Welcome to the listening time podcast.
Hey, english learners, this is connor and you're listening to episode 249 of the listening time podcast.
I hope you're doing well.
I hope your english learning is going great.
I hope you're seeing progress, at least with your listening comprehension And hopefully with your speaking ability as well.
In today's episode, I'm going to talk about maintenance.
So what do I mean?
Well, just a few minutes before writing this script, I was thinking about what to talk about, and I looked to my left and I saw our furnace, like the thing that provides air hot air to our house, and I realized I hadn't changed the filter, even though I'm supposed to change it every certain amount of months.
I forgot that I haven't changed it, and it made me think of this idea of maintaining the different appliances in your home, or maintaining your home in general, but not only that, also maintaining other things in life.
We have to do a lot of maintenance in our lives, or otherwise things will decay, meaning they deteriorate, they get worse and, over time, if you don't maintain things well, this is what happens, unfortunately.
So I want to talk about some different things we need to maintain in our lives so that they don't deteriorate too much.
And before we start, I want to challenge you to start using my advanced podcast episodes, in which I speak fast.
You can get those by becoming a Listening Time family member.
That link to sign up for that is down below.
Also, check out my US Conversations podcast.
If you haven't done so already, you're missing out.
It's a lot of fun.
I talk to different people from all over the country, usually English teachers, and you learn a lot about these different regions and different cities where these people live.
It's really educational and it's great practice for your listening.
And you can also find an English teacher there if you're looking for one.
That link is also down below.
Okay let's talk about maintenance.
So what are some things that we need to maintain, or otherwise they will decay, they will deteriorate or get worse.
Well first let me talk about maintaining a house because That's what gave me this idea.
To be honest, I'm not accustomed to maintaining a house.
This is the first time I've ever rented a house.
Before this, I rented apartments in Mexico.
And the maintenance when you rent an apartment is very minimal, because the owner is The landlord or the person who owns that apartment or the whole apartment building does a lot of the maintenance for you, so you don't have that much to do.
Now that i'm renting a house, i have to learn about different things that need to be monitored, maintained and checked regularly, like the sprinklers that water the lawn which means the grass in your yard and the AC unit these different things that I'm not accustomed to monitoring and maintaining.
I have to do that now.
So, of course, you need to maintain those things that I mentioned.
You need to maintain different appliances in your house.
Sometimes you need to change filters on things or just smoke detectors sometimes.
Those things that detect if there's smoke in your house so that you're alerted to any fire.
When you're alerted, it means that it tells you that there's a fire.
You need to make sure you're changing those.
There's a carbon monoxide monitor which detects whether or not there's carbon monoxide in the house which can kill someone.
So those things need to be replaced at different intervals, meaning different periods of time, and And I mentioned the lawn like the sprinklers.
You need to maintain your sprinkler system and you should probably clean them, I think, which I haven't done.
And so I'll have to check on that.
There's different things you need to do there.
You might need to maintain your garden if you have one.
By the way, in American English when we use the word garden, we're literally talking about a place where you grow vegetables and fruit, things like that.
That's a garden.
However, in other dialects of English, like in British English, I think, they might just use the word garden to talk about your backyard, for example.
So I wanted to mention that distinction.
So you might need to maintain a garden so that your tomatoes don't die or whatever, and your plants in general need maintenance.
I've made the mistake before of not properly maintaining a plant and And then I realize when it's too late, and then the plant has already died.
So you have to maintain that.
Some people have gutters on their house like their roof.
This is what drains the water and other things when they come down through this little tube and it empties.
It's kind of hard to describe, but this is called a gutter.
Yeah, you need to clean your gutters.
There's different things that you need to maintain to keep the house functioning how it should.
And then not only just the house itself, but also what's inside the house, like maintaining clean space, maintaining order in your house.
So cleaning regularly is is a form of maintenance tidying your house and doing this regularly.
That is necessary in order to maintain order in your house.
If you don't do all of these things, then your house will probably look very messy.
Things won't work correctly and that won't be good.
So your house is a very important thing that you need to maintain.
Another thing that requires maintenance is cars.
And I do not like this.
I hate having to do the routine maintenance for cars because it usually means that I have to go and spend hours at that mechanic or dealership because I don't normally get a ride there and then come home and then go back.
I usually just stay there and try to be productive.
