Just Sayin'
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
I have come back from my ski holiday. I was at Big White for about six-seven days with my wife, my son Mark, his wife and their three kids. Fabulous first three-four days, very sunny, then we had some poor visibility. If you look up Big White on the Internet, you'll see that it's a fabulous area. They've had, I think, 12 centimeters of snow in the last eight hours. Great snow, I took some pictures. I'll be putting them up there, but now I'm back. You have to drive, basically, over two mountain passes. One is the Okanagan Connector, which connects Kelowna with Merritt, then over the Coquihalla. There was a huge snowstorm there on the Coquihalla Highway through the mountains and I, of course, saw that on the Internet so I was able to sneak through there. We had a lot of snow yesterday.
I was cross-country skiing in an area called the Telemark something or other, a cross-country area out of Kelowna, because my wife and I spent two nights in Kelowna with some very good friends. So we had snow there, then we had a window this morning and we were able to get out. Four hours driving over two mountain ranges to get back to Vancouver. I just want to have a bit of a rant here.
I'm a little bit tired, we've been staying up late drinking wine with friends and so forth, driving home and that. I was reading the newspaper and there was this protestor. There's sort of a native protest going on in Canada and there was a protestor with their sign that had a bunch of gibberish on it and then it had at the bottom just sayin', Whenever I see this just sayin', like people will comment on my blog or here and come out with whatever opinion they have and then say just sayin', that really annoys me. What is meant by just sayin'?
If I have an opinion, I present my opinion. I'm not just sayin'. I'm expressing my opinion, the person listening can either agree or disagree, but this ‘just sayin' implies that I don't really want to have a discussion on the subject. What I am saying is obviously right and irrefutable and I'm just kind of tossing it out there, but I don't want you in any way to dissect it or discuss it or contradict me. I don't have to have an argument because I'm just sayin'. This kind of attitude, I find, is quite common.
I don't know where it comes from. I don't remember seeing it 20-30 years ago, but today it's very common. Let's not have an argument, I just think this and so, there you go, just sayin'. I'm not that way. How about rather than just sayin', don't say that, say just go for it. Again, the friend that I stayed with in Kelowna has been pretending to study Spanish for three years, but has never done much. Don't just dabble, go for it. If you want to learn, put the effort in and you'll learn or don't do it, do something else, but don't sort of just sayin' or just halfheartedly doing. That's not my style, but I guess other people are different. I'm enjoying my Korean.
I did a fair amount of cross-country skiing up at Big White and that gave me an opportunity to listen to Korean. It's still not as much fun to listen to Korean because the content is still somewhat boring compared to what I can listen to in Russian and Czech, but I'm making progress. I have now gone to Wikipedia in Korean and I'm reading up on Korean history. I'm sort of isolating more and more of the basic patterns of Korean, reading them over and over again and reviewing my examples at LingQ. I've started talking to a tutor, little _ as she's known at LingQ, one of our tutors.
If she agrees, perhaps the next time I speak to her I will record the discussion so you can get a sense of just how poor my Korean is at this stage. Bear in mind that I studied Korean about seven or eight years ago for about six months on my own, this is before we had it at LingQ. Of course, I'm helped very much by the fact that 50% of the words in Korean are of Chinese origin, a large percentage, and the word order is very similar in Japanese, so I think I have a big advantage over someone who doesn't have any experience in Asian languages. So you'll be hearing from me with regard to Korean. Other than that, I'm trying to see if I can line up some interesting discussions.
David Mansaray has contacted me about a possible discussion about independent education. I mean there's no question in my mind that we have to move in that direction. I had mentioned on my blog that there was an article in the Canadian press that stated the average debt load for student loans, like people graduating from university, took 14 years to repay. I don't believe that anyway.
It's based on their assumptions as to how much money a person would make and how much they would actually be able to save and repay the loan. Nevertheless, people get indebted to the tune of $20-$30-$40-$50,000. I mean four years at university costs $100,000 plus dollars. If you go to a first-class U.S. university it can be $200,000. What do you really get for it? There was a presentation put on by someone at the TED Series on how he did a four-year course at MIT in Computer Science, did it on his own and achieved the same and spent one percent of what it would cost to go to MIT.
I'm also going to try to contact him and have a Web conversation with him. I'm going to try to contact Stephen Krashen and have a Web conversation with him so we can have some conversations on some of these subjects. David Mansaray wants to talk a bit about independent education.
It's really more a matter of how the person being educated is in the driver's seat and gets to choose where to get the education rather than having it something that's marketed at him by these universities who are really selling, basically, four years at an institution in order to get a diploma. You get the diploma for having spent four years at the university rather than for what you necessarily learned or can do. Anyway, we'll get into some of these subjects. Yeah, basically, that's about it.
I'm back and I'm going to have to work through all my accumulated email and other stuff and I look forward to having some more exchanges with people. Thank you for listening, bye for now.