In this podcast episode, the host interviews Gaston Doran, the author of two books on languages called Babel and Lingo. They discuss how language learning changes the brain, learning languages through apps like Duolingo, and how cultures and behavior differ based on language. Gaston talks about his journey with languages, the definition of fluency, and his experiences learning Vietnamese and German. They also touch on the uniqueness of German, the impact of bilingualism on decision-making, and the limitations of language learning apps. Gaston emphasizes the importance of practice and conversation in language learning.
Hello everyone, welcome to the Artydode podcast. I'm your host, Vasik Armenikus. I'm excited to share this episode with you because my guest today is Gaston Doran, the author of two great books on languages. They are called Babel and Lingo. It was interesting to hear Gaston's thoughts on how does the language learning change the way our brain works. Another question I asked Gaston was whether one can learn a new language by using apps such as Duolingo. We also discussed how do cultures and their behavior differ depending on the language they speak.
Before getting to the interview itself, I wanted to let you know that you can find Gaston's books and all the other sources mentioned during my conversation with him by clicking the link in the description of this episode. I hope you enjoy the podcast. Thank you so much for coming to my podcast. I've actually discovered your book, Babel. It's through a very international way. I follow one account on Instagram of one bookshop, my favorite bookshop in St.
Petersburg. They posted your book in Russian translation. I loved their description and their recommendation so much. I was like, this is a book that I should read. Languages generally is one of the favorite things to talk about, how they influence us. Generally, the language community, the polyglot community is full of really nice people. You read the translation by Natalia Shakova. I read it in English because I'm in London, but the recommendation was in Russian, so very international way, very bilingual way.
I'm really curious if that's the same bookshop in St. Petersburg that my wife once visited a few years ago that was after the publication of Lingo, which in Russian is called Lingua, I think. My wife went in and she said, I'm the wife of the author. Then one of the salespeople wanted to take a selfie with my wife. That was really nice. I wonder if you remember the name of the bookshop. I wasn't there. Only she was there.
Sorry, could you say the name again? It's called Подписные издания, which is subscription editions in translation. It was an old Soviet way of getting books. You subscribed and you were sent a bunch of random books that you might be interested in. I wanted to ask you about your journey through the world of languages. Where did it start? Why? Everyone has a reason for passion for languages. Some people just ignore it. Some people are extremely passionate about it.
I think my journey really started at home in my childhood because I'm from the Netherlands, but I'm from part of the country that is very close to both the German and the French language areas. We also have our own regional language, which my family would speak and with my friends, I would speak that. Of course, we spoke Dutch and we learned English in school. Then when I went to university, a bit later on, I also studied Spanish because I wanted to travel to South America.
At that point, I had already, well, not mastered, I wouldn't say mastered, but I spoke five or six languages decently. Actually, I've never got further than that, I should add. It had really kindled my interest in languages because I would observe all these differences between German and Dutch and the regional language, which are all similar, but different. I would analyze why is that and what are the differences exactly and how have they come about. I think that's where my journey started.
Later on, I would just dabble in languages, learn a bit of Czech here and a bit of Turkish there and a bit of Norwegian the next time. Well, you know what these polyglots are like. We're sort of impatient and we didn't always see a language through, but in the meantime, we have fun learning them. There is also a thing like what does it mean to be fluent? For example, I speak English and hopefully on a good level, but at the same time, there are subjects that I struggle with in terms of words, grammar.
I assume one definition of being fluent is to be capable to communicate with anybody in the language field. How would you define being fluent? What I'm thinking of when I use the word fluent or when I hear the word fluent used is when somebody can speak the language and doesn't have to think about every word, doesn't have to think about how to conjugate verbs and decline nouns or adjectives. They can still make mistakes. When I speak French, I make lots of mistakes, but I can have a proper conversation in French and I can speak at a reasonable speed.
