ep 130 Do Accents Really Matter?
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Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of Coffee Corner. Today is your episode 130. I don't really have a specific topic. Let's just chat about what I've been thinking or what's on my mind. First, I do want to reflect on the workshop I delivered a while ago and I was gonna try to talk about what makes me feel nervous, what makes me feel confident, but I totally forgot about it. So let's get started.

First of all, first, I haven't felt this way for a very long time about my language. I think I'm able to speak fluently. My pronunciation is not too bad. My accent is not too bad. And then for a very long time, I don't really care too much about my accent as long as I convey ideas clearly.

But somehow when I was right before I was given the presentation, I start to get nervous about my language. Am I able to use good language to deliver a professional presentation to teachers? And I start to worry about my accent because I really want to sound professional and clear. And then, of course, my grammar. I post a clip of my presentation there and I do notice there are a couple of grammar mistakes. I cringed when I was watching it.

Anyway, so I was so nervous to the point that my watch actually reminded me of an irregular heart rate while being inactive. So that's how nervous I was. But overall, I was very happy about the results, especially during the presentation. I got a few laughters and people were asking questions very constructively.

And they were very nice. They actually wanted me to do more, but we ran out of time. And after that, positive feedback flooded to me. I actually got...

requirement by my supervisor. She asked if I want to do another workshop, like hands-on workshop to showcase how to use ChatGPT to plan lessons and to create activities. So I am really hoping I can use this opportunity to get a promotion. Anyway, that's another story. But I do want to say that

If you tell yourself you can do it, even though you are very nervous, as long as you are fully prepared, you can do it. You may make mistakes, but maybe nobody cares. I don't think anyone at the conference, at the workshop, cared about my accent, cared about my grammar mistakes, because my content was so good, so good, tried to brag about it. And then they were more focused on the content. That brought me to a very interesting question.

question but kind of a phenomena is why do people care about accent so much instead of even fluency or ideas. It has gone viral right now about the speech from Harvard University, the girl, a little poor girl. I think a lot of people were judging her accent, her pronunciation or even her manner while delivering the presentation, delivering the speech.

I personally think they're judging her or they're criticizing her from the wrong perspective. Why am I saying that? At that moment, it's not about language, it's not about pronunciation or accent. It's about the content and her personality and even let's say her persona she created. Is that really important to have a perfect native-like accent? Is that very important to have 100% accurate grammar?

To this point, I really don't think so. And I was, I just finished, no, not I just finished, I finished a blog a couple weeks ago. It's called The World I See by Dr. Fifi Lee. So if you know her or you're interested, please Google her or listen to her podcast. You will be amazed by how much she's achieved and how great she is as an Asian woman in this male-dominant world, artificial intelligence world.

And then I start to think, of course, that has nothing to do with her achievement. I start to think her English is not perfect. She has a very obvious accent when she talks and sometimes to the point that you might have a hard time understanding her. But it doesn't matter. Nobody says anything about her accent. Nobody says anything about her English because she is so good. She is so amazing to the point that

You forget about her language and overall language is just a tool for communication or other things you're trying to use to help yourself achieve another thing, right? I think sometimes language is a key to open doors. It is important. You need to have it to open different doors.

You know English, you know Spanish, you know French, you can read more in their own languages, you understand more. Sometimes people do or some of the literature or research does get lost in translation. It is better to read in original language.

So again, learning a language will be a key to opening all the doors. But I don't think you need to master it. You know what I mean? If you are not, I would say if you're in a language teacher, you need to have very good English to teach students because you are the model for them. So they learn from you. I still remember my maybe elementary school or middle school English teacher.

Her pronunciation was not good. So I learned from her and I learned the word a little but from her it was later. Later. And for a very long time I said later until I went to my high school and then I started to say later and got laughed at because it was a very wrong pronunciation. Well, that...

I think in that case, as an English teacher or teacher of a language, you do have to have relatively perfect English to teach perfect grammar. Even though if you have a little bit flawed instructional language, I don't think that matters. As long as the knowledge you deliver to your learners is accurate, is correct.

I think that's all that matters, right? What I want to say is for her, you automatically forget about her language. You focus on how amazing she is, how much she's achieved and her wonderful, amazing, unbelievable journey from China to the United States.

