Catholic English

(Note: This is an updated version of the audio to fix a problem, it should be 38mins long.)

Here is the first episode of the Catholic English Podcast. You can play the audio using the player above, and read the transcript (text) below. If you want to, you can download the text in pdf format for printing (link above).

The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts and other podcast platforms. (I personally use and recommend Pocket Casts. You can download the app from the Google Play Store here.)

Introduction

Hello, and a very warm welcome to the Catholic English Podcast. I’m your host, Henry, and I’m very happy to be here with you and finally start this project.

Since this is the first episode, some introductions are necessary. You can find all this on our website www.catholicenglish.org where you can also sign up to receive email updates and find other courses that I provide.

So what is Catholic English? It’s a service for people who want to learn English – especially if you want the help of Jesus, Mary and Joseph – together with the rest of the saints.

Jesus came to us to open our eyes and ears and to help us change ourselves and live better lives. The Holy Spirit and the communion of saints continue offering us this help in all things, big and small, and they can surely help us to learn English.

Anyone is welcome to use this service. You don’t have to be a Catholic or even Christian. The original meaning of catholic was universal – since Jesus sent out his apostles not only to the Jews, but to the whole world.

The basic material used by Catholic English is writing by and about the saints, and the text of the bible. We do live in the modern world however, and when we feel the need we will be looking at modern texts – but always with Catholic eyes and a Catholic heart.

Often people try to make a distinction between their life in the church and the rest of their life. I’ve found that the lessons I’ve learned from my reading of the saints and the bible have a direct impact on my whole life. I’d like to share these insights with you.

Hopefully this will be interesting material that will motivate you to learn English and, with the grace of God, other useful life lessons too.

How to Learn English

So, how are we going to do this? What is the best way to learn English, and what’s the best way for us to work together to help you? We need to agree on a method and approach. We need to understand our responsibilities.

I’ve been guided over the last few years by some wise and sensible language learners and teachers: Piotr from www.realpolish.pl, and Steve Kaufmann who you can find on YouTube or at www.thelinguist.com. They use and advocate what they call the ‘natural’ method of learning languages. This natural method is based on how children learn their mother tongues, their mother languages: lots of listening (for years) then lots of mistakes as they clumsily try to copy and repeat the words they’re half hearing. Children don’t usually start learning the grammar of their native language for another five to eight years – if at all.

Luckily for us, we are already experts at at least one language, and we have lots of tools, experience and strategies that we can use, so we can learn new languages like English with a lot less crying and frustration that the average 2 year old!

Piotr and Steve shared ‘7 secrets of language learning’ and I’d like to share these with you, followed by some reflections on how these secrets could be re-interpreted in a more religiously inspired way. In fact it seems to me that most of the good advice that is offered in the world today is a kind of weaker version of the advice which the prophets, Jesus, and the saints have been giving us for thousands of years.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’ll return to this idea later, for now let’s focus on these 7 secrets. Here they are, as told by Piotr and Steve:

1. Spend time with the language.

The suggested target for an adult language learner is one hour per day. Don’t get too worried – you don’t have to achieve this straight away, and there are various strategies for how to get there. However, learning languages takes time, and if you’re serious about learning English, you need to give it time.

You also need to know, and to remember, that this one hour a day doesn’t include time spent in class or time trying to solve grammar problems or to get into the diamond league in Duolingo. It’s an hour of really spending time with the language, listening and reading, paying attention, speaking and writing.

So this is the first secret: try to spend an hour a day really trying to get friendly and familiar with the language.

2. Do what you enjoy.

Both Piotr and Steve enjoy listening and reading, and I do too. Some people prefer going into the city or the workplace and simply talking to people right from the beginning. Others enjoy watching films.

The point is that if you’re aiming for an hour a day spent with the language, then you have to feel happy about what you’re doing. It’s very hard to spend an hour a day in front of a text book reading about grammar and filling in gaps in sentences – it’s just not enjoyable.

If you enjoy hearing about the Saints, if you want to spend a little more time on the Christian path, if you have a mission in life which requires you to be able to read or communicate in English, then these podcasts could be really good for you. If your passion is banking and finance, maybe search for a podcast related to that instead.

The second secret is: the learning will be more effective if you do what you enjoy.

3. Pay attention.

This one’s very interesting and very important for me. We all know that it’s possible to read a book and suddenly realise that our mind has wandered and we have no idea what we’ve been reading. It’s similarly possible to be listening to a podcast, and suddenly realise that we haven’t really been listening.