On the other hand, if I try to speak Polish, which is what I'm currently studying, I really do have to think about every word. I will have to think about every case of the noun, every ending, every verb, whether it's perfective or imperfective, and my speed is perhaps one word per 10 seconds or so. I mean, that's not – obviously, that's not fluency. So, that would be my thought when you… Yeah, the process of the language learning, I think it's – I would describe – I personally speak four languages fluently and during the lockdown, I decided to embark on Italian and French in the first half Italian, second half of the year French, and just the process of learning languages, discovering books that are not – that weren't translated into English or magazines that you can read, you know, it's a whole another world.
Exactly, yeah. Is your process of language learning, is it like more, let's say, active learning in terms of learning words and then going and trying to communicate or is it like more studying grammar with the book and then how do you… Yeah, it's the latter and this is definitely not a recommendation. I mean, don't do what I do, but it is what I – well, it is my bad habit, let's say. So, now I am thinking – and I know that all the languages that I have learned to speak decently, I've done that through speaking.
I mean, you can't learn a language properly without speaking and I know that. So, now in the case of Polish, for instance, I'm thinking of going to Poland in spring or so or whenever COVID will allow and then really take lessons with other students and force myself to speak because I remember when I learned Spanish when I was in my early 20s, it was horrible at first, but I'm – well, I was lucky enough to go to places where people only spoke Spanish.
So, I had to and then I went to South America and most people there only spoke Quechua. So, I was happy to find, you know, the indigenous language called Quechua. So, I was happy when I found people speaking Spanish and I would happily speak with them and it went better and better. So, that's the way to do it. You force yourself to speak it. And you tried learning Vietnamese as far as I know and I've heard the interviews and can you tell like about the Vietnamese and your journey through that very unusual language for, let's say, unusual in sense, you know? Yeah, sure.
From our perspective, from our European and Indo-European perspective, it is very unusual. Of course, from an East Asian perspective, it's perfectly normal. Well, what should I tell you? It was – well, I made the same mistake that I've made over and over again. I've tried to learn it from books and then I did travel to Vietnam. But even there, I would mostly be working with just one teacher who had very good English. So, in the end, we spoke very little Vietnamese and it's very hard for Europeans generally.
If I had really wanted to do that, if I had really wanted to master that, I should have exposed myself to the language. But even so, a Vietnamese friend of mine used to have a Spanish husband who lived with her in Vietnam for eight years. But even at the end of those eight years, well, he did – he had learned quite a bit, but he was far from fluent even then. So, it is really terribly, terribly hard for Europeans.
It is a very demanding language to learn and I haven't come close to mastering it, not close to it. I wonder, like, certain languages are easy to learn, depending on person, of course, because I have friends who learned Mandarin and they said, yes, it was difficult, but they mastered it by their hard work. But I tried learning Mandarin and I tried doing it for six months. After six months, I tried to have a basic conversation with a Mandarin speaker and it was a total failure.
I don't want to remember that episode of my life. I'm just wondering, like, are certain languages difficult to learn in general or it is familiarity, as we said, like, about being European, let's say, if you are a native English speaker or in French, it's not that difficult or, like, for Italians, learning French, I assume, is not as difficult as it would be Mandarin. Do you think there are certain languages that are just difficult per se or it is about familiarity? It is mostly about familiarity.
This same Vietnamese friend that I just mentioned decided that she wanted to learn some Mandarin and after two or three months, she could have a basic conversation with Chinese people. And I'm not saying that to make you feel ashamed. I think it's perfectly normal that as a European, you didn't manage that. And she, as a Vietnamese and as a very bright person, I should add, she did. But having said that, there are languages that are very complex in that they are very full of irregularities.
And many small languages spoken in remote areas that have only ever been spoken by native speakers and hardly ever been spoken by second language speakers, those languages are so full of irregularities that it's really extremely hard to master those. And the native speakers do not expect you to speak them. So they are probably also surprised when they hear you and they will even not believe that you are actually speaking their language and they will perhaps not understand you for that reason.
