Language Assimilation and Closing

how long have you been there uh two years that's plenty of time for you going to get halfway through learning Cantonese and Mandarin. I'll tell you straight up, like, I firmly believe when you move to another country that you must assimilate into their society. So if I was Mexican, I came to America, I'd be doing my best to learn English. If I'm a Texan moving to Australia, I've learned easy learning curve, their lingo. It's pretty easy. Just drop the end off and add an O to everything and you're pretty sweet. But I've always been of the opinion that if I moved to a country and English is my primary language, it's not theirs, I'm going to probably learn their culture and try to learn their language, right? And I think for me, it's a matter of respect and also easy getting through the community and being able to talk to them correctly in the way they understand. Um, one time when Zoe and I were, we were traveling, I think we were going to, um, we were going to Ireland. Uh, I can't remember where we had been. We, I think we had been in America doing seminars. We were going to the Irish strength Institute, but we ended up going through, I think Norway, I think it was Norway. So we did a night in Norway And I was like, well, if we're going to go at night, let's do like 24 hours. We kind of see a little bit of Norway. So we flew in and they lost my luggage. So I had no fucking clothes. So we had to go into we had to go into the city and buy at least enough clothes, like a couple of outfits before we went to Ireland. I could buy some shit. So we went downtown. It was the weirdest thing ever. We went downtown. There were people everywhere. You could hear a fucking pin drop. and uh i'm talking there were hundreds of people out and you could you you would you'd feel more comfortable whispering to somebody because your voice would carry so so far and whenever i go to a country like that i always read through uh like uh what's the happy planet or whatever the fuck it is one of those you know one of those travel things i want to read about the the culture and what should i do and not do and i don't want to offend anybody that type of shit and one of the things it said about the the scandinavian countries is that if you're loud like me they automatically assume you're drunk and you don't want that so i went to there it's like i'm gonna okay i'm gonna use my own soft voice like my very private private voice and we went downtown and it was like fucking ghost pin drop so we we go into this sports store and i hear this loud motherfucker just like and it's an american accent and zoe goes is that american or canadian i go that's that's californian and sure enough the guy was a guy from california that had moved to norway and so we started talking to him and he was like yeah how's the how's the process of going to this country he goes that's pretty sweet man like i got a job this that he goes you know within the first two years i have to learn how to speak their language because that's probably like the biggest hurdle uh because that language apparently hard as fuck but i think that's the right thing to do right if you're going to immigrate into somebody's country then you need to abide by their laws and you need to abide by their culture and you need to abide by their language i think it's i picked up a little bit it's a very very difficult language to learn you know i think it's one of things that like we deciding what we do over the next few years based off whether we can go home and see family who knows in this year like but if if we extend from the year like i gonna actually like start doing some do some lessons or something where i can actually actually learn it so i'm at home i get i'll get overwhelmed and i just just no i'll get distracted like going back to what was there at the start yeah yeah yeah no look it's a it's a hard it's hard fucking language man because you're one intonation off making somebody agreeable or then wanting to fucking stab you in the throat Right. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you two, two quick stories on that. Like one of my best friends, we've known each other since we were 19. She's Chinese, Chinese American. And I would go over to have dinner with her family. And they were all either, either, you know, born in China or first, first generation Americans. and so we go to dinner and they'd all be sitting there and i'm like the big token white dude and they're all like you know talking chinese and shit and i'm just like yeah cool like i was talking you all motherfuckers all speak english i don't speak uh mandarin so i don't know why you guys speak a manner and it's funny because they would all talk and they'd laugh and they'd look at me to try to include me into it and they'd be like ha ha ha and i'd be like ha ha motherfuckers yeah you laughing at me and then my friend was like no they're just they're trying to include you in a conversation i'm like well you could probably include me if you all spoke english that would be real fucking easy but i decided i was gonna start i was gonna try to learn how to speak chinese so i bought pimsleur which this is 20 something years ago so it was like a little fucking tape you put in your cassette tape you