But paying attention is more than not drifting off into other thoughts. We really have to focus on the language, on the words, how they fit together, patterns, rhythms, idioms, pronunciation. There is a lot going on in any language. We can learn it all, and eventually master it, but this doesn’t happen all at once.

At first we learn some things and ‘half-learn’ others. After the initial stage, our learning is obviously a process of building on these foundations. We have to pay attention to the language we’re reading or listening to, and we have to notice useful and interesting things – notice the patterns, the contexts the words are used in, new meanings and understandings, contrasts with other things, and mistakes we’ve previously made which we now have the potential to correct.

Really all of our learning depends on this noticing. We notice the things we are ready to learn. No teacher can teach us exactly what we need, only we can notice the next word, the next phrase, the next piece that fits on our unique foundation and moves us towards becoming fluent language users.

The third secret, then, is pay attention to the language – and notice the new things you’re ready to learn.

4. Words are more important than grammar.

If you’ve ever tried talking to someone in a foreign language, you’ll know this from experience. If you don’t know a word, you can’t explain yourself. Making a few grammar errors isn’t such a big problem though. The most important thing is communication.

You really need to try to pick up (to learn) as many words as possible. The best way is through lots of reading and listening. Listening helps you to hear a lot of words in a shorter time, and a lot of what you hear will be understood through the context. It’s really good to listen to the same thing a few times. Steve suggests that you shouldn’t move on until you understand at least 80% of what you’re listening to.

Reading is slower and more exact. While you’re reading you can look up words and phrases using online dictionaries, or even translate whole sentences and paragraphs. You will find that however you learn new words, grammar will come naturally through the ways that the words are commonly linked and put together.

You should really try to take notes of new words and phrases and practice writing and speaking if you can. Remember that the context that a word is used in is very important, especially in English where many words look the same but have different meanings and pronunciation. For any new word that interests you, note down a fragment of text where you can see the word in it’s natural context. This is the beginning of writing, but eventually more ambitious writing will really help you to gain mastery in your new language.

Grammar is a description of how words are put together into sentences to form meaning. It’s good to study some grammar from time to time, but if you focus too much on learning and using correct grammar it can make it more difficult to have natural conversations with other people. Plus you’ll quickly learn that most native speakers use English very differently form the ways that are taught in schools and grammar text books.

So learn words, words, words, and be more relaxed about the grammar is the fourth secret of learning languages.

5. Be patient.

We need to remember that learning a new language usually takes years. I remember really feeling I was learning a lot of English (my native language) when I started writing seriously in my late twenties. Now I’m in my fifties and I’m still learning.

When we start learning foreign languages we see all sorts of books and courses which promise amazing results in a few weeks, but really for most of us this is just a dream. In reality it takes months and years of consistent effort – and you need to know this when you start out.

It also helps to be aware that at the beginning, we feel like we’re learning quickly, but once we’ve covered the basics everything slows down a lot, and can feel very frustrating. At the intermediate level we can study sometimes for months without feeling that we’re making progress, but we have to be patient and believe that we are. In fact, if we go back to some of our earlier notes and podcasts we will be able to see our progress, and we really are doing valuable and effective work.

Another thing that happens is that we often forget what we learned yesterday or last week or last month. This is life. That’s how our brain works. We have to learn things many times before they become a part of us, so we simply know them without thinking or remembering. Before we get there we have to forget our words many times. We need to know the process and be patient.

Finally we will get through the intermediate stage, and then using and learning English will become a pleasure again as we become more and more fluent. Throughout our learning, we need to find ways to take pleasure in the language – listen to interesting things, things you want to share with your friends, learn useful life lessons along the way. These things will help you get through the long and difficult intermediate stage of learning.

So be patient, and you’ll have mastered the fifth secret of learning languages.

6. Use appropriate tools.

Learning languages is so much easier today than it was 40 or 400 years ago. Now most of us carry powerful little computers around with us, and we can download podcasts, mp3 files, dictionaries, books and apps that all help us to find interesting content, understand it, and learn flexibly, consistently and effectively.

We should really use these resources to help us to achieve our language learning goals, but take care. Is your chosen app really helping you to progress as quickly as you could, and to reach the vocabulary that you need in your life? Is your translator giving accurate and usable translations.

