Speaking and Communicating Podcast

By and large, statistically, the non-native English speakers, the people that had an accent, were rated as less credible, less competent, and less effective.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

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Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with Marty Green, hailing all the way from Poland.

She is an English teacher and coach of Marty Education.

And one thing that we have in common is that we both have experience in helping ESL, non-English speakers, professionals to help them with their English skills.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show.

Hi, Marty.

Hello, Roberta.

Thank you very much for the very, very warm welcome.

I do very much appreciate being here.

Thank you for being here.

Welcome.

It's truly my pleasure to have you today.

As we were saying earlier, we have so much in common, which we'll cover later in this episode, but please introduce yourself.

Certainly.

So hello and welcome to anybody listening.

My name is Marty Green.

And as Roberta has already mentioned, I am an English teacher and coach.

And I work for Marty Education, which is a company that I started a few years back, almost half a decade ago.

And what I like to work with and what I very, very much am passionate about is helping people feel more confident and more comfortable with their English and helping people develop their English personality, which I suppose we'll get into a little bit later.

But essentially, what I very much like working with is helping people feel like themselves.

What got you started on this journey of helping professionals with the English skills?

Very good question.

It all started for me, and as I mentioned to you before, a very fun story that I always like to share that the one thing that I would say as a kid, the one thing that I would never ever want to be was a teacher, which I can't help laughing at, but I suppose yet here we are.

But it all started for me when I moved to England for a few months with my family, but intentionally to Australia at a very young age.

And being in England and going to the school in England and being with the kids and the environment in England with zero English at that time, I knew how to say hi, hello and count to three.

At that time, it was a very large language shock for me.

I mean, culturally speaking, of course, as well, but language wise as well, that, OK, I can talk to other Polish people, but I cannot answer my teacher's question in class.

So that was the first experience of wow, you know, English is not just a subject that I was doing at school before and not just the exams that I had to do, but it's a real breathing thing that I can genuinely use to communicate with other people.

And then moving to Australia a little bit after that, I realized that, OK, this is maybe a little bit easier, that people were much nicer in Australia.

And then still the experience of not really being able to talk to other people, not feeling that I can express what I have in my mind, all the thoughts that were going through me that, OK, I could do this.

I'm really good at, I don't know, maps or science or whatever.

Here I can't be, not because I'm not, but because it's not the language that I'm feeling comfortable with.

I could do that all in Polish, but in English, it was just a huge break, a huge OK.

I'm somebody else now, I'm somebody different because I can't be myself.

And so where that started for me, what we were talking about before that, OK, look, I could help other people with that.

I'm sure it's not just me struggling with this.

And I do not wish for anybody to feel the way that I felt at that time.

And so how can I bring that to other people?

How can I share that?

OK, look, I know that your mind is racing and I know your palms are sweating and I know that you have everything in the tip of your tongue.

You just can't say anything.

I know what that feels like.

And so that got me on the journey of starting Marty Education and starting what I do right now, which is exactly helping people with those kinds of struggles, helping them develop their personality, develop their confidence, develop their, I suppose, their entire life in another language, in English, very specifically.

I do work with some people learning Polish, although that is more of a hobby, typically.

Maybe people have some ancestry, maybe some roots from Poland, maybe grandparents, and they just want to come back to that.

But by and large, with people with English, most of the time, it's like you said, working with business professionals, working with, for example, people.

A lot of my clients have come to Australia on a permanent visa.

And, OK, look, I got the job, but I don't really feel good during the meetings.

I can't talk to my colleagues.

I don't know how to talk to my boss.

I can do my work because it's maybe what I used to do.

And so the technical terms are always fine.

That's something that I find really incredible.

Everybody is always OK with the technical terms.

I never, ever had to teach anybody some IT vocab, but it's always the small talk.

It's always the hi, how are yous that everybody struggles with because that's what we're not taught.

We're taught at schools, OK, here is the past perfect, and here is how you should use the second conditional.

And here is how you structure a question, but how do you actually use any of that?

In a real life scenario, yeah.

Exactly right.

Nobody knows what's going on.

That's the thing I ask, OK, do you know what the second conditional is?

Of course I do.

OK, could you give me an example?

Because I haven't used it in real life, yeah.

Just for context, so when you were a child going to school in Holland, you did learn English as a second language?

Yeah, I mean, you could say that I did have English as a subject, but I wouldn't say that was extremely helpful.

Generally speaking, I would say the English level in Polish schools is more of what I was talking about before.

