EBTB #1: Us born in the 80s are nostalgic by nature

Hi and welcome to the podcast that will help you learn English. Yes, we said it. This is it! This is the ultimate podcast for you to make the progress you need in English. 

My name’s Rohit and I’d like to welcome you to our first episode of The English Alternative with Rohit, brought to you by GoGetter English. The main aim of our podcast will be just to do whatever, whatever, no matter what is in our hand to help you learn English, once and for all. It’s about time someone did it.

No, our intention isn’t just to TEACH English, no, we’ll help you overcome those psychological barriers that you yourself have put up and we’ll also try to help you discover how you can learn English in a way that is comfortable and at the same time suitable to you. of course, This doesn’t mean that you are just going to sit back and relax while you listen to this wonderful podcast. What we want you to do is to stop wasting time with the methods that don’t work for you and start investing time in the ones that do. 

So, if you’d let us, we’d love to show you how you can maximize your learning capacity while learning English. So it’s my pleasure to Welcome you to the English Alternative.

I’ll be your host, my name’s Rohit and the first thing I want to do is tell you how we think we might be able to help you. The first thing I must warn you about is that there isn’t a magic potion, no trick to learn English, but I’m sure you know that already. If you want to speak English the way you speak your mother tongue, all you need and can do is PRACTISE. Practise a lot. And this is the stage many people get confused at. People, think practising is simply doing some exercises from a book, watching series and movies, reading books. Well, so yes, these are great ways to practise, but haven’t you noticed, if you’re listening to this, you yourself might think that although you do all the things I just mentioned, these might not be working. Well, the reason for that is very simple, and it’s because, drum roll. 

YOU MIGHT NOT BE DOING IT THE RIGHT WAY. It’s like when you go to the gym and you have no coach to guide you. You end up doing a not-so-great-job while working out. You have all the equipment, machinery, weights, everything, and still you can see your belly hardly working against gravity. Well, then get yourself a coach. With English learning something very similar happens. You have all the resources, really, you literally millions of places you could learn English from, and still you might have trouble with some areas. Well, that’s exactly where we come in. That’s what we’ve been doing for a really long time. We select the best content for you, so you can learn what you want and the way you learn best. Our intention is to also show you other ways in which you can expand your learning abilities especially while learning English.

Of course, we’ll be talking about the best books you can read to improve, the best series, or rather the episodes that you can watch and the movies you can enjoy. We’ll also be talking about apps that will help you learn English, and apps that will help you in general. We’ll also talk about magazines, blogs, youtube, music, everything that can help you learn English faster and better. Anything that we find that is interesting to you, is what we’ll bring you in this weekly podcast. If you’re in for some fun and some learning, this is the place you need to be, this is the place where you’ll learn English.

So let’s go with our first podcast of the season. Todayyy in the English Alternative we’d like to talk about something I just can’t get rid of and I can’t really understand why. Today I’d like to talk about Nostalgia and how inevitably it is to all of us born in the 80s. We tend to be nostalgic about everything. Actually, there were a couple of things that got me thinking about this, and they were basically the Red hot chilly peppers and stranger things. Both these things got me thinking about my younger self and how I spent most of my days as a kid. 

So let’s go down memory lane. 

I’ll start by telling you this. I’ve been a gamer all of my life. Of course, not a real gamer. I’ve always played video games, but I can’t consider myself a real gamer for one, because I don’t think I covered my gamer quota in played hours. For sure, I’ve played Super Mario, Mortal Kombat, and many other classics in the video-game galore. Currently, I occasionally play FIFA. I tend to be up-to-date with the latest edition of the game. That means that I play the latest edition of the game, as soon as its released. The whole point of this being that, there was a time back in the 80s in which we all didn’t have a game console at home and we needed to go, you know that place where you could find video games in which a coin was needed to actually play them. Did you think about the name of those places? DO you know it? Every neighbourhood had one. Well if you thought of the word ARCADE that’s exactly the place I spent a lot of time and unfortunately money. Jesus the amount of money I happily spent there.

The money thing was a real issue. Whatever pocket money I got from relatives, I was investing it on a game I wasn’t even decent at. I was either at the arcade or the candy store right next to it, where I was spending my hard-earned treasures But going back to the arcade there was something about that place, right? They all smelled kind of the same. There used to always be a man with a pouch who would not be very ready to give you the change you need it to play your favourite games, ironically, he would always be in such a bad mood. Then I don’t know if you recall that, but there was some kind of code that wasn’t written anywhere from which you knew who was next in line. The code  was simply whoever was next in line would just place their coin (usually a quarter) in a place where you could see it and that’s it. You just knew who was next in line and that was all. Never got into a fight with someone for cutting in line, it was just the code and it was sacred.

But there was one game that for me ruled them all. I was lucky to grow up in Spain. and there was one game that demanded some respect. It was THE GAME. For me it was the most beautiful and fun game of all. and that was the foosball table, or how we like to