slide it in the thing and i remember i was driving my truck and i was trying to repeat the words and after about 15 minutes i just ejected threw it out the fucking window. I was like, I'm never going to learn this shit. It could happen. But a good friend of mine who he used to own the largest sunglass company in America. So he decided he was a designer and he decided he was going to go to China and he was going to figure out how to get sunglasses made. And so could not speak a lick of Chinese, flew over, got a fucking apartment and started trying to talk to the guys at the factories and he taught himself how to speak Chinese. And at one point, they asked him to speak in front of a high school graduation. And so he was up there and he was speaking Chinese. And apparently at one point, his intonation was just slightly off. And instead of saying something like, may you all be successful, he said something like, go suck your mom's goat ass or something. And some dude walks out of the back, he's like, oh, you can't say that. you cannot say that he's like what he was like look nobody say anything they're speechless he was like no that's not why they're speechless and they had to pull them off stage yes like in cantonese it's even tougher than mandarin it's like nine dialects so the margin for error is huge yeah absolutely they should they should just be like a like uh people who speak english and use like 18 different words that mean the same fucking thing in different contexts like they're there and there and where and where and you know effect and effect and just makes it even even worse yeah but i say like english isn't an easy language either like i don't i'm quite glad that i learned that with all the things that was actually saying like well my my other half is a primary school teacher and she i never get i don't know what they do like in australia or in the u.s but here they're there they teach phonics so they spell out yeah basically and it's great until you have an accent. I remember them, he was talking about these kids, where she had to mark them that they were right, but she was trying to get them to spell fire. But rather than I-R-E, because they're from Birmingham, they spelled it F-I-Y-A, because technically, in phonics, it's right, because it's fire. Okay, well, this is a drawback here. I think phonics must be an American thing, because if you go to the UK, you go to Australia, they don't say fire like they say fire. so it's like technically it does sound like it would be spelt that way yeah i i don't i never used to school it's definitely a relatively new thing since since i since i was in school many years ago um i i've started to um started to speak that way which i'm starting to get lazy r's and yeah the longer the longer i spend over here and i actually went i went back to uh the u.s and somebody, Zoe and I was in a taxi or an Uber and the guy asked me if I was from Australia and I'm like, what the fuck? You know, I get that when I go home. I had, I remember once I was at university and I got speaking to a guy from Warsaw, which is not too far from my neck of the woods. And I'm not, I've never had a particularly thick black and white accent, but I left him at the time because he goes, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm okay.

I was scared you didn't sound like you because I just slipped in without knowing it back until I was like, you're a wee pet, I'm Archer, come on, how you doing? You know, and like, absolutely terrible. Cool. So, I mean, I could chat and rant away with you all night. I'll definitely look at some point, get you on for round two and maybe chat completely non-training stuff. But thank you very much for your time. For anyone who doesn't know where to find Luke, where can people find Luke? um you can find me at three roma oh never mind don't do that um yeah so muscle nerds underscore health on instagram if you like memes um and you won't bother me about business stuff my instagram is luke lehman l-e-a-m-a-n and that's purely a meme account um and then on facebook obviously muscle nerds but uh fuck nobody uses facebook anymore it's too it's too much discussion on facebook now i'm not just scrolling pictures so we don't actually use we don't have a fucking tiktok so don ask i don do stupid crazy dances and shit um yeah that about it i mean if people want to inquire about coaching or education consoles mentorship stuff like that info at muscleners which is also our webpage. So we don't have the best webpage in the world. We're just kind of working on it, but it has enough information to find us and all that shit. I can definitely vouch for the memes are good. You have a big knack of finding good memes every week. That's my next calling. If muscle nurse doesn't work out, I'm going to be, I'm just going to move into the professional meme Lord, uh, category and just do that. Yeah. I, I definitely, definitely, definitely got a calling for it there. And well, and I suppose the last thing, a place where people can find you, they're local to your areas, the gym. Are you guys? Yeah. Yeah. That's the, uh, Institute of Physical Performance and that is in Banyo so B-A-Y-B-A-N-Y-O so yeah awesome awesome again thank you so much for coming on it's been an absolute pleasure chat soon