OK, just copy this entire text from your textbook.

OK, but what does it mean?

So just to regurgitate for the exam.

And also when you go home or when you go to the shop, you don't speak English to anyone.

So whatever you learned in the classroom, you're not going to practice it anyway.

Exactly right.

And language you lose.

Even if you learn it, language you lose if you don't speak it, which is then one of the challenges.

When I was in South Korea, we used to talk amongst each other as teachers and say, the biggest challenge is that when these kids go home, they speak Korean the whole time.

We try to have English immersion.

And they say, we're going to teach, even if you know the Korean word, don't translate it.

Make them want to speak English.

So you have that background, and then you go to the UK, and obviously huge adjustment.

Everybody speaks English.

How did then when you went to Australia, how did you grow up in Australia with this language barrier and then come to a situation where you understand enough to be able to do school and have a social life and be able to communicate?

Definitely.

So I would say coming from England to Australia was, in hindsight, somewhat of a positive at the time.

It really wasn't.

But looking back at it, I would suppose it was a positive in the sense that I already went through, like you said, the initial shock of, okay, we got that done, and now we can move on with our lives in a sense.

I mean, still English was basically at a zero at that stage.

So I can't say that, oh, I magically started speaking after six months or anything like that, because I cannot advocate for that.

But I would say being in Australia, and this is why I very much believe in the impact of the environment, what you were talking about before.

Okay, like you said, in South Korea, they come back home and they just start speaking Korean versus in Australia.

Like you said, going to the supermarket, going out with my parents, going to the zoo, I don't know, listening to the radio, to the music, to watching the TV.

Everything was in that language.

And so whether you want it or not, somehow it just seeps in to you.

It was everywhere.

Exactly right, exactly right.

What I would say really helped though was I was a very, very big fan of reading and I still am.

And something that I used to do, I would pick up a lot of books and even what I was telling you about before, even though I didn't understand anything that I was reading, I would just kind of flip through the pages, look at the words, look at how they were structured.

Pronunciation wasn't exactly there at that point, but I was just looking through the words, looking through what they looked like even.

And I suppose something that also really helped was being very conscious, I would say at that time, because even though at that stage when I would move to Australia, I was maybe 12, 13, something around that time.

So it was around the time that I moved past not being conscious of myself, but still not exactly maybe 20 to be very aware of what was going on.

I think it was kind of that middle ground at that time.

So I could see, okay, I am very different.

I don't know what they're talking about.

They don't know what I'm talking about.

So we have to fix that somehow.

Something that helped, though, was I would speak a lot.

I would have to speak a lot because we would have to give presentations.

We had a lot of homework and assignments.

And I think it was just the pure necessity to be very honest with you, because I did study some grammar and I did learn vocabulary and I translated everything.

I went through all of that.

But I would say what really pushed me over that barrier, so to speak, was that pure necessity of I'm here, I have to do this.

So that's something that I then, and this is maybe something that we're going to touch on a little bit later on as well, something that formed in my mind, maybe not very consciously then, but now looking back to it, it's something that really structured the three pillars for me, something that I like working with and that kind of structured approach of, okay, it's the thinking, it's the mindset that I'm here and I have to be here because I've got no other choice.

It's the structure of, okay, I know exactly what I'm going to be doing to get better.

And it's the knowledge at the end of the day.

It's the knowledge that, okay, I know the words, I know the grammar, I know the vocabulary, I know everything that I need to know.

I'm capable, I know what I'm doing to being where I am right now was just pure practice.

That's how we got to where we are today.

I'm curious about something.

If you're an Australian teacher and Marty from Poland comes into your classroom, is there a special way in which you teach her or try to make sure she understood, or she just blends in with these Australian kids, she'll understand when she understands?

No, she's just another kid.

Just do the presentation, give out the homework, and she'll do just fine.

That's how that works.

And did you find that watching Australian TV shows helped you in, like we say, when we teach, we're teaching in the classroom as best as we can, but it's not that good.

We try to demonstrate real life scenarios of, okay, if you go to a shop, I'm going to be the cashier, you're going to be the customer, but it's not that good in the way we try to paint the real life scenarios.

Did you watch TV to maybe see how some conversations play out in real life?

I wouldn't say that was necessarily a play, to be very honest with you.

I never really watched a lot of Australian TV.

I mean, Australian in the sense that it was in Australia, but I watched, I would say, more American TV shows.

I would say we got, like you said, that the real life scenarios were genuinely real life scenarios that we were part of.

