 2006, in partnership with creator Catherine Martin. He had earlier financed a library on the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation in his home state of South Dakota.
He has written books and articles on topics as diverse as vexillology, presidential trivia, steamboats and Chinese history. He is currently a docent at the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade, Maryland. He has a B.A. from Saint Vincent College (Latrobe, PA) in history, M.A. from Hawaii Pacific University in diplomacy and military studies and is a graduate of the Naval War College Fleet Seminar Program and the University of Chicago’s Advanced Translation Certification Program.
Gregory, now the president-emeritus of the National Museum of Language, continues to participate in active ways for the museum, e.g., finding speakers. He has his own language-related activities as well, e.g., creating a history language calendar and updating his 2016 book about the foreign language capabilities of U.S. presidents (Presidential Foreign Language Trivia).
Transcript
Norah Jones: 0:03
My guest for this podcast, Gregory Nedved, really wants us to know that you can start language learning and use any time at all in your life and that language can take you anywhere. So where will you go in your life with language and culture?
Introduction: 0:27
Welcome to Episode 122 of It’s About Language, hosted by Norah Lulich Jones. Today, we’re embarking on a linguistic journey with Greg Nedved, a visionary leader at the National Museum of Language since 2008. As an acclaimed US Defense Department historian fluent in Chinese Mandarin, Greg’s career spans nearly three decades. Join us as we explore his captivating endeavors, from crafting a history language calendar to uncovering Presidential foreign language trivia.
Norah Jones: 0:59
Well, Greg Nedved, welcome to. It’s About Language. So glad to have you back this time for a solo recording.
Gregory Nedved: 1:05
Thank, you for having me, Norah. I’m Greg Nedved and, again, I’m delighted to be here today to have this opportunity for lack of a better way of saying it to talk about myself and my language initiatives, of which I’ve had a few. I’m now. At the National Museum of Language. I’m the former president. I was president from 2018 until 2023, and now I’m helping out in a number of ways. I’m running programs, I’m finding speakers for them, but I’ve also got a couple of other things I’ve been working on down through the years. I’m trying to create a language calendar. Basically, that is there are 365 days in the year. I’d like to have a language historic fact for every single one of those days, and I’m not there yet. I’ve got 18 to go Like, for example, January 1st 2009 is when the Chinese, the People’s Republic of China, decided that they would make Pinyin their official Romanization system. And we have one coming up in February, February 21st, International Mother Language Day. That’s another one that’s on my list. So this is something I’ve been working on for some time. Another thing, too, is a few years back, I wrote a book, which I’m updating now — hopefully it’ll be marketed pretty soon — on Presidential foreign language trivia, where I’ve recorded facts about our Presidents and their language backgrounds. It’s a book that I put out in 2016. And I’d like to argue it’s the most comprehensive thing I’ve seen on it, actually, because I provide sources and I cover every President we’ve had. One of the reasons I’m updating it is because it’s old now 2016,. We’ve had a couple of Presidents since. So that’s basically what I’ve been up to lately. I still work. I’ll be retiring from the federal government pretty soon, actually at the end of March, and I am teaching a basic Chinese Mandarin course at a community college at night. In fact, it starts up again in February, so I’m trying to stay active in language.
Norah Jones: 3:39
You certainly are, and I want to touch on basically all of those things. I would like, though, my listeners to understand that, when you talk about working with the federal government and teaching the Mandarin Chinese, that people are probably,based on the kinds of experiences they’ve heard when they listen to folks that are engaged in language, are thinking that you started this early, you’ve always taken a look at what direction languages can take you, but you did not start early, did you? I think you have a little unorthodox beginning with languages. Can you tell us about that and about how you found pathways?
Gregory Nedved: 4:23
Yes, that’s interesting. I’m one of the few people you’re going to run into anywhere – I think I’ve met one other person who became a professional linguist without ever taking the language in high school, which is pretty interesting. I never had any French, Spanish, German until I went to college and, believe it or not, my first language was Chinese. And what’s interesting here is I made a lot of stupid mistakes in learning the language because I never had any language training before. It’s kind of funny because, like, for example, I literally refused to believe things because it didn’t make sense to me. “No one can talk like that.” You know that’s illogical and now, looking back at it, it was just all silly. But those are the kind of stupid mistakes you make when you first learn a language. And then I became good in the language and I became an Army linguist and then from there I got hired by the government and where I’ve worked language for many years. Not so much anymore. I mostly just do history. I currently am a historian for the government. Again, I’ll be retiring at the end of March. The Chinese, the language work that I do, is just all for fun these days.