What are your goals, your needs, and which of the thousands of options is really helpful and appropriate?

You’ll have to spend some time exploring and checking. Don’t get stuck with one solution. Your needs and interests might change, and you should change your tools to fit your needs. If Catholic English suits you, then that’s great, if not, then go and find something that’s better for you.

Therefore, the sixth secret of learning languages is – use appropriate tools.

7. Learn independently.

Everyone has different needs, different interests and different goals – and only you know your individual needs, interests and goals. This means that YOU are the best person to manage YOUR learning.

It may seem like we need a teacher, an expert, to guide us. Someone who knows the answers and can tell them to us. This may work in the maths classroom where there is a right answer and there is agreement about what it is.

However, language is a skill, like playing an instrument, or riding a bicycle. No one can tell you all the theory of playing the violin, and then expect you to be able to play a Mozart concerto. You have to practice and practice and practice.

A teacher can certainly guide you, inspire you, motivate you, but in the end it’s YOU who is responsible for all your learning. The sooner you take responsibility for your learning, the better the results will be.

A simple example might be that you have decided to listen to a recording in English every day for a month, but today you just don’t have the energy… The more you let yourself avoid the responsibilities that you’ve given yourself, the harder it’s going to be to achieve your goals, whether that’s in learning English, doing your job, going to Mass, etc.

On the other hand, taking responsibility in your life, in every aspect of your life, generally improves health, relationships and learning.

So, take responsibility, learn independently, and you’ve got the seventh and last secret to learning languages.

Let’s do a quick summary of these seven secrets:

1. Spend time with the language

2. Do what you enjoy

3. Pay attention

4. Words are more important than grammar

5. Be patient

6. Use appropriate tools

7. Learn independently

What do you think of them? I’m personally very grateful for this advice, and it seems to me to be sensible and useful.

I also feel inspired to look at the advice in a slightly different way, to say it in a different way, and to see if, through this, our inspiration can grow even bigger.

A Catholic version of the rules for learning a language

So let’s try to rethink these rules from a slightly less worldly and slightly more Catholic perspective. The following rules (I’m sorry, but I don’t want to call them secrets any more) are about our faith and our life. If learning English has come into our life, then it would be good if these rules can support our faith, our life, and our learning in one integrated whole.

Please don’t take these rules too seriously. I’m just a simple English teacher and I’m not pretending to have found some big secret. Let’s just think about how the rules might sound, and hopefully learn a little more English along the way.

1. Spend time with your faith.

At least an hour a day for adults. This time can be spent in any language – God understands them all, and even if you’re not fluent yet, He knows what you’re thinking better than you do anyway.

Wait, you might be thinking, spend at least an hour a day with my faith? That’s a lot of time, and I’ve got a busy life. But our religion, our faith, requires time. In fact, it requires a lifetime of practice. There are many ways of spending this hour a day – we’ll hear lots about them in future episodes of this podcast, and if you want to learn English and learn more about our faith, then this podcast could be just what you’re looking for.

So this is the first rule: try to spend an hour a day really trying to get friendly and familiar with your faith.

2. Follow your heart and do what’s good

Don’t do what you enjoy – this is not the path to sainthood! I have two ways of rewriting this: Follow your heart, because that’s where you receive God’s guidance; or, Do what’s Good (not what’s easy). We’ve heard these rules before and we know they’re good.

They apply to learning English as well as to life. If your heart says ‘Learn English,’ maybe because you need it for your evangelisation or missionary work, or simply because it will be an important part of your life and communication with other people, then learn it.

Actually these two things go together: follow your heart AND do what’s good. Sometimes we can be mislead by our hearts, and we need to check that what we hear really is coming from God. We’ll get some more advice about this in the next episode of the podcast.

3. Hear, see (pay attention).

As Jesus said “Let anyone with ears to hear, listen!” (Mark 4:9; 4:23; Luke 8:8; 14:35), and “Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear?” (Mark 8:18)

Listen, look, hear and see. Pay attention in life as well as in English lessons. Again, I’ll have more to say about this in the next episode.

4. Love is more important than law.

“God is Love” (1 John 4:16). We communicate with people with love and for love, and, especially when we speak, we make grammar errors even in our native languages, but no one minds. Love is certainly more important than grammar.

Grammar is like the law of language, how we put the words together correctly. St Paul showed us that it was possible to know everything about the law, but still make mistakes. Thankfully Jesus fulfilled the law and showed us the way of love.