So if we went to the supermarket and actually very funnily, I just remembered a story that I can share with you that always makes me laugh when I remember it, because I think everybody gets stuck on, oh, I don't know everything and I'm not perfect and I don't know all the words, so I'm terrible and everything like that.

But listen to this, we went to the Australian supermarket and this was still when we were pretty fresh in Australia.

And we went to the supermarket and we were looking for a long vegetable, a.k.a.

a leek.

And we went to the cashier and we had no idea what a leek was in English.

And so we came up to her and we started explaining that it's this long vegetable and we even showed her a picture of it.

And she's like, I don't know what that's called.

And we're like, what do you mean you don't know what that's called?

You're Australian, right?

You speak English, your native language is English and you don't know what this vegetable is called.

And she's like, no, it's just a long green vegetable.

Really?

Honestly?

He also knows a lot of leekies.

Exactly.

And so, you know, you don't have to be perfect.

Even native speakers are not perfect.

We never were, we never are.

And that's very comforting, especially because I find that non-English speakers feel this pressure to be perfect.

And I always ask, who is?

We're not.

We grew up speaking English, but we're not perfect either.

Why do you put that pressure on yourself to think you're supposed to sound perfect or not speak the language at all?

Like my friend Heather says, the best English or the perfect English is the English that gets the job done.

I like that.

That makes a lot of sense.

What we were talking about before that communication, not perfection, just getting what you need to do done.

So when your professional clients come to you, first of all, usually which nationalities do they come from?

Most often in my recent experience, it's been Brazilians.

I used to have a lot of Russian people, now a little bit less for maybe relatively obvious reasons.

However, Russian people from other countries are living in other countries in Georgia, for instance, in Israel and even Australia, some of them.

So I would say Brazil and Russia are the largest countries.

But I do have students from Peru.

I do have students from China, from South Korea, from Japan, from Poland as well.

Of course, I had one student from France, so a little bit of those European ones as well.

But I would say most of the time it's Brazil, Peru.

And when they come to you, they say, Marty, please help me with?

Expressing myself, saying what I have in my mind, well, saying what I have in my mind correctly, and something that I notice a lot, and something that we actually just briefly mentioned without that perfection, whatever that means.

Most of the time, the people that come to me come to me with grammar.

That's what they're thinking.

That's their big idea.

I have really bad grammar.

I cannot speak.

Help me express myself.

And so I asked them some questions.

Okay, could you tell me what exactly you struggle with?

Are there any very specific grammar points that you know for a fact?

When I want to talk about the past, I cannot, for example, or when I want to talk about my wishes, I cannot.

Are there any very specific grammar topics that you struggle with?

Most of the time, yes, I struggle with the perfect tenses, always the perfect tenses, always the present perfect, the present perfect continuous, always the conditionals, always the passive voice, always the reported speech.

And something that I noticed is most people are more afraid of the name of the grammar structure than the grammar structure itself, which again, I like to attribute to our wonderful education system.

But most of the time, it's, oh, I don't know how to do reported speech.

And I tell them, look, it's literally just he said this.

Oh, really?

The technicalities become more the main focus than the speaking.

Yes and no.

At the beginning, the reason why I do that is I like them to tell me what they're thinking, because I found that most people have very general idea of what they want.

I want to be more fluent.

I want to be more confident.

I want to speak better.

What does that mean?

What does that mean?

You want to be more fluent?

Does that mean that you speak faster as in words per minute faster?

Does that mean that you use more phrasal verbs?

Does that mean that you use more advanced vocabulary?

Does that mean that use different grammar structures?

What does that mean to you?

But I feel like not a lot of people really understand that.

Not a lot of people have even thought about that.

I think it's one of those things that you just hear, and, oh, I'm supposed to be fluent.

I'm learning to be fluent, which is awesome.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be fluent.

But what does that mean to you?

And so I like to start with the things that everybody has always thought of, just so we get some common ground.

And then I understand, okay, so you don't feel really confident with the present perfect, for example.

But you just said four present perfect sentences perfectly.

Perfectly.

Zero issues, zero errors.

So that's really probably not the issue.

That's probably not what we have to be focusing on.

Hence, I asked the question.

It seems more that they become focused more on the technicalities of English, grammar, and language, rather than just having a conversation, rather than just having a conversation with Marty over a glass of wine, because that's what it is.

I mean, I learned all of that in school.

I remember when English class had about three different exams on three different days.

You have the language, grammar, you have the literature, the poetry, and the Shakespearean, and all the book reviews.