I take my computer with me, but I usually have to wait for hours and, of course, you have to pay money.
And I'm always a little anxious to hear if there's anything wrong with the car.
I don't like that.
I don't like getting the diagnosis for my car.
So I do not like doing the routine maintenance on my cars, but it's necessary.
If I don't do this, my cars will stop working.
And it will be hard to get them working well again.
I'll have to replace parts and it will cost a lot of money.
So it's better to just do the necessary maintenance.
And what is the necessary maintenance?
Well, at the very least, the bare minimum is to change the oil.
You have to do this pretty often, actually.
So that's the bare minimum.
And aside from that there's changing the filters and doing tire rotations and maybe checking your alignment and getting an alignment if that's necessary, and other things.
I'm not a car guy, so...
I don't really know much about this, but those are things that I tend to do for my cars.
And some people can just do the bare minimum, like they just do oil changes and they get away with it, meaning they aren't punished for only doing the minimum.
Their cars run for a long time.
Other people don't get away with just doing the bare minimum.
They have to do more, otherwise their cars stop running well.
So this just depends on the car and the person, how they drive.
That can affect the car as well.
But cars definitely need maintenance.
Another thing that needs to be maintained, and this is probably more important to most people than their house is or their car is their body.
However, we don't always treat our body as if it's more important than our house or our car.
What needs to be maintained about our body?
Well, our health in general, of course.
Our body needs to have good health and we need to make sure that we're keeping it running normally and efficiently.
I use the word running as if our body were a machine, a car.
But even though this is not a good analogy like if you don't keep your car healthy, it doesn't run well.
Same thing with your body.
If you don't take care of your health, then you won't function well.
You'll have problems with your health.
You'll get injured.
You won't be able to do what you want to do.
So in general, you need to keep your body healthy.
And how do you do this?
You eat well and you move, you exercise, you do whatever is necessary to get your body in motion, how it was designed to be.
We're not designed to just not move all day.
Our bodies are designed to do things, to be active.
And so being in motion and feeding your body what it needs, and other things as well, but those are the main things that we need to do to maintain our health.
Also, our teeth.
Our teeth require maintenance.
They're not a very large part of our body, but they're an important part of And they require a lot of maintenance compared to other parts of our body.
So it's important to keep our teeth clean and make sure we're not developing cavities and developing other problems with our mouth.
It's important to maintain your teeth and keep them clean and healthy.
And it's also good to maintain our brain.
And we don't do physical things to our brain to maintain it.
But I'm referring to stimulating your brain intellectually.
People who don't do this, their brain kind of deteriorates in a way.
I think that if people don't feed their brain, so to say, like give their brain stimulation and exercise, this is bad.
Their brain isn't being maintained, they probably won't be as bright and intelligent, And there can be some negative effects.
So it's good to maintain that part of ourselves as well.
And this is why I think that everyone should be lifelong learners.
You should always strive to learn new things, practice things that you've already learned.
This is great for your brain and your overall health, so that's a way we can maintain that part of our body.
And then now let me talk about maintaining languages.
I'm sure many of you knew i was gonna talk about this.
Uh, maintaining languages is something that can be frustrating, especially if you are an avid language learner like you do this for pleasure, you do it a lot, you learn multiple languages.
If that's your case, you will undoubtedly run into the issue of needing to maintain languages while you're focusing on other languages with more priority.
Because what happens when you don't spend time with a language, so to say, is that it gets rusty over time.
It starts to deteriorate.
And this is something that can stress people out.
It has stressed me out in the past.
It isn't fun when you've spent many, many hours learning a language and and then you move on to another language and then you realize that that first language has gotten much, much worse than it was before because you haven't used it in a year or something.
It feels like you spent all that time learning that language and it was almost a waste, because now that language is a lot worse for you.
But people need to realize that languages don't disappear completely.
Of course you forget a lot but those things that you've forgotten are still deep in your brain.
So that means that you can revive them more easily than someone who is just learning those things for the first time.
So it can feel like you've forgotten everything you wasted all that time, but not really, because that time you invested in that language has helped your brain store some of that information, a lot of that information, deep in your brain.
And so when you relearn the language later, it will be faster and easier than when you first learned that language, or it will be easier it will be more familiar to you than to someone who is just starting that language for the first time.
So yes, you will forget a lot of things, but you will be able to recall them, revive them more quickly the second time.