Norah Jones: 5:49
You provide such an interesting perspective. If I go back to continue to mull over this –enjoy it frankly –is because you began your learning as a reflective adult. That response of “wait a minute, this makes no sense,” that this sensitizes you, I think, in a way that those that have begun their language learning early or who come from heritage language experiences…. that you can articulate some of the things that are happening when people look at, listen to, and confront languages. What are some of the things that you are able to do in your work, in your life, for fun or for work, that reflect that unique experience of beginning as a rank beginner, as an adult, to confront language?
Gregory Nedved: 6:44
Basically, I have learned from this.my early mistakes in learning languages. For example, a couple three years ago, I started learning Czech, which is my ethnic language. Both of my parents spoke Czech. I myself never really learned it. I decided that I would learn it for fun. This actually happened during COVID. I discovered that it was, in some ways, easier to learn because I now knew what I was doing as opposed to before. What’s interesting there is that Czech is a pretty difficult language. I thought Chinese made a lot more sense than Czech. See, I’m still looking at it sort of analytically. I used one of these online language learning programs that you have. It was great in a lot of ways, but it didn’t provide any grammar assistance. I had to figure the grammar out on my own. I remember talking to my wife, who was able to explain a few things to me because she had a background in Russian. She understood the grammar when I didn’t understand it because they didn’t provide any grammar explanation. Again, I would say that my experience is somewhat unique in the sense that other people have had languages basically from the time they were born, they were speaking more than one language. I had to learn it older and pretty much on my own. I mean, at least I had to learn the hard way.
Norah Jones: 8:38
When you are talking about and congratulations, by the way, on your impending retirement after many years of working. You work for the federal government. Can you let us know what specifically you do there, or as close as you can, depending on what status of what department in the federal government.
Gregory Nedved: 9:01
Sure, I got hired as a Chinese Mandarin language analyst. That’s the term now. I don’t know if you know that In the old we don’t have linguists anymore. We have language analysts, because you do more than just translate, things like that. When I was in the Army, I went to the Defense Language Institute out in Monterey. I’d actually had some Chinese before because I learned it in college, like I said, but I got more of it at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. The focus there,and this is what the federal government mostly wants, at least it did back then was listening and speaking. They train you to listen and they train you….I’m sorry, I misspoke Listening and reading. That’s very important. Listening and reading those are the skills that they want. Because you have headphones on or you’re reading something. The writing and the speaking not so much. That depends on your job. You are taught that, but that’s not the focus. At least in my experience with the federal government, that’s essentially what you do. You have the headphones on and you’re reading. The stuff you’re reading can be pretty difficult. That’s a quick and dirty of what I have done down through the years. After I got out of that, I went to the language school and I became an instructor and I ran the Chinese department for a while. I ran the Korean department as well for a little bit. After that I got my current job as a historian, where I don’t really work with languages so much except for fun.
Norah Jones: 10:48
When you’re working as a historian, how do the languages have an impact on how you look at things? You did already mention the two wonderful books that you have. I’m looking forward to the calendar to be finished. We are recording, by the way, on January 22nd of 2024, and do we have a historical item for January 22nd?
Gregory Nedved: 11:15
On January 22, 2009, voters in Nashville, Tennessee, rejected a proposal to make English the only government language. The vote was 57% to 43%.
Norah Jones: 11:30
Now, when we take a look at that little factoid, and based on your experience with languages in the world for fun and for work, that is an interesting and fairly significant little vote. For example, there’s a lot of unexpected things that can happen once you get engaged with language, as you and I have chatted about and actually you’ve written about. You take a look at something like that. Would you have expected people to have provided an option for other languages rather than to close in on, say, English only?
Gregory Nedved: 12:10
Well, one of the things I’ve learned is you don’t really have expectations, believe it or not, because they usually just disappoint you. In my research on the Presidents, English as the official language has been a big issue. And, for example, Theodore Roosevelt, who was one of our early Presidents he’s on Mount Rushmore, he’s a pretty famous President. He was one of those that was a big English-only president. Now this was 100 years ago and things have changed, but that kind of stuff is still with us all the time. So in these calendar factoids I’m looking for any language-related thing I can find, and some of them have to do with, for example, a certain linguist was born, some legislation was passed, this is the day that a movie, a foreign language film that did very well, premiered. So that’s the kind of thing that I’m looking for. But nothing really surprises me too much on stuff like that and again, I’m looking at it from a historic point of view, I’m looking at it as strictly as a historian. I’m reporting what happened.
