Hey hello listeners and YouTube fans.
Welcome to this episode of Learn Everyday English, your roadway to English proficiency.
Glad to have you with me and with us again because we have a special guest in the studio again, my twin brother Gerald.
We're going to be getting into another different topic, but before we do that just want to remind you, hey check out our webpage at Learn Everyday English www .learneverydayenglish .com and be sure to check out our podcasts.
You can find those at the webpage or go to any podcast application like Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts and download that.
I try to upload a podcast once a week every Monday on a variety of different topics and gotten good reviews from that.
I've had people from over 75 countries download podcast episodes and that's a very good way to improve your English.
And we'll be talking about language learning in another episode, so I'm saying just keep your eyes out for that.
But today we're gonna just jump right in to today's episode and talk to Gerald about I guess his basic hobbies and interests and he's this interesting person has a lot of interesting and a variety of hobbies, things he likes to do.
So I'm going to let him talk about that.
But before I do that just make sure if you like these videos hit the like button to subscribe, hit the bell for notifications and for tell your friends about it so that they can benefit from it as well.
So without further ado, let's jump right in to today's episode.
So Gerald, I guess tell us a little bit about yourself, how you grew up, period of time and where you lived and that sort of thing.
Yeah, we were born in a little town in Pennsylvania called Butler, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, if you've heard of that.
We moved and we were really small.
Our father was in the army, so we lived in Nevada for a little while.
I don't really remember much about that.
And we kind of grew up until we were maybe 11, 11 years old or so in Maryland, the state of Maryland on an army base.
And our father retired and we moved to Louisiana.
That's where our parents are from, so we stayed there for about a year.
And we moved to Houston.
My father had gotten a job.
I guess we were in elementary school, about 12 years old, so we started elementary school, junior high, and then high school in Houston.
And then after we finished high school and I guess in college there, we went to the University of Houston and our father retired.
So I guess we've been in Houston or I've been in Houston since 12 years old, so I guess almost not quite 40, almost 40 years I guess.
Okay, and I lived in Houston too since then, but five years ago I moved up to a small town about one hour north of Houston, away from like the big city and it's a much smaller town population, 40 ,000 people.
I think Houston has a population of around 2 million, I think, if I remember correctly.
I think I was wrong with it.
It's 40, maybe 46 years or something, making myself younger than I really am.
Yeah, it's important to say we're just kind of just having a casual conversation, you know, so we're talking just like regular Texans.
I don't know if you consider us Texans because we don't really talk with the Texas accent, Southern accent you might hear around, but some people say we have a little accent, so let us know what you think.
Some people told me, hey, I really like your accent or the way you speak, but it's hard for me to know and tell what I sound like to other people.
I just sound like that.
A lot of people tell us we sound the same or exactly the same when we speak, so let us know if we sound alike or not in the comments below.
It would be interesting to hear what you'd have to say, and I know we talked in a previous video, Gerald Works Out at NASA, and we covered that before, so we're gonna ask you, what do you like to do when you're not working at NASA in your free time?
Like what personal interests do you have?
And then you have a plethora of interests that means like a large amount or a large variety of things that you like to do.
I don't know about a plethora, but you may have seen in other videos, probably my main interest or passion, I guess, is music.
I just find it relaxing.
It's like a stress relief, so I like to play music.
We'll talk a little bit more about that, and I also like to read.
I like to study different world religions, apologetics.
I also like to study different languages.
I don't think I'm really that talented in learning languages.
It seems like it's sort of difficult for me, but I just like learning about other cultures and different places that people live.
I think that may have started when we were when we were kids.
We were younger. We used to listen to shortwave radio a lot, so I heard stations from countries all over the world.
It's just kind of fascinating thinking about being there, so languages and cultures and music and reading about world religions and things like that are interesting.
I remember that shortwave radio listening.
That was some good times.
We each had a shortwave radio.
We shared the same room, so we had twin beds, and we'd stay up late at night turning the dial on the radio.
If you don't know what that is, they didn't have buttons on radios.
Really, there's a dial you had to turn, but it was just so fascinating.
You could hear stations coming in from countries all over the world, like radio Tahiti from Tahiti and Germany and France.
South Africa, South Africa, the Pacific.
You learned a lot about geography and different places around the world.
Let's first maybe target or talk about the music.
I know it's really a passion of yours.
Where did that begin?