So, it wasn't a waste.
However, it is still true that languages need maintenance.
And the less you maintain a language, the rustier it gets, the more you forget.
And so, this can be challenging if you learn multiple languages like me.
For example, right now, my focus is Greek. but I'm trying to maintain my French.
And this is hard to be honest, because I do a lot of things in my day and it's hard for me to dedicate a large amount of time to maintaining French.
However, I know that if I spend a little time every day with French, this will really help its maintenance.
Even if I'm not improving at all and even if it's still deteriorating a little bit, the fact that I'm using it a little bit every day, or most days, it can slow down the deterioration of my French.
And let's face it, the things that we maintain in our lives tend to deteriorate, even if we're maintaining them properly.
Even if I maintain my car properly, at some point, it's not going to run anymore.
Maybe it will last for a really long time, but 200 years from now, I doubt that this car will still work.
So even though I do what I need to do to maintain the car, it still deteriorates a little bit over time, little by little.
That's just how things work.
Our bodies are the same way.
This body that I have.
It's going to deteriorate over time, whether or not I maintain it, so that's just a fact of life.
With languages it might not be the same, but almost, because even if we just maintain a language over the years, as we get older our brain doesn't work quite as well.
So it can still deteriorate in that way, because maybe our brain is getting older and we just can't use the language like we used to.
So this is just a fact of life.
However, it's nice to be able to slow down this deterioration and keep my level of French at a decent level.
And then in the future I'll prioritize French again and I won't have to start over and start from scratch or try to remember everything.
No, my level will probably just be a little lower than it was when I stopped, And it won't take long to reach that same level that I used to have.
So frequent contact with a language is a great way to maintain it, even if you don't spend that much time with it.
Like, if you just spend 15 minutes a day with a language, that's great because it will really help you maintain your level.
You probably won't improve much, because you just don't spend a lot of time doing the things you need to do to improve it, but it will at least help you maintain that language.
I try to spend more than 15 minutes a day when I maintain a language like French right now.
However, sometimes that's all I can do.
But the fact that I do those 15 minutes is great.
That really helps maintain it.
And besides just listening to something for 15 minutes, frequent speaking really helps you in your maintenance of a language.
Maybe you spend 10 minutes talking to yourself in that language.
That's fantastic.
That will really help you maintain your language and not just maintain your ability to understand it and know the different words.
It will help maintain your ability to produce the language, because you're speaking is the thing that decays the most when you don't prioritize a language.
Your speaking is what gets worse.
For example, with Spanish, I don't really speak that much Spanish nowadays.
I do, but a lot less than in the past.
And I can still understand the same amount of Spanish now as I could when I was living in Mexico, speaking Spanish a lot every day.
I can still understand the same amount, I think, even though I don't speak it that much.
However, my speaking has gone down a little bit, not a ton, but it definitely has decreased.
It's gotten a little worse because that's what happens when you don't prioritize a language.
Your speaking is what takes the biggest hit.
And you have to get that back if you want to improve that again.
So doing frequent speaking is a great way to maintain a language.
And if you're learning multiple languages, you can do language stacking, which is where you use one language to learn another language.
So i could use french to learn greek, for example.
Like when i need to look up a word in greek, i can translate it into french instead of english.
That's just one example.
So that's something people can do.
There are also other little hacks, little tips that people can follow, like changing your phone into the language that you're trying to maintain, and things like that.
And then perhaps you can just spend a short period of time every once in a while trying reviving that language.
Like maybe you can only spend 15 minutes a day with that language now, but then maybe three or four times a year you spend like one week where you actually spend a few hours or maybe just a couple hours a day with that language to try to revive it and improve it, like you do.
These little sprints, you could call them.
That can also work.
So there are many ways you can maintain a language.
And yes, it's frustrating when a language deteriorates.
But thankfully we can just follow this tip of having frequent contact with the language, even if it's just a little bit.
And that can really help.
All right, I hope that you enjoyed this episode.
Remember that you can use my advanced podcast episodes to help you reach the next level in your listening, because in those episodes I speak at normal speed.
So if you want those, the link is down below and also check out my US Conversations podcast so you can listen to my conversations that I have with other people from around the country.
It's great practice for your listening.
It's a lot of fun.
It's entertaining.
I know you'll like it, so check that out.
That link is also down below.
Thank you all for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