Norah Jones: 13:32
Now, when you take a look at your Presidential book, which you’re revising and updating based on its copyright of 2016,. What are one or, if you wish, more than one stories of the contents that you’re like, I think people really should read about this. This is interesting and I’m glad, as a historian, that I’m able to share this.
Gregory Nedved: 13:54
There’s a lot of fun anecdotes. The first thing that I would tell people is …and I don’t know what their expectations were again, we’re talking about expectations,,, is there a correlation between knowing languages and being a good President and a bad President? Some of our presidents knew several languages and some of them didn’t, and interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be much of a correlation. For example, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who I think almost anyone would recognize as being great American Presidents neither one of them had particularly strong language backgrounds. They had a little bit, but not much. I mean foreign language. Then, on the other hand, you had someone like John Quincy Adams, who probably was our best language President, in terms of his knowledge of languages and what he did with them. He was considered, at least by most historians, to be sort of an obscure president. Now it goes both ways. Thomas Jefferson knew a lot of languages. So there’s your case as well, that here’s a guy that proved that having a good language background could make you a pretty effective President. In the early days, our Presidents, the languages believe it or not in the early days that you wanted to learn were Latin and Greek. Those are the classical languages, and also French. But in terms of our Presidents, we didn’t really have much Spanish until later on. Now Spanish is a very, very common language for our Presidents. But speaking of anecdotes, let me give you to talk about George W Bush, one of our more recent presidents. He had a reputation for being …and I think we all remember this as sort of a bumbler with the English language. They were always making fun of things he would say: “they misunderestimated me.” Things like that was a famous quote he has. He actually was pretty good in Spanish and that’s missed sometimes. So there’s a perception that’s missed sometimes. I remember Jay Leno did a. The NBC comedian did a stint on Bush where he would have Bush just screwing up in English and then speaking Spanish like he was giving a lecture somewhere, very, very professionally, very, very clear sounding. You have those kinds of misconceptions. That’s one of the classic ones. We had Presidents that had a lot of effect on the English language. That’s another one that I bring up in my book, like, for example, Abraham Lincoln popularized the term “Michigander,” someone from the state of Michigan, a Michigander, and he used that term and it was sort of a derogatory term, believe it or not, but eventually it became, at least when he used it. Now it’s referred to as someone from Michigan, a Michigander, so there’s all kinds of these little things out there that you wouldn’t expect.
Norah Jones: 17:18
I have a question about a piece of vocabulary. Then, since we’re into it, wasn’t “normality” the word until a president got a hold of it?
Gregory Nedved: 17:28
You mean, normalcy, normality? There was a guy by the name… One of our presidents was Warren Harding and he popularized the phrase “return to normalcy.” This had to do with bringing the United States back to a calm situation because we had just been in World War I and his campaign slogan was return to normalcy, or that was his theme. Let’s go back to the good old days. That’s an example there of people learning vocabulary words correctly or incorrectly. Snowmageddon from the year 2010. As I understand it was actually that term came from President Obama. There’s a lot of very interesting presidential factoids about languages. I mean, they’re just fascinating. I could go on and on about them. For example, if people were to ask me who is our best President with the German language, I would say Bill Clinton, which is not something you would necessarily know. But again getting back to, as I said before, Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, the two most famous, at least considered to be the two best American presidents by many historians, neither one of them had particularly strong language backgrounds.
Norah Jones: 18:44
Fascinating. On my website, fluency.consulting, as I’ll be mentioning, there’ll be links to where folks can buy your book. Tell us about your calendar when it will be available, do you think?
Gregory Nedved: 18:59
I’ve been working on this for a little while, and one of the things that I hoped to do was to post it on the National Museum of Language website, but I decided I needed to finish it first.
Norah Jones: 19:13
Yes, I can understand. Well, thank you. And speaking of the National Museum of Language, Greg you were indeed the president of it. You’re still deeply engaged with it. There was a development of, for example, the language flag. That was a concept. Speak some about your relationship with the National Museum of Language, and the National Museum of Language relationship with the kinds of information and experiences that people should know about.