And then the third paper would be the comprehension and composition and all the paragraphs in your answer questions.

I forgot half of that stuff.

You know what I mean?

That's why I keep going back to this idea of why do non-English speakers have this pressure that they put on themselves when we just focus on the conversation, despite all the technical stuff we learned?

I feel like why most people get stuck is because they have that experience of speaking wrong, and they have that experience of making mistakes.

And that's where they get stuck.

Even though they keep progressing, they keep learning, they keep getting better.

And by the time that they come to you or me, they're already over here, but their mind is stuck here that, oh, I already made that mistake, and I used to make that mistake, and I'm still making that mistake.

And that's why they don't believe us.

I will say, but you just spoke a perfect English sentence, and that's why they don't believe us.

No matter how much you reiterate that your English is fine, they don't believe us.

And sometimes I feel also because I come from, you know, I started my first job in the 90s, so I come from a generation of, which we're going to talk about, the formal business English phrases.

When you write a letter to your boss and you write an email to your boss, much more formal.

But even then, it's not that different from the pressure that non-English speakers put on themselves to sound perfect.

Are we the ones also guilty of making them feel that pressure in our present?

I like to think not, but I don't think that's true.

I think it's more so just perhaps wishful thinking.

And this is something that I actually found very, very fascinating because that's what everybody always tells me, that look, I can talk to other, I don't know, Italian people, and I can talk to Greek people, and I can talk to Chinese people, but I cannot talk to native speakers.

And that always made me curious because like you said, is it the energy that people give off or is it that they're more attuned to, oh, you just made a mistake, oh, you're stupid, oh, you don't know anything because you just made a mistake?

I think that's where most people get stuck, which I suppose can be true.

I don't want to know fairy tales and beautiful rainbows and so on that people don't notice.

Some people do, some people don't.

Again, not to generalize, I do.

But I think it's more so just an occupational hazard that I notice all of these things.

A lot of people don't.

A lot of people have no idea that you just even made a mistake.

So some will, some won't.

Like you said, maybe more of an older mindset that, oh, look, I'm the only person here that doesn't speak English perfectly.

Okay, but half of your colleagues are from other parts of the world, and they're here doing their job.

Perfectly either.

And speaking of work, have you found that when your clients approach you, they also have this necessity to improve their English skills because they work for a global company, and maybe they want to express their ideas better?

Very often.

I would say the majority of the people that I work with come to me because of that, because, like you said, they work in a multinational company, for instance, or they work for a company in Australia, or they work for a company in the US or something like that.

And a lot of their colleagues are native speakers, and they just don't feel very confident talking to them.

And this is where most people get stuck.

I would say in something that I really like working on them with is working through some business phrases, some business idioms, business vocabulary, because I am very aware that it is a little bit different, and I'm very, very aware that native speakers often use those kinds of phrases, and they often use those kinds of idioms.

And you need to understand them.

Even if you don't use them, that's completely up to you.

But you at least have to understand what they're talking about, because I feel like that's one of the worst feelings in the world.

If you're supposed to be professional, you're supposed to be doing your job, you're supposed to be taking notes, and you're listening to the words, and you understand the words, but you have no idea what's going on.

I feel like that can be possible.

Exactly, the context.

I feel like that's one of the worst feelings, because it's not even I didn't understand anything, but I understood the words, but I still have no idea what they said.

So that's what I very much like starting with for the business context, because understanding is super, super important at that point.

So doing that, working through that, and then working through what we were talking about before the mindset behind it.

Okay, you think you're terrible.

You're really not.

But me telling you that isn't really going to help.

So, okay, how can I show you?

How can I prove to you that you are better than you think you are?

And so doing these little exercises, like you said, maybe some kind of role play, maybe doing a lot of people, for example, need to prepare for their interviews with me.

So that's what we do.

I give them some questions and okay, you can give me an answer.

I can give you some tips.

Maybe that doesn't sound super good.

Maybe you can try a different word, different phrase, by doing it in a little bit of a different way.

And then they do it and they can hear it for themselves.

They can hear, oh, yeah, that sounds better.

Thanks.

But then the next time we do it, they can do that themselves.

And I say, oh, you use that phrase that we used before.

Nice, good work.

They're like, oh, I did.

And they're so proud of themselves.

And here's the thing.

When it comes to the workspace, which I know is a huge pressure point, unfortunately, going back to us now, being guilty of this, unfortunately, sometimes our non-English speaking colleagues are perceived as not as competent as they are, because they don't express themselves just like us.

