To me, language is a way certain groups of people communicate with each other. There can be various subsections and whatnot, for example if some people know English and Spanish, and others know Spanish and Portuguese. Culture, on the other hand, is the traditions certain groups have, whether it be language, or celebrations, or way of eating food. They play a pretty big role in my life, as I speak both Enlglish and Chinese, so I’ll often speak Chinese at home but English outside, which helps show how I’m Chinese American. Language relates to culture in this sense: if people have a similar culture, they will also have a similar language. Often, it’s also important to learn culture when learning a language to get context for things like idioms or sayings.

Instead of listening to the ones on the website, I found the podcast on Spotify and played their episode titled “Maps.” The image is just a person with their eyes closed, and has a pattern of clouds being closed by the stars in the background. The break in the clouds probably represents some kind of a path, the “short cut,” and maybe the person closing their eyes enjoys listening to the different documentaries the podcast features. The tagline is “Short documentaries and adventures in sound,” which I would say is completely accurate. This episode presented three completely different stories, and how maps can relate to one’s life, not just directions for getting around a physical place.

Ode Urn:

This podcast is in Mandarin, which was technically my first language, but my English is definitely stronger. From what I gather, my Mandarin speaking and listening skills are about equivalent to a 5th grader in China. I’m used to listening to things in English, so I have to focus to suppress the English in order to actually somewhat understand them. There’s this kind of distracting background music in the intro that sounds kind of rebellious/high pacing, which makes sense for the subject of the episode, which seems to be “Don’t need a reason to travel.” In the beginning, they seem to talk about spontaneously going on trips on their motorcycles. In terms of format, it just seems to be three people talking about different trips they’ve had, and what kinds of fun or trouble they’ve had doing them. Listening to the voices, they have pretty thick Beijing/northern China accents, although I can still understand them since my family’s from farther north than Beijing.

Note: rewritten after class on 10/07 and after reading the script.