St Francis de Sales had a lot to say about love, which is why he’s known in the Catholic Church as the Doctor of Divine Love. We’ll be hearing more about him and his wise and holy advice in the third episode of the podcast.

5. Be virtuous.

Patience is certainly a good virtue, and the Church and the saints have a lot to teach us about patience, and many other virtues too. Humility is perhaps the greatest virtue, and the humble are always patient. Practice humility and life’s problems won’t seem so great, and you will slowly but surely learn English.

6. Use appropriate tools.

Our appropriate tools are: go to Mass, pray, read Holy Scripture and the saints, spend time in adoration, call on the help of Mary, or your guardian angel. The saints have lots of particular advice that could be collected in this category. For example the spiritual bouquet of St Francis de Sales.

We must remember to be patient here too. We can’t manage to do everything at once, and God doesn’t expect us to. Sometimes we find a tool that seems appropriate, but we can’t keep up with it, or we forget it. Don’t worry. If these practices are right for you, they will find a place in your life, eventually. If not, just keep on listening to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and you will find the tools that are appropriate for you.

7. Learn the lessons life offers you.

Anyone can be your teacher at any time, often the poorest and most powerless. Experts can sometimes be good teachers, but don’t turn them into idols and don’t expect them to give you all the answers. At the same time, remember that we are all branches on the one vine. That means that we’re all connected and in reality there’s no such thing as independence from other people. It partly depends on our stage in life. As Jesus said to Peter: “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (John 21:18).

Another piece of saintly advice that fits in here is to be responsible. If you know that you should do something, do it. Don’t put it off until sometime in the future, and don’t wait for someone else to do it. This seems to be a much deeper and more respectful attitude than the modern ‘be independent’ (which implicitly means ‘don’t care about other people.’) We’ll talk more about this in episode 2 of the podcast.

---

Lonergan’s Four Imperatives

Finally, I think that we’ve got some time to look at some related advice from a real Catholic visionary, Bernard Lonergan SJ (1904-1984), a Canadian priest, theologian and philosopher.

The four imperatives¹ of Lonergan’s method are strikingly similar² to some of the secrets of Steve Kaufmann. I said earlier that it seems to me that most of the good advice that is offered in the world today is a kind of weaker version of the advice which the prophets, Jesus, and the saints have been giving us for thousands of years.

Nowadays academics and writers obviously spend a lot of time learning and thinking and writing, and through this, and through the process of academic checking and competition, some ideas are published which become widely known in the world. One popular recent example of this is the work of Jordan B. Peterson (to take another Canadian example). But where do his 12 Rules of Life really come from? Should we believe them, and if so why? If we’re looking at these rules from a Catholic perspective, do they support our faith, or contradict it?

Similar questions could be asked of our seven secrets of language learning, or my loosely Catholic version of these rules. The Church says, and I think we would agree, that a better standard of value, of truth, better than this worldly agreement, publication and popular acceptance, is something like the imprimatur, the confirmation that a book has been thoroughly and prayerfully checked by a competent authority (usually a Bishop) and doesn’t contain any advice that is contrary to scripture.

Lonergan’s four imperatives are deeply rooted in the Catholic Tradition, and by thinking about them and using them, we know we’re on safe and solid ground.

I must admit that I haven’t read Lonergan’s work. I’m grateful to Bishop Robert Barron for his exposition³ of these imperatives in his book The Strangest Way (2021). As Bishop Barron is describing Lonergan’s method, he reminds us that Christians should ‘take seriously what Aquinas said concerning God’s immanence in all things, “by essence, presence, and power,” and that they see, consequently, everything as saturated with the divine.’

We can see then, for example, that Steve Kaufmann is saturated by the divine (like we all are, and, especially, all our neighbours) whether he knows it or not, whether he spends hours in daily prayer or not. Being saturated with the divine, some divine things are going to come out in his life, in his writing, in his advice. Being a businessman in the modern world, some less divine things are also bound to come out.

As travellers on the roads of life in this modern, or postmodern world, how do we find the divine truth, and how do we distinguish it from the less divine things that we’re also constantly exposed to? This, in many ways, is the goal of this podcast series. To look at divine truth, as given us through the Bible, and as shown us by the saints, and to look at our lives in this world, and see how they fit together, and how we might therefore, a little better at least, find our way through this life.