Gregory Nedved: 19:45
Okay, you mentioned the flag. That was something that I was involved in directly when I came on board in 2008. And one of the reasons we came up with the flag idea is because there really didn’t exist out there anywhere a flag representing languages across the board. Now there are flags for languages ,like Esperanto has an actual flag, but there’s no language for French, or there’s no flag for French, for Spanish, for German, and we just decided we would do that for the National Museum of Language, so it became our symbol. If you look at our website, it’s now our logo, so our museum logo is the tree that you see on our site.
Norah Jones: 20:34
When people do go to the website of the National Museum of Language. What opportunities, what interesting things will they find, what will they learn?
Gregory Nedved: 20:44
Our website is as good as it’s ever been. Now, that’s the kind of thing you’d expect me to say, but we have a lot of things on there that could benefit people. In fact, we’re trying to market or even volunteer information to teachers, because we are a National Museum of Language. We’re nationwide, but we’re also worldwide. To be a little bit more specific, if you look at our site, you’ll notice that we have a social justice section, a poetry, poetry in all different languages from various times in history, and we’ve done a program on that. We have a cartoon section. You go on there and you look, you’ll see some classic Greek cartoons, Greek humor from the days of Plato and Aristotle. What we’re currently working on…. we’re not done with it yet and it’s really going to be fun… is a joke section where we’re collecting all jokes from around the world, and that one is pretty interesting, because you have to be very careful because humor is sensitive. For example let me talk about China, for example humor was considered to be anti-Confucian. Now, what you might get the impression and Confucius had a big effect on China for many, many centuries and, to an extent, even today, you might get the impression from this that the Chinese are dour people with no sense of humor, and because it was drilled into them to not be that way. Well, that’s really not true. You know, they have a great sense of humor and they just have different types of things that they find funny, for example, puns, things about the language, just like we would in English. Puns are dad type of jokes they find pretty funny. But relationship jokes are not very good or can be kind of offensive, like, for example, in the United States and I’m not saying this is good or bad, but this is just the way it is. Like a husband will laugh, will make fun of his wife’s cooking or the wife will make fun of her husband being a slob. That’s not the kind of humor you want in China because of the relationships that have developed, sort of a familial type of relationship. It’s insulting and it causes people to lose face. So this is the kind of thing that you look for in jokes. So there’s a weeding out process, you know, and what we’re saying is that the joke doesn’t have to be funny in English, but it should be in that language. But that’s another thing that we have on our site: A trip to Puerto Rico, where you go online and you will see people getting on a cruise and traveling to Puerto Rico and you click on a slide and it brings up all these factoids about Puerto Rico. There’s some tremendous language resources on there. It really is. It’s better than ever and it’s getting better all the time. So there are things that we offer students of all ages, essentially, for our site. I think that better answers the question.
Norah Jones: 24:10
It does indeed, and I noticed throughout that there is a sense of the language is embedded in culture, and that sensitivity to culture is also part of what the National Museum of Language helps to bring to people that are exploring. Okay, now, you yourself are also engaged…..well, you’re engaged in many, many activities around with your historian and linguistic and just general interests. Here’s one that I would like to ask you about the preservation of Native American languages and cultures. You’re also engaged with that, are you?
Gregory Nedved: 24:49
A few years back, I funded a recording in the… I think the best way to pronounce it is the Mi’kmaq language. Now, what is that? All right, this is a language in Canada. It’s a Canadian language, northeastern Canada to be a little bit more specific, the Maritime Province, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and there was a cartoon I think it was from the year 2002, that ran on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC and it actually apparently was an award-winning cartoon. It was a Mi’kmaq cartoon, but it was in English. It was this…. they call them First Nations here we say Native Americans, they’re called First Nations in Canada, but this was a First Nations cartoon, and what I did was I contacted the producer of that cartoon. Her name was Catherine Martin, who was a Mi’kmaq and I told her I would be willing to put that in Mi’kmaq, to pay for it, if they could find someone to actually do it. And they managed to do that. We were able to find a way to put the actual cartoon, dub it, in actual Mi’kmaq, and it’s a Mi’kmaq creation story, it’s a children’s story, and so we were able to do that and I have a copy of it and it’s available. We don’t really do too much with it anymore, but you know it was one of the more successful projects that I had a while back in terms of native language preservation, so I’m very proud of that, and our Museum is. We have presentations all the time on native language preservation, so that’s one of the things that we really believe in.