And how she has achieved so much that she has become one of the giants in artificial intelligence. She started that and everything after that, CHAT-JPT, LLMs and other things are built on the foundation of she has created it.

That is amazing. Do I care about her language? No. Does anyone else care about her language? Probably not, because that is not important. Back to this little poor girl from Harvard University. Her problem is not a language or accent. Her problem is she has claimed what she's not. And that has struck people to think about that.

She doesn't know the reality, right? She has privilege. She's not aware of that, of course. And she thinks if I give this grand gesture, I gave this beautiful speech and people are going to listen to him. People are going to feel touched. But she doesn't understand her audience. And that is the biggest problem. She doesn't understand her audience. And some people just don't buy it.

I think back to my workshop, it's a panel discussion. So we had three people. I was the first one and the second one was, and the last two were native speakers. One was a teacher. The other one was a member of Toastmaster. And I can tell you, I'm not trying to criticize or being judging here.

So when I was giving my presentation about how to use ChatGPT to save time on lesson planning, everyone was focused, everyone was engaged, and then they all asked me questions and they thought my presentation was funny. And I even got a message from my colleague saying, you're a natural public speaker. The second teacher who presented how she used AI tools to help her with the lesson planning didn't really get quite satisfied.

positive feedback people started to lose interest but she was she has perfect language she was a native speaker she speaks really well but guess what she didn't know her audience and she just lost it

And the last one was supposed to be an expert in AI. And also she, I said, she's a member of Toastmasters. So she knows all those sorts of skills. But again, she doesn't know her audience. So her presentation was very fancy, but again, full of fluff.

Teachers were not interested in her session just because her session was not useful. And you were not here to show off your skills. You're here to bring some practical content that teachers can use to help themselves. And I think I was able to find out what they wanted and then deliver that in a way that they actually really, they were really interested. But that shows me that sometimes language is not good.

that important. You need to have it to be able to express yourself, but you also need to have other things to go with it. And that's how you achieve things. Having language itself doesn't mean you're really good. Having language means you have a skill. But then to accomplish something, to achieve something, you need more than just one skill. But that was my thoughts on the workshop I had a while ago. Anyway,

So second thing I want to talk about is also from the book At the World I See. I really like the book. The first few chapters, I had a hard time getting to it just because her words are very big and abstract. And she used a lot of grammar structures I was not very familiar with. So I had a hard time understanding things. But once you get into the book, I feel like I was growing with her. She had a lot of views I really appreciate.

But the one thing I was thinking, she was talking about machine learning, how machine learned, because she was thinking about how children learn things and then try to apply that to machine learning, how we can train machine. But they first started feeding information to machine and let them do things, let them think, and then realize that they can't train machine. They have to let machine learn things and then they start to think about how children learning things.

And one thing she was talking about how people were born with similar features. Of course, similar physical features and your personalities might be even similar. But then people change. You know, some people was born as introverted person and gradually become extroverted or in between. Those kind of things. So she mentioned that through the growth process,

You are learning, you're absorbing everything around you. That's machine learning, right? The machine is learning your information, trying to become you and trying to get to know you, yourself same. You're trying to learn everything around you.

If you are the person, let's say my little toddler, he is learning everything. He's observing everything he has, including influence, positive influence, negative influence, my emotions, my husband's emotions, how we interact with each other. And he's observing everything and trying to be part of it. And gradually our behaviors and our responses and feedback will shape us.

what he will become. And that is amazing thing. And now, of course, that puts a lot of pressure on me because I have to be very careful. Part of me don't really like myself, so I don't want him to become like myself. So I am very cautious about what I do, how I feel and how I react to him. But that's how we shape our personalities too.

I've talked about this a lot and how you behave, how you deal with your relationships or how you deal with your emotions and feelings. Those are influenced by your parents, your teachers, your friends, and anyone that happened to be in your life. How your parents deal with you.

difficult situations how your parents dealt with the conflicts will shape your personality and you gradually become some kind of person on the way that you might not recognize when you were three years old but that has inspired me to move forward so I said this family region is important because that's how you know who you are in it how you

Become who you are now. So you want, if you like it, keep doing what you're doing. If you don't like it, you're going to start to make some changes. But how are you going to make changes? Think about the crowd that you are hanging out with. Think about the work environment you are in. Think about your school and everything. I had a friend a long time ago, high school friend. He always complained about his life, but he never made any changes. So he has become that kind of person who always complains.