It's a situation that many missionaries have ended up in. You know, these missionaries who will go to the Amazon or to Papua New Guinea and they will learn a language spoken perhaps in just one village or a few villages. And I mean, they give years and years of their lives out of religious motivation, I guess. And in the end, they will get there. But it's a hell of a job. Well, it's a heavenly job to them, I guess, but it's a hell of a job for anybody else.
That reminds me a story of the famous missionary Matteo Ricci. When he went to China with his mission, he tried to learn the local language and he was more or less successful, but he was the only one among many others who just gave up. In your book, particularly Babel, each chapter, you approach it through a different angle. Let's say, you write differently about Arabic than you did about German. I really like that because each language cannot be approached and told in a similar manner.
Can you tell me about the writing, kind of your approach, how did you choose how to approach writing about languages? Okay, yeah. Babel is a bit like my previous book, Lingo, and I chose this approach when I was writing Lingo in the early 2010s. The reason was that I wanted to reach a non-linguistic audience. I mean, an audience of people, a readership of people who are not necessarily interested in linguistics. But who do enjoy broadening their horizon, read about other countries, other cultures, other people, but they're easily bored.
So, I wanted to create sufficient variety. The thing is, if I write about spelling in one language, I could write about the same subject, spelling, for all the other languages. But the reader doesn't want to have an exhaustive piece of information. They want to have a sort of amuse-bouche, as they say in restaurants, right? Just a little taster. They want a little taster. And for another language, I would choose a very different topic because that topic would be particularly interesting in that language.
Let's say, speed of pronunciation, or in the case of Icelandic, for instance, the lack of change over time, which is a very particularly Icelandic thing. So, I would kind of portray languages by choosing things that are particular to them. But since there are so many languages, I would give an overview of many linguistic issues without boring the reader, or at least that was my objective. I didn't know anything about Icelandic that you mentioned, and it was so interesting to read about the language that hadn't changed over the centuries.
Are there similar languages that haven't, are prone to external influences, let's say, or it is purely geographical things? I think I'm getting your question. You're wondering if some sorts of languages are more prone to change, whereas others are more likely to stay put? Yes, Mandarin, for example, like I think is a language that assimilates foreign elements quite well. I know that Mandarin takes very few loan words. I mean, it has some, especially from Japanese, and I'm sure some from other languages, but because of its very peculiar structure, it doesn't like so much to take loan words.
When you look at the Japanese, or listen to the Japanese, there are words that you clearly can see like that they were borrowed from English. With the Chinese, with Mandarin, my impression was that yes, there are a lot of like borrowing from other languages, but it assimilates what it borrows rather than just copies. You are absolutely right that Japanese is much more given to borrowing words from English these days, but in the past they borrowed lots and lots and lots of words from several Chinese dialects and inverted commas, Chinese languages, and as a Dutch person, I find it fun to tell you that Japanese has quite a few Dutch words as well, because between the, what was it, I think 17th and 19th centuries, the Dutch were the only European nation that was allowed to trade with Japan, so certain European technologies and inventions and phenomena arrived in Japan through the Dutch, and they borrowed the Dutch words for them.
If you look even on Wikipedia, you can find lists of dozens and dozens, perhaps even hundreds of Dutch words in modern Japanese, and I've always found that, well, it's not exactly a source of pride, I mean it was colonialism after all, but it is fun. I think another thing that I found in your book, the word that I used very often in my life, Russian, Voxel, connected like with Voxel, car manufacturer. I was like, how it was right in front of me, and I've never thought about it.
Your chapter on German, and also some of your speeches that I watched on YouTube about German, Swedish, can you tell about language outliers, like the German people consider strange, but at the same time not that strange? To me, personally, German is not at all strange, because it was, I think you could say it was the first foreign language that I learned well, because my first girlfriend was German, and that's of course the best way to learn a language, right? Moreover, German is pretty similar to Dutch, so much of it doesn't sound all that exotic to me.