Norah Jones: 26:43
That’s huge. Thank you so much, Greg. And therein lies another trail to go on the preservation as a concept, preservation of languages, preservation of the way that they are written. The National Museum of Language right now is a partner with the Endangered Alphabets. You had a presentation over the weekend and what are some of the things that you are engaged with in this partnership and support?
Gregory Nedved: 27:17
There’s a man by the name of Tim Brookes who I know you interviewed. Mr. Brookes, he runs Endangered Alphabets and he is trying to get January 23rd which is tomorrow, by the way, to become World Endangered Writing Day. He wants this to become a factoid, so that every single day on January 23rd…and he asked our help, and one of the things that we did was arrange for the speaker, Mr. Oreem Yosef, who we just had over the weekend, as I mentioned, who gave this terrific presentation on African scripts. He was recommended by Mr. Brookes. But, more to the point, we are trying to get UNESCO and this is something I’m involved in myself directly, UNESCO, you know, the United Nations Organization to recognize January 23rd as World Endangered Writing Day, and we’re having a little bit of success. We’re not going to make it this year, but we are going to be sending a representative to the United Nations. It won’t be me, it’ll be someone else from our Museum who’s going to, I guess, for lack of a better way of saying it make a pitch for this in the future. So maybe next year at this time January 23rd , 2025, will be the first year that we actually have a UN recognized World Endangered Writing Day. That would be phenomenal. So that is something you know that we’re involved with directly.
Norah Jones: 28:47
Phenomenal. Now, why? Why is this important? Why should those that are listening to this podcast say this is an important thing for me to pay attention to.
Gregory Nedved: 28:58
Well, Norah, the answer is in the word endangered. I mean when these languages go away and the written language when they go away. You know you can’t. I don’t know, maybe you can. Nowadays I understand that there are some ways to bring back revived dead languages. You know there are scientific ways of doing it. I’m not an expert there, but at least it seems to me that if you’re losing these, if nothing else, they’re going to be very, very hard, if not impossible, to get back. So once they’re gone, you’ve lost them. So I think we need to preserve those as best we can, and there’s an understanding of this. There’s a lot of efforts out there to do that, and that’s a positive. So that’s at least my thinking on it, and I’m not saying anything that no one else could logically figure it out. These are endangered languages, they are endangered alphabets and they need to be preserved.
Norah Jones: 29:53
When you interact with people that are in the National Museum of Language or come to the site, what are some of the common questions, needs, hopes, expectations from reaching out and connecting about language?
Gregory Nedved: 30:12
I think the misconception I think people have. First of all, when they see National Museum of Language, they think that we’re an actual brick and mortar facility. We haven’t been that way for a few years. We’re entirely online. Most of the other questions we get are more pertinent to what we do and we are able to help them out, give them what they want, satisfy them better.
Norah Jones: 30:36
That’s great. What kind of story do you have to tell of folks that have come to you, to the National Museum however, you want to interpret it and discovered something and gone on a journey, a direction that they wouldn’t have expected.
Gregory Nedved: 30:51
because of what they have discovered, what we do is we get people excited about languages. If you look at our site, you know one of the words that’s listed in our as part of our basic, our theme, our mission is the wonder of language. We want to get people excited about language and hopefully, by looking at our site and looking at the things we have to offer, they will do that. I don’t know about of a, of a particular case at least. It hasn’t been my experience that someone’s life was changed necessarily by a program that we had or anything like that. I think it’s more planting seeds. I think that’s the best way to look at it.
Norah Jones: 31:37
Plant those seeds, indeed. Let’s return to you and your experience in with Chinese. When you first started taking Chinese and you were, you would use that phrase. At the beginning, that was like people don’t sound like this. Well, what were some of the other I say discoveries? What made you decide to stick with it? What, what role? Why is it played such a role in your life?
Gregory Nedved: 32:01
Hey, the reason I got in Chinese in the first place and I mentioned this earlier I never had any language background. I went to college and the college I went to had a language requirement and I wasn’t much interested in French, Spanish or German. And, by the way, it was hard for me to get into the college because I didn’t have a language background. I had a liberal arts…. It was a liberal arts college, but what they did have was an overseas Chinese program. It was affiliated. The college I went to, St Vincent College in La Trobe, Pennsylvania, was a Benedictine college and they had a mission in Taiwan. So I applied for the program and this allowed me to get my college credits. My spent my junior year in Taiwan learning Chinese, and that’s how I got going. That’s how I got started. I once I actually got into the language and I started accepting things instead of fighting it, I realized that, hey, there’s a future here. It’s the kind of language you know, that and even to this day it’s true If you know Chinese, you’re not going to have a problem getting a job, because there’s always going to be people wanting you because of your Chinese language background. And so, again. I went into the Army where I really got good at the language. I got better in the language in the Army than I ever did in Taiwan and then I kind of went from there. It was a stepping stone that allowed me to go on and work professionally in the language, both for the government and where I currently am now.