And I find it very negative. Sometimes chatting with him makes me depressed. And I feel like if this is not the right person, I move on, right? I move on to a different direction because I don't want to become like him. I want to become someone positive. I want to become someone who is more resilient and tolerant.

tougher so I start to shift in my direction to another group of people and when I see people with I cannot say people with a great achievement because it sounds a little bit materialistic so what I want to say if if you don't like this group of people and move on and find a group of people you like and hang out with the good crowd don't hang out with the bad crowd

There's some bad influence. You never know you will get it. And that's why I think a lot of people, especially parents, when they look after their children and they see a group of children, they're playing there, they don't want their child to play with them for certain reasons.

It's reasonable. And I'm not arguing with that. And it's difficult because you eventually get into that kind of environment. You get interacted with those kind of people. But how are you going to teach your kids to be tough, to be not influenced by them is how you react to certain things.

So if you don't want to become a naggy person, you don't want to become complaining all the time, then you should not hang out with people who complain all the time. You should find people who are good at solving problems, who are good listeners and who want to listen to you, who want to help you solve problems or who can give you suggestions, especially constructive suggestions. Hang out with those people, learn from them. So you have created this platform.

machine learning system and you start to observe good things and you start to reshape yourself, reshape your personality and you become a person you really like. And that's how you relearn and unlearn and reshape yourself to be a better person. If you want to be a confident person, then don't hang out with people who always give you negative feedback. Feedback is important. You do need constructive feedback, but it doesn't have to be

negative all the time you do need a positivity to shape your confidence to build your confidence and hang out with people who can give you that kind of support and I mean back to parents sometimes can be very difficult because physically just can't get away from them

then you have to be tough and you have to create physical space for yourself, even for 10 minutes, 20 minutes to, to reflect on yourself, to think about how you are going to deal with things. And sometimes you just have to ignore what they say. Uh, one thing I was, I just learned this week, I was listening to a podcast talking about communication. Uh, one thing I really learned, I thought that was fun because I found that very familiar because of my son. So, uh,

what's his name? Jefferson? Jefferson something. He was talking about when people gave you unsolicited opinion and you don't like it. Let's say your parents are talking about your hair, talking about your body shape, or even talking about your relationship and you don't really like it and you don't want to take it, but they just give it to you. And what you can do is, hmm, hmm. That's what my son does when I say something to him. And I find it very interesting because every time he does that,

I lost it. I didn't know what to say to him afterwards. And you can try that too. If you have that kind of situation that you just cannot get away from those people, those situations, what you can do is to use finish sentence, like complete sentence. Hmm, that's very interesting. Thank you for your opinion. Things like that to help yourself build a shield to protect you. And the next time when you find the fine line,

for your own boundaries, for your own world, is really helpful to build confidence to say no. And when you say no, the more no you say, the better you get and then the more confidence you're going to have and the better you will feel. It's really...

interesting and a very subtle feeling you're going to have. You have to do it to experience it and you will understand what I'm saying. So anyway, back to machine learning is think about yourself and some of you are, I don't know your age group, but I am happy to cover all

all the age groups here and if you're young you have a lot to learn and you have a long way to go really think about what you want even it's just a kind of vague picture of your future

aiming high and work on the specifics, right? So that will get you really far. If you are 20s, you're 30s or even 40s, your life is not done. You can relive your life. If you're not happy about this moment, then think about how you're going to change it. Don't think about the people you are hanging out with right now. Think about how you can get rid of them and restart your life. And I think that's what I learned from this book.

Anyway, so let's stop right here because my camera is gonna run out of battery and I'm totally not organized. I hope you like this video and summer is coming. I promise you because I don't have much going on this summer. I will try to aim to episodes per week because my son will be in daycare and I will be at home.

being a free person so I will do my best anyway stay tuned I love you guys and hope everything goes well for you and for my young people young friends you just finished Gaokao and congratulations I'm hoping for the best for you okay bye