It was only when I was doing research for Babel, and I came across this article by an American linguist, and now I don't have his name at my fingertips, I'll have to look it up, but he had a German family name actually, but he's American, and he figured out that if you look at German not from a European perspective, but from a global linguistic perspective, you find that it has many characteristics, many features that are somewhat rare in the world, and what he has done is he has taken like 200 or so languages from all over the place, all over the world, including Armenian, by the way, and he has listed them, he has calculated how exceptional many of their features are, or how commonplace, and he has done some calculations, and in the end, in the top 10 of weirdest languages, German was in 10th spot, and well, the numbers eight to, oh sorry, one to eight are mostly fairly small languages, and number nine, there's Armenian, believe it or not, Armenian apparently has quite a few outlandish features, and then there's German in 10th spot, so from a global and kind of objective perspective, it is a strange language, even though to me, and possibly to you, it's not all that remarkable.
Yes, again, it is the familiarity that we mentioned. Another thing, at your TED talk, you mentioned about the bilinguals and how it impacts us, kind of changes our way of thinking. I like your mentioning about gambling, how it stops us from gambling in sense like that, we think in non-native language, it kind of gives us some break, you know. Yeah, that was some research I came across back then when I was preparing my TED talk, that's several years ago, so I really have to think hard where that was again, but I think the idea was that whenever you're speaking a foreign language, there's always a certain degree of, you're always once removed from your direct, from your most direct emotions, so it's easier to stand back, think harder, and make a good decision.
I think that was the reasoning, and well, I mean, that's a very good thing in a situation like gambling, right? I mean, apart from not gambling, which is even better, I think this kind of gambling is probably best. Once you have to think a bit slower. Exactly, and more rationally, probably more rationally. I mean, whenever you speak a foreign language, well, let me speak for myself, but I do not speak any other language than Dutch quite as fluently as Dutch, so I always have to think a bit harder.
I always have to try and think for the right words and make sure not to make grammatical errors, and I suppose that also prevents to some degree making other flaws. It also stops you from going against other kinds of logic. I don't know if you have had the same, but it influences kind of in reverse way as well. Once you have to choose a word more carefully in a foreign language, you start thinking about the words that you use in your native language.
You know, you are saying, should I use this word instead of that? It will be more precise, more true. My wife often complains that I am too precise, both in my own wording, but also in what I try to understand her. I mean, of course, I always try to understand her. I usually do, but sometimes I can think of two interpretations, and then I ask her, do you mean A or B? And she says, of course, I mean B.
Isn't that obvious? I said, no, it's not obvious, because it could be A. Well, okay, I suppose you're right, but this is so unnerving. I've got a similar thing. My wife is English, and she speaks English, and when she says something, I'm like, specify what exactly do you mean? It's interesting how you find different interpretations to the same thing, and you kind of watch out your own language. Well, earlier on, you said that the polyglot community consists of very nice people, but I'm not sure if people outside the polyglot community always agree.
Yeah, that's true. About language learning, if we go on YouTube or anywhere, there are so many apps or people who try to say, learn language fast, right now, in 10 days, particularly in Russian. Up till now, I get adverts saying, learn English in a month. What do you think about generally language learning and how it's kind of marketed to people in a sense that, can you learn language in a week? Absolutely not. I mean, I do think that it is possible to learn to read a related language.
I mean, if you speak Russian, as you do, I'm sure that you can learn to read, let's say, Czech in a week. That's probably possible. You will not read it perfectly, but you will have a fairly good idea of what a given text says. But that's about it. I mean, all these claims about learning it in a week or in a month or in five minutes, it's basically just publicity lies. I mean, it's commercial lies. And even apps like Duolingo or a more serious one, a much more expensive one like Rosetta Stone, I mean, they have their use.