I guess I had some notes here, but I actually forgot about your very first musical experience was in elementary school playing what instrument was that?
Yeah, I guess I tried to block that out of my memory.
It wasn't very pleasant.
I guess in elementary school I started playing the coronet.
I guess it's supposed to be similar to the trumpet, but I didn't play that very long because the band teacher was, as we'll say, a jerk.
He wasn't very nice and he would yell at the students, so I ended up quitting.
I think later, I forgot maybe several years later, my brother and I started playing the organ.
My parents bought an organ.
We played that for several years.
I think once we got older and started getting into a teenage years, that wasn't cool, so we ended up stopping.
I didn't too, maybe, because of going to that private Catholic high school.
It was pretty demanding, I think, the workload.
That might have been right.
I think I just didn't really want to play the organ anymore also, so that was a good reason to stop.
Let me add something about the, Gerald mentioned about playing the coronet in elementary school, so I was playing the clarinet.
It's another type of instrument, so if you don't know what a coronet or a clarinet is, you know, Google that, yeah, you'll find that out.
Yeah, but he was right and I was doing real well with the clarinet, but yeah, like first or second chair.
Yeah, first or second chair, which means like first or second, you know, best player.
But yeah, the teacher, like Gerald said, was a real jerk, and yeah, he didn't have any patience, so I just wondered, he had, we said, had no business in trying to teach young children music, so I remember I went in there to quit, and I told him I didn't want to play anymore, and he got real upset.
He had a pencil. I still remember it to this day, you say, very vividly in my mind.
He had a pencil in his hand, and he threw it down on the desk real hard.
I remember as a kid, I watched the pencil hit the desk, you know, bounce up in the air, and then I kind of put my head down and just walked out of the room, and yeah, so I have a joke and say he ruined my music career with the clarinet, so yeah, it was a bad experience.
I don't know why they hired him to teach kids.
He was not the right instructor.
Yeah, so yeah, we both took Oregon, and then I think the next foray, as you can say, or try at doing something was in college, right, for you?
Yeah, I guess we had gotten involved in this Christian Bible study group, and you know, always had an interest in music, so they needed somebody like to help lead some of the songs that we sang, so I went to a pawn shop near our house at the time and bought a guitar and a book of chords and started
teaching myself how to play guitars, and he did that for two years or so, three years, and then once I started working, got a job, you know, at the time, I just stopped playing and didn't really do much in the way of music for quite a long time.
Yeah, and after that, you didn't first instrument you picked back up again and was a guitar, was it, later on in life?
No, I guess it's interesting.
I guess when I started working at NASA, I guess the number of years later, one of my co -workers in the office, I can't really remember how we started talking about it, but we got on the topic of the ukulele, or as I would say in Hawaii, the ukulele.
He said, well, maybe you should, I guess he was into woodworking and building things, so he said, hey, maybe you could think about building a ukulele.
That didn't really interest me, but I thought about, hey, maybe I'll buy one and just start playing that because it's smaller than a guitar and it has four strings and they play it a lot in Hawaiian music and it's kind of a fun instrument to play, so I ended up buying one and kind of fell in love with it,
you know, and just started playing that for a number of years after that.
Okay, and I guess not to, Gerald does have a YouTube channel where he has a lot of videos of him playing the ukulele.
He's very talented, much better than me, and I'll have the link down below if you want to give out the name of the channel.
I'd say I'm just a musical hack who likes to play.
There's a lot of people better than me, but I just enjoy it.
But yeah, if you want to check out the World Ukulele channel on YouTube, that's all one word, World Ukulele, and from the title you can see I like to try to play music from all over the world.
I just find that really interesting and I think that probably started when we were listening to shortwave radio back when we were a lot younger, but that just planted that seed.
As Gary mentioned, I remember one of the first stations I heard was Radio Tahiti, just lying in bed listening to the Tahitian ukulele music being played.
It's just fascinating, so I like to play or try to play music from all around the world.
So after the ukulele, what was the next instrument you say ventured into or tried to play?
Yes, I mean we would always get together when we had time to play music, and so he would play the guitar more, and so we got into a type of music called bluegrass, and so I decided, hey, let me try to play the banjo.
So I bought a banjo and started learning how to play that.
So I played that for four or five years.
I didn't really play the ukulele at all after that or the guitar, and so that was really fun.
We'd go to a lot of bluegrass jams, and what is a jam?
Is it a type of food product?