Norah Jones: 33:40
That’s phenomenal. Now, when you think about your own personal say, take on Chinese, the language, the culture. What is it that you find especially enjoyable to mull over or to share with your students, for example?
Gregory Nedved: 33:54
OK, well, I like to tell people I have an interesting approach to teaching Chinese and again, I teach a very basic course, the five-week course, in Ann Arundel Community College, and I don’t start by giving them simple phrases like hello, goodbye. I focus on the numbers. The numbers is how I start, because with the numbers you can do so many things. The numbers are great building blocks. But to get them interested in the language, you know, I show them how the numbers are written and I try and make it as simple as possible. For example, across what we would consider a simple cross is the is the number 10. A straight line is one, two straight lines is two. I mean they’re different lengths, but I try and say, hey, you know there’s a, there’s a logic to this language. And I also try and tell them that Chinese is really not as hard as it might seem in terms of the understanding of it, the logic of it. It’s very logical. In many ways it’s simpler than English. What’s hard about it, what really throws people are the tones and also the writing system. It’s very difficult to write Chinese characters, but once you get past that it’s, it’s really a pretty straightforward language and I try and remove the fear from the language. That’s kind of my approach.
Norah Jones: 35:22
Removing fear is a really important aspect there. People are afraid of languages, especially those that are written, speaking of endangered languages and writing systems that are written in ways that we don’t recognize right away. Thank you very much, Greg. We’ve talked about a variety of Items about your life, your work, what you’ve published, what is it that you want to make sure that the listeners have heard from you, from your perspective, your experience, what listeners to a podcast about language and language and culture together? What would you like to repeat or reemphasize or bring a new that I did not yet ask about? That you would have liked to have talked about to the listeners?
Gregory Nedved: 36:17
Well, I would say, from my experiences and this is actually reflected somewhat in our National Museum language you can do a lot with languages. You know, if just because you’re having a problem learning Arabic or Bulgarian or Swahili and you think language is not for me, something like that, there’s a lot you can still do with it, like, for example, I’ve come up with the language calendar. You know I researched our presidents. You know there’s just a lot you can do with languages. It’s not simply reading, writing, speaking and listening. I think that’s the message that I would pass on to people. I understand that my own situation is somewhat unique. Not everyone is like me. No one’s like me. That’s why I’m unique. But that at least, that’s at least the message that I’d like to convey. It’s kind of like if you have a bad job, it doesn’t mean work is bad. You know you need to go somewhere else and try something else. You have to find a niche that works for you. You know you have to find a place and and go from there. Some people will search for that niche, you know, forever, and they may never find it, unfortunately, but others, I think it’s important to get a niche. I think a niche is what makes people successful ultimately. You know you find the thing you like, where you think you have a future and you pursue it and you’re comfortable doing that.
Norah Jones: 38:02
And there’s all sorts of opportunities. Depending on how you just go to take a look around, that language can take you In unexpected ways, like we’ve discovered in experiencing what you have done through the years. Greg, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for bringing about the information about yourself and your unique experience, the National Museum of Language, and all the other things that you’ve shared with the audience today.
Gregory Nedved: 38:32
Well, thank you, thank you for what you do. These podcasts are wonderful and I hope others will go back if that they haven’t been listening to them to go and listen to them because there’s you interview so many different types of people and you’ve you’re actually showing that yourself, that you can do a lot of different things with languages. You know your niche is a podcast. How’s that?
Norah Jones: 38:55
How’s that? That’s a good find there. I’ll thank you very much for that, Greg, and I certainly have indeed enjoyed and I think our listeners can tell using the language and being able to talk to wonderful people such as yourself. Thank you, Greg. Take care.
Gregory Nedved: 39:13
Thank you, Norah. Happy New Year.
Norah Jones: 39:14
Thanks so much for listening to this podcast with my guest, Gregory Nedved. Please do check out his biography and resources and pathways at my website fluency.consulting. Where will language and culture take you? Be sure to share your adventures with those around you, and with me. Until next time.
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