They're very smart, but because one, their hesitancy and lack of confidence in our presence, they don't express themselves.

And when we then, our organizations, perceive them as, oh, they're not as competent, which is a very, very distorted view, a whole other discussion.

But I think that's why then back to them feeling the pressure of needing to be perfect, because they want to prove, I know the job, I'm capable, but this language barrier thing is going to make Marty think that I don't know how to do my job.

For sure.

And it's not that it's in their heads, and I don't want people to think that it's in your head, and my dear listener, it is not in your head, because, and this is something that I've noticed a lot of people are very surprised by, but I actually read quite a lot of studies on this, and there are numerous journals and numerous case studies.

For example, there is one that they did, I think, as recent as 2013, and they were looking at different professionals in the sales and in the marketing teams, and they had people that had a non-native English accent, and they had a few different people.

One of the larger groups was Greek people, and then they were comparing them to Native American English speakers, and they were looking at customer satisfaction when they were doing sales calls, when they were presenting something, when they were doing their marketing, how credible and how competent they were rated.

And by and large, statistically, the non-native English speakers, the people that had an accent were rated as less credible, less competent, and less effective.

So it's not that, oh, they will think that, oh, they will not.

They do.

That's how biased we are.

As you said, on the customer service, can you imagine?

Even if you say the exact same thing on the call center script, you are still judged.

And speaking of studies, there was another one where, so the UK and the US are seen as the prestigious English-speaking countries.

New Zealand, remember, that's another English-speaking country.

New Zealanders think that English from the UK and US is better than New Zealand English.

These two countries are put on such a pedestal that you're very old.

It's mind-boggling.

And these New Zealanders, all they speak is English.

Imagine if you're from Asia or the Middle East or South America.

Yeah, true, very true.

How could you possibly feel confident?

So much work we need to do, Marty, but tell us about the three pillars and your pronunciation course.

For sure, definitely, definitely.

So the three pillars are your mindset, knowledge and structure.

So what we briefly were talking about before, the mindset is basically how you think, how you think about yourself, how you think about the language, how you think about how you present yourself.

So your mindset is all about how you think.

And the reason why I always put this first is if you don't have that down, no matter the amounts of vocabulary you know, no matter the perfect idioms that you know, if you don't have it in your mind to, okay, I'm going to say this, then you will not say it.

And it doesn't matter what you know, it matters how you think about yourself first and foremost always.

So that's what I like to start with.

I like to set that up for the people that I work with.

Then there is the knowledge.

Again, that's fairly self-explanatory, I would assume.

So the vocabulary, the grammar, the pronunciation side of things, all of that falls into the knowledge pillar.

And then we have the structure pillar.

And your structure is essentially how you work with all of that.

So let's say, okay, I need to improve my pronunciation.

How do I do that?

Do I take a course?

Do I take private lessons?

Do I learn from YouTube?

Do I, I don't know, go to an English speaking country for three months for an immersion course?

Great, okay, should I be doing that on Monday after work or before work, or should I be doing this three hours on the weekend?

I would say that structure pillar is something that a lot of people forget about because it's, okay, I need to improve my vocabulary.

Awesome, yes, let's learn vocabulary.

Okay, but how are you going to do that?

And how are you going to stay consistent?

Most importantly, staying consistent with your study.

That's what the structure pillar does.

And coming back to pronunciation, like you said, I do have a pronunciation course.

It is called the Forever Pronunciation Course.

And the reason why I made this course is because I've noticed pronunciation is one of those things that most people tend to leave in the background.

That, okay, I need to improve my grammar and I need to improve my vocabulary.

And typically when I ask people, okay, is there anything that you want to work with in terms of your pronunciation?

Oh, no, no, that's for later.

Do you realize that it's important, right?

I mean, we were just looking at some studies.

Most people don't.

Most people don't, which is maybe not a very good advertising point in terms of, okay, let's make the thing that nobody wants.

Maybe.

But I do feel like it's very, very significant and incredibly important because pronunciation, again, it changes how people think about you and it changes how people perceive you.

And that is a huge part of communication.

It's not just the words that you use, but it's also how you say those words.

So for anybody interested and for anybody listening to this that is interested in the pronunciation course, I do actually have a special offer for our listeners here.

You can use a promo code SPECIAL20 and this will give you a 20% discount on the course.

And you can just find the course by going to my website, marty.education, and no come, no nothing, because I do get asked that quite often.