There's another word in English called jam, but yeah, jam is just like a meeting or get together where just people would bring their instruments and you just sit around the room and play songs.
That's basically what a jam is.
It's not very formal.
So we would do that, go to different parts of the city and play.
That was really a lot of fun, and I learned a whole lot doing that.
I guess I forgot to mention that I think before that time when I was playing the ukulele, since they do play a lot in Hawaiian music, we actually started playing in a group in Houston that played Hawaiian music called the Houston Slackers.
I think that was before the banjo.
So that was a lot of fun.
That's really where I learned a lot playing with people who were better than me, but just by playing so all the time, my playing got better and better.
That was a lot of fun.
We traveled to different aloha festivals in San Antonio and Houston and play Hawaiian music.
That was really fun.
There's Houston Slackers, so there's a significance to the name Slackers.
What does that mean?
Yeah, I guess in Hawaii, they play the ukulele, but also there's a type of guitar style that they play called slack key guitar.
It's basically playing a regular guitar, but they change the tuning, the tuning of the strings.
It's just like a real mellow, easy listening type of style.
In a group that we were in, two of the guitar players played slack keys, so that's why we came up with the name Houston Slackers.
I know you too also have a guitar and learned to play the guitar too again later in life also.
You would play it for the church, Bible study.
Yeah, I guess I was in that phase.
I went back to playing the guitar a little bit for Bible study groups.
I'd play and lead some songs, and then actually out at NASA, there's a praise and worship group that I joined that we would play.
We started off doing it once a week, but then it moved to maybe once a month.
I still was playing a guitar, but just not as often, and I can really only just strum chords.
I'm not that good of a guitar player, but I can play enough to strum and sing.
And then moving on, I guess another instrument that you got into was the djembe kind of type of African drum.
So how did that evolve?
I think that's because of you, right?
Yeah. Because Gary, I don't know how you started, but he started playing the djembe and was taking lessons with an instructor from Guinea, West Africa named Mohammed Jabi.
He's a really good djembe player.
He's a master djembe -fola.
And so I guess he was taking lessons, and I started going to the lessons as well.
Started playing, and so we've been playing djembe for quite a while now, and we are part of this group called the Joy of Djembe Drumming, where we play at different festivals and in events and actually play the ukulele with some of the songs.
So that's been a lot of fun as well, as Gary could probably agree with.
That's one of the hardest instruments to really master and get good at.
It seems simple, you're just hitting it, but to make the different sounds or tones, it takes a lot of practice.
Yeah, I was going to say it looks easy to play the djembe drum, but like Mohammed, I would always say you got to make the drum talk, you got to make the drum speak, and you can only do that by having just this impeccable technique.
So yeah, to me, it's one of the hardest instruments to master to make it sound good.
Moving on, I guess you've kind of, we say, dabbled with or dabbled into.
That means, you know, maybe tried different things here and there, maybe not always very seriously, but that means to dabble into certain things.
You dabbled into a few other instruments, right, like the concertina.
Yeah, I'm not very, very good with those, but yeah, I think I saw some, I went to a concert and saw someone playing the concertina, like the squeeze box, but I bought one, but I just never got used to playing it.
It's just so different, and I guess I got a melodica.
It's like a little small keyboard, but you blow air into it to make the sound, and you use your fingers to press the keys, and I'll play that every now and then or occasionally, but not that often, and trying to remember.
I got an African kalimba.
It's like an African thumb piano, but that also takes a lot of practice, and just with time, I never really played that very much, but Gary also plays or has dabbled in playing a number of instruments as well.
Yeah, I used to have a Cajun accordion for Cajun music, and I got to have another accordion, like to play Mexican norteño or type of music, and I dabbled in the type of banjo they play in Irish music, tenor, Irish tenor banjo, and yeah, so we both just like music, and you hear something, and you say,
hey, let me give that a try.
You may like it, you may not, but it's just fun.
I think that's the most important thing.
I think right now, I guess you're playing something I find pretty interesting.
It's a real cool, I think, neat type of music.
Tell us about that.
What are you talking about?
African? Yeah, is it Congolese?
Yeah, I guess it's maybe African rumba.
Okay. I mean, I've always liked the African sound.
It's just different than American music.
It's just kind of, I call it kind of happy music, especially if you hear these sukus or I forgot the other name for it, but you just kind of want to get up and dance, but it's not that easy to play if you're just playing a lot of the fast picking, so I guess I'm still working on that, but I'm also playing
some of the finger style and learning how to play that, but I don't play it on the guitar.