They're useful. They help. But it's never enough. I mean, as we discussed before, you always need the conversation, the practice. You always need to make the errors in practice because you will remember the mistakes you made. And you have to automate. I'm not sure if this is quite the correct English word, but I would say you have to automate or automatize. Automatize, I think is the word. All these grammatical constructions, you have to automatize the vocabulary.
It takes time. I hope you are enjoying my conversation with Gaston. And before we continue, I wanted to say that this episode is kindly sponsored by Audible. I've been an Audible subscriber for seven years now. I don't think that there is any subscription service that I used so consistently for so long. If you want to give it a try, you can get 30 days free trial by clicking the link in the description of this episode. And that will give you an access to one free Audible book that you can keep forever.
And you can choose any book from the hundreds of thousands of books that are available on Audible. If you are interested, if you like reading, give it a try. And now let's continue with the rest of the episode. Ironically, when you mentioned Czech, I used to live in Prague for five, six years and I did my university. Okay, so that was not a good example. I should have said Bulgarian perhaps. No, but you're right. Because when I was learning, I did a language course in Prague when I just moved in.
And yes, a lot of words from Russian and it definitely made it easier to learn Czech. While speaking Russian. But another thing that I noticed is that after the language course was the most useless way to learn the language. Because after five, six years while living, you encounter the language, you interacted, you're forced to speak. You're forced to get drunk in Prague because they have wonderful beer. I assume there are two ways we can learn the language.
One is to sit down and learn the words and the grammar, which is important. But at the same time, there is a kind of other active way of learning language. That's what I had with Czech. Any of the languages that you learned, how did you feel like when you kind of learned it not through a book, but... Well, that's what happened with German. And that was possible because German is closer to Dutch. I mean, it's like Czech and Russian, I guess.
And I had all these social interactions with this friend who later on became my girlfriend. I mean, we would have... I was 12 when I met her and I was 15 when we fell in love. So, we would talk a lot and we felt safe. I mean, it was a friendship, right? So, then you don't mind so much making mistakes. But it's really scary to walk into a shop and start speaking to people in a language that you're only just learning.
And they may laugh at you, or they may just not try to understand you. And we shouldn't care, but it is scary. So, finding friends or perhaps co-students who make you feel, who accept you and with whom you can just chat. And that chatting is at the same time practice, but you don't do it for practice's sake, you do it for chatting's sake. My wife constantly says like, oh, I need to learn either Russian or Armenian because in family, Russian is more useful language.
That's why it's in your Babel book because it's one of the languages that you need to learn if you want to encounter, to speak with many people. While Armenian is very limited, only 5 to 10 million people speak to that. But at the same time, she feels very uncomfortable when she speaks with me any of those languages because she says, oh, am I making a mistake here? I say, no, it's fine. It's fine. Like just practice.
So, yes, it's really hard to find. Yeah. And of course, I don't know your wife, but I know that many English speakers are even more embarrassed about speaking foreign languages than speakers of small languages like Dutch people or Armenians because we are more used to having to make fools of ourselves just because so few people speak Dutch or Armenian. And there's also a very strong tradition of language learning in the Netherlands and I guess also in Armenia.
Whereas in Britain and the United States, that tradition is much weaker and people do not know. They're profoundly uncomfortable. It creates a different culture and different personalities in a sense that if you are ready to take a risk to dive in into someone's culture while making a fool of yourself, it creates different types of people and different approaches and views to life. What do you think? How Dutch people are different, let's say, by being bilingual? Well, yeah.
Well, the Dutch nowadays are mostly bilingual, really. I mean, most Dutch people speak, have fairly good English, acceptable English, but there's no longer a very strong tradition of learning German or French or other languages. And English is ubiquitous here in the Netherlands. So, it doesn't really feel like all that foreign a language anymore. So, perhaps we are not the best example to answer your question. No, you know, in your book, for example, you also mentioned Swahili and how, yeah, you know, there is multilingual, like multilinguality is just like essential, otherwise you won't be able to communicate between each other.
So, it again creates another culture. Yeah, the linguistic culture that you find in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, that is really something. I mean, because most people there learn several languages, but they learn them in practice on the street. They learn them while talking with neighbors, on the marketplace. And there is a very strong tradition of, well, we speak different languages, but we'll just have to understand each other. So, let's do our best. And I use your words, and you use mine, and we don't laugh at each other.
So, I may be idealizing the situation a bit, but that is roughly what it feels like. And that is something that we've lost in Europe. I mean, even in smaller countries like Holland and, say, Denmark, where it's a given that you will need to learn English and maybe something else, we have this very educational approach, like you learn English in school, and you may learn some German and French in school. But mostly, that's not what people do in Africa.
I mean, they may speak, let's say, Luwo at home, and then they will speak Luganda and Swahili in different situations. And that is really so enviable. I really envy that. Why do you think it's changing? Because, like, my father speaks many languages, speaks six. When I asked him why did he learn so many languages, among the many reasons is that English wasn't enough. Back in his time, English was dominant and a big language, of course. But right now, today, do you think that this multilinguality is changing because English is becoming more and more kind of media, international, everything is in English? One of my colleagues at work said that, you know, what's the point of learning any other languages since everything is in English, you know? Yeah, well, there are two questions.
Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right that if your father were a young man today, he might prefer to learn just English and maybe then something else for fun. But he wouldn't, he would perhaps not need, feel that he needs all these other languages so much. As for your colleague, who's probably an English monolingual, I guess, he or she has a very instrumental approach to language. I mean, it's true that you can find most information in English nowadays.
But you will be missing out on the experience of discovering a different culture. And you will be missing out on the experience of approaching one thing in two different ways, which may not be awfully important, but it is sort of instructive. I do find it's a useful experience to have. So, I'm not going to say that monolinguals are impoverished or anything like that. But they are missing out on things that are really interesting and somewhat important.
I don't want to exaggerate it, but I think somewhat important. These are two different approaches to life. One is like very utilitarian. Like, I'm in France. I don't speak French. I have to learn French. That's my experience with Czech language when I was in Czech Republic. So, it was kind of utilitarian. While there is another approach of self-improvement, of being able to learn in order to expand yourself culturally, look at the world through a different angle.
It's a bit like the difference between training and education. I mean, you can have a training that will allow you to find a good job, etc. For that, you will only need English. But for education, for making yourself a more complete human being, I would always recommend learning at least one additional language. Maybe more if you're interested, but at least one, just to have that experience. Since I started learning French, and the best way is to read books that you already know.
Yeah, I discovered that the book sounded completely different. Like, in the translations, like, are completely, I think, a completely different flavor to the book. I think, like, the way that people phrase their thoughts in each language is completely different. Yeah, partly that, but it might also be the case that you, as the reader, have different associations and connotations with those words, even though the translation is perfect, and maybe even quite, well, not literal, but as literal as it should be.
But you, as the reader, are adding layers, layers and layers, and therefore, to you, it feels as if it were different. Your books, they were translated into several languages. And did you notice any differences in the translation? Of course, it's a non-fiction book, and non-fiction is more precise than a fiction book. But did you notice any differences in the translations? Oh, absolutely. One very important difference was that some of the translations were strongly localized, as it's known.
So, it was, certain elements were added or taken out to make it appear to the reader of the translation as if the book had been written in their language. That was the case in German and in Norwegian, and I think there's a lot to be said in favor of that. On the other hand, the Russian translation, for instance, was very literal, and I think the Swedish one as well. So, if you read the Russian edition of Lingo, and I guess also Babel, you're basically reading an English book, a British book even, in Russian words.
And then there was the Spanish case where the translator maintained, kept all the original wording in Spanish, of course, then, but added paragraphs to explain things, which is okay. It's a neat idea, and it worked reasonably. So, yeah, the translators worked in very different manners. It also led to some funny situations, by the way, because in Lingo, the Russian chapter in Lingo explains to the English reader what the Cyrillic alphabet is like, how the letters are pronounced, how they can be memorized by comparing them to Greek, etc.
Okay, that was good and fine for the English reader, but then the Russian translator translated that quite literally. So, now, in the end, I, who do not speak Russian and cannot read Russian apart from the letters, am explaining to the Russian reader how to read Cyrillic. I mean, I found that quite hilarious. That's actually, like, I haven't thought about it since I read it in English. I haven't thought about it, how to translate the chapter on that, you know.
That's interesting. Yeah, explaining someone their own language is interesting. I wanted to ask you about, you obviously have a blog where you have, like, a lot of interesting articles about languages and their intricacies. Is there another third book coming up anytime soon? Well, it's not coming up. I wouldn't say that. I have been thinking about a third international book, because I also write books for the Dutch market, which cannot really be translated. It wouldn't make sense to translate them.
I do have plans for a future third international book, and it's not even all that hard to guess what it will be about after European languages and big languages. It might be something like global languages, but small ones, something on those lines, and I'm still developing the ideas, and I suppose I will start writing it in, like, two years' time, and then hopefully I will finish it in, like, five years' time, so don't keep your breath.
Is that the way you approach the writing? I mean, like, does it take a lot of time, or do you do a lot of traveling to encounter...? No, it's not that. It's not that, but the writing of the translation... Yeah, well, the production of Lingo, let's say, was a very intense process, for reasons that I would rather not go into. Then the British publisher asked me to write Babel, and that, again, was a very, very intense process, with lots of research.
It was also the first time that I wrote a book directly in English, which I've never done before, and after that I was just tired, and I didn't feel the enthusiasm and the sparkle that I needed to write something interesting. I mean, I could have started on my new project, but I felt that it would just not be good enough, that it would lack the sparkle that Lingo and Babel hopefully do have, so I decided to start on different, on smaller projects, and once I have recovered from writing Babel, I'm sure I will start on the new project, and actually, I feel that the enthusiasm is returning now.
So, yes, I'm pretty sure that if I have the energy and I have the years to do it, I will write that. Okay, before hitting the stop button, I just wanted to thank you for coming. It was a pleasure talking to you. You're welcome, thank you. Speaking about languages is one of the favorite activities. Thank you so much, and looking forward to your next book, which is still in planning, but hopefully it will... Yeah, I should mention that my latest Dutch book called The Dutchnerry, the one that my wife gave me this beautiful decoration for, that will be translated into English, but it will mostly be interesting for people who have some sort of connection to the Netherlands, because it is about English expressions that have the word Dutch in them, like Dutch courage, and double Dutch, and talk like a Dutch uncle, and there are quite a few of those.
There are a few dozen that are still being used nowadays. There are even a few hundreds that were used in the past. So, for anybody who has some sort of interest in the Netherlands, that will be an interesting book. Otherwise, not so much. Thank you, everyone, for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Before we go, I wanted to mention that every guest has their own blog page on our website. On these blog pages, I compile all the interesting references that they've made, so you won't have to bookmark or stop the podcast to find anything.
So, if you want, just click on the link that is in the description of this episode, and you'll be headed straight to the website with all the references that Gaston made during the interview. I also wanted to mention that I write a newsletter every month, and I recommend books, which I think you might find interesting as well, but I also send some updates on this podcast, on some extra material. I also share my writing. I write about art, I analyze art, and my recent article is about Francisco de Goya, the great Spanish painter, and his famous black paintings.
So, if you would like to get all the recommendations and all the updates straight into your inbox every month, you can subscribe to my newsletter, and you'll find my newsletter in the same link that I mentioned before, which is in the description of the podcast. Once again, I wanted to thank you for listening to this podcast, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye!