It's just marty.education, and you will find that in the resources section.

Thank you for the special offer, Marty.education.

I will put all those details on the show notes.

And the last thing I wanted to ask you, because as we were talking about the pressure that non-English speakers put on themselves, what do you mean by you help your clients with their English personality?

For sure.

Thank you for asking, Roberta.

I do very much like this topic.

The reason why this is such a big deal for me is because, as what we were talking about at the very beginning, I personally, when I started learning the language, I couldn't be myself because I just didn't have the language to support the me that I was used to.

And so through that, I noticed that I developed a little bit of a different personality, a different way of being.

I noticed that even to this very day, I noticed that I think differently.

I solve problems differently.

I look at negatives and positives differently.

When I'm thinking in English versus when I'm thinking in Polish, which is just incredibly fascinating, and that's a rabbit hole that I like to go down.

But that's something that I very much believe in, that if you are a certain type of person in your native language, be it Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, it doesn't matter.

You don't have to be the exact same person in English.

You can be.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with being the same.

But what I found in myself, at least, is you can create a different persona.

You can create.

Yeah, like an alter ego when you speak English.

Exactly right.

Exactly right.

And I think that really helps with your accent as well.

Something that I really like playing with is, look, you don't have to improve your pronunciation.

You're not improving, quote unquote, anything.

Just imagine that you are an actor and actress and you are preparing for a new role and you have to just learn a new accent.

You have to create a new persona, a new character for whatever reason.

And that character happens to have an American accent or a British accent or an Australian accent, whatever it is that you want.

Just learn something new.

And I feel like that changes.

Oh, OK, well, I can do that.

I can learn things.

And it's more fun that way.

Yeah, it's more fun that way if you describe it like that.

When you're having fun, it's easier to learn rather than the pressure and feeling the need for perfection.

And speaking of having this alter ego English American accent persona, I was teaching these kids privately in Toul when their grandma approached me on the subway, actually.

And I remember, so I used to make them watch a clip of Ant Farm.

It was a Disney sitcom.

And I remember the little boy.

I think he was around eight or nine, eight.

And the one thing he remembers from that episode to this day, he's like, are you kidding me?

He even changes, even his demeanor changes because it's imitating the Disney kid.

So it does.

Yes, you can have fun with this instead of feeling very uptight and feeling the need to be perfect.

Very much.

And like you said, it's even we don't think about this.

But like you said, that little boy, I'm sure he wasn't doing that consciously, that, OK, now I'm going to be that little boy from that cartoon.

But it's just what he remembered.

It's the feeling of the language.

It's the feeling of the phrases, the feeling of the words that you're using.

And that's something that I love so much about different languages and about learning so many of these different things.

You get to feel different feeling than you're used to in your native language.

You could never feel the same.

Oh, are you kidding me?

So exactly right.

If you learn to find a way to have fun with it, I think that that's really important.

One last thing before you go, Marty, I believe you have a podcast.

Would you like to share with our listeners so that they can tune in as well?

Of course, it would be my pleasure.

So for anybody that is interested in learning more about languages, more about communication, because that's something that I am also very, very passionate about and something that I liked talking about on my podcast, it is called 21st Century Expression.

And what that focuses on is how we tend to communicate with other people, because like you said, and something that I very much believe in the way that we used to talk in the nineties or in the eighties is very, very different than the way that we communicate right now.

And it's not just about the vocabulary, but it's the body language that we use.

It's not just, okay, you know, sit tight and don't cross your arms and the things that everybody's always heard before.

But I feel like there is just so much new information and so many things that we can improve on and something that actually a very, very good point that you mentioned in terms of what I also like to talk about on my podcast and something that I'm a big believer in is a little communication ABC, which I like to remember because it's super, super simple.

And it's your active listening, huge believer in active listening.

It is your body language and it's your constructive criticism.

So all of these things put together, maybe not very vividly, you know, ABC, this is exactly what we're doing.

But I would I would describe my podcast with those with those three things.

So again, 21st Century Expression for anybody that wants to learn more.

21st Century Expression podcast by Marty Green.

Marty, the English teacher and coach.

Thank you so much for being here.

What a pleasure this has been.

It's been an absolute pleasure for me too, Roberta.

And to you, my dear listener, thank you very much too for being here, for sharing your time with us today.

And I hope to see you again.

For sure.

And thank you for the special offer.

As I said, I will put all those details on the show notes, and we look forward to learning more from you.

Marty Green, the English teacher and coach.

Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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