I'm playing it on a four -string ukulele that's kind of big.
It's bigger than a normal ukulele, so I'm really liking that.
I have some videos I'm trying to learn, so it's always trying to keep learning new things, whether it be music or any other subject that you're interested in.
Yeah, I think that's a good point.
I think that's good for your mind because you're always keeping your mind working and mind stimulated and moving.
That's music, and that's been a big part, and you mentioned the seminary degree.
That's part of what you call maybe apologetics also.
What is apologetics?
Yeah, I guess a degree isn't per se related to apologetics.
It's just sort of kind of a basic thing.
Classes and I guess in ministry, but as a Christian, I've always kind of wondered and had questions about what I believe and why I believe it, probably like everybody, and so I just started reading about answering some of those questions, and that's sort of how I got into this field of apologetics.
That's basically, it just means that you're able to try to explain to people why you believe what you believe, think everybody should be able to do that.
You may not agree with everybody, but we're all free to make our own decisions, but that's what that area of study is, so I've done a lot of that, and so that's just one of the other areas besides music that I'm interested in, and that kind of ties in specifically with, I just find it interesting to
know and understand and what other people believe, so I like to read about other world religions, too.
And do you also like to kind of work out a little bit?
Yeah, I still try to work out, not as much as I used to when I was younger, definitely, but yeah, I guess I like mostly just do things at home now.
I'll do calisthenics, you know, I'll lift some weights or do push -ups and things like that, or sometimes go ride my bike or a walk, so yeah, that's the other things I try to do, so just finding all the time to do that, the music and everything and working, it's sometimes difficult.
I think the last thing, which we're really not going to touch on too much in this video, because we're going to have a special next separate video about that, but we also, like I said, dabbled in foreign languages, and I know currently you're studying foreign language right now.
Do you have a short highlight about that?
Yeah, I guess maybe like a lot of people in the United States in our school, you know, we had to take a foreign language, so we both studied Spanish in high school, but it was sort of useless, because once you studied for four years, I couldn't speak or hardly understand anything, so it's really kind
of a waste of time, but in college, I took a Spanish class and a French class, but that was about it, so my language ability was pretty much zero.
When I started working at NASA, I studied Japanese for a number of years since I was working with the Japanese space agency, but I would say, I guess maybe we'll talk further about that, and then just because of music again, you know, I tried to study the Tahitian language a little bit, because I like
their music, and now I'm studying Swahili, because I really like the African music, and you know, not just only be able to play songs from around the world, I'd also like to be able to sing in the original language.
That's cool. Well, I think that's going to wrap up our interview for today, which is kind of at the time limit, so Gerald, thanks for joining us, me in the studio, and kind of share your life and interests and hobbies with us, so I hope you out there are listening or watching the video enjoyed that.
Hopefully it was helpful for you in your English language journey, good for listening comprehension skills, so if you like these videos, if you're watching on YouTube, hit the like button and subscribe.
If you're on your podcast, it just might be helpful to play this over again and listen to it.
If you have any questions, leave them below on the YouTube video, or if you were listening to the podcast, you can go to the Learn Every Day English webpage.
There's a contact form at the bottom of the homepage.
You can just send me a message, drop me a line, and let me know what you think.
Again, like, subscribe, and hopefully you'll be checking out more videos.
Like I said, we're going to have another video with Gerald.
He's going to talk about, or we say delve into, or look into a little more deeply, kind of his language learning experience, and I'll just say this before we leave, you know, I'm studying Spanish, but I'm not a advanced Spanish speaker.
I'm not a polyglot.
That's only other language I'm learning or able to speak besides English, and just because someone's maybe not an expert at a language doesn't mean you can't learn anything from them, because I think both of us have tried to learn languages.
I tried a little bit of French, didn't like that at all.
Actually, I studied Chinese for three years and stopped studying that, so we had experienced learning languages, maybe different things, what to do that's helpful, or things not to do, so I think we can give you some experience, or I guess our own thoughts on how language learning has been for us, and things that you guys can think about and take into consideration as
you go about your language learning journey.
So without further ado, we're going to end there, so thanks for watching this episode of Learn Every Day English, and check out the other videos and podcasts, and until next time, hey, we'll see you later.
Hey, goodbye.