So what are Lonergan’s four imperatives? They are firstly, be attentive, then, be intelligent, be reasonable, and finally, be responsible. Do you see the connection with Kaufmann’s secrets? Let’s look in more detail.

1. Be attentive

Maybe this is something very simple, or maybe something very ‘elusive’ to use Bishop Barron’s word. If something is elusive, that means that it’s very difficult to catch, that it keeps escaping from us. The world is in front of us to see, but we’re so stuck in our habitual ways of seeing, we’re so keen to agree with the ways our family, our friends, or our role models see things, that it can be really hard to really see (it can be very hard to in reality see – note the two different meanings of really here).

Barron notes that for Lonergan many scientists fail (‘go off the rails’ like a train in an accident) not because they’re not intelligent enough, “but because they get their data wrong; they don’t look.” He also notes that many people lose their way at this first stage in their spiritual life – because they don’t look.

2. Be intelligent

Once you begin to see, you need to begin to see the patterns, the connections, the forms that give coherence to the world. This is connected, for Lonergan, to ‘insight’, to that ‘aha, I see!’ moment. Christians, knowing what they know about the Bible, the liturgy, the saints and the Tradition, have insights when they see the links with their own experiences.

3. Be reasonable

This is maybe the most important step. If you’ve managed to be attentive, to see and hear, and to intelligently put everything together, having insights, now you have to make decisions.

Once we start having ideas or insights, we can begin to have lots of them. I’m sure most of us can look back at our younger selves and remember having some kind of insight, thinking how clever we were. If you wrote it down, and then looked back on it five or ten years later, the chances are that it then looked naive and embarrassing. The thing is, that among these insights, we need to be able to judge which are true and good and worth keeping, and which are not.

“Many people, Lonergan thinks, are wonderfully attentive and insightful, but they lack this crucial third intellectual quality of discrimination: they can never finally make up their minds.” (Barron)

There are many important notes that I could include here about how to decide, but we haven’t got time today. This really is the subject of the next podcast, about St Ignatius of Loyola, who made known in the Catholic world the whole process of discernment⁴.

So for now we’ll move on to…

4. Be responsible

Once we have been attentive, intelligent and reasonable, we know the truth, but the truth isn’t just an abstract concept – it’s a call to action – we must respond. Here the saints give amazing examples again and again, like St Maximillian Kolbe who sacrificed himself to save another man, or St Stephen who testified in the name of Jesus Christ and was stoned to death, to name only two.

Of course the actions we’re called to are not limited to dying heroic deaths, they include many many simple everyday things, showing our love for Christ and our neighbour, sacrificing our worldly false self to ‘put on’ the Christ inside us (cf. Romans 13:14). The point is that to be responsible, we have to respond to the truth, however uncomfortable it might be. The joyful truth is, the more we manage to respond to the truth, the more natural and joyful it becomes.

Conclusion

This is our method then, for learning English, for providing these podcasts, this service, and for hopefully finding other, Catholic, ways of seeing, insights, ways of making decisions and taking action. Your responsibility is to follow these rules, as far as you are able. My responsibility is to regularly produce and provide interesting and understandable content for you to use.

Congratulations to all of you who have managed to stay listening to the end. I encourage you to listen again, to read the transcript which is available for free on the website www.catholicenglish.org, especially to listen and read at the same time if possible, to make notes, to look up unfamiliar words and phrases in a dictionary, to comment, ask questions.

I have lots of ideas for podcasts already. This first one has been a lot of work and has taken a lot of time, even though it’s still full of my errors. I truly feel and believe however that I am called to provide this service through the intercession of Mary, and that means that I must do it, and that I will receive the necessary strength to struggle through and succeed. I’m aiming for a new podcast every two weeks, and with the help of Mary, the Holy Spirit and my guardian angel, I feel full of hope.

Goodbye for now, and God bless.

---

Footnotes

1. If something is imperative (adjective) that means it’s very important and/or urgent. An imperative (noun) is a part of grammar, or an order, a command: e.g. ‘Go to bed!’ or ‘Be attentive!’ ↩︎
2. Strikingly similar means both very similar, and also that the similarity strikes us or hits us – it gets our attention. E.g. Have you seen the twins? They’re strikingly similar! ↩︎
3. An exposition is a clear description and explanation of something. ↩︎
4. To discern is to see something that is difficult to see. Discernment in the Christian sense is the process of discerning the will of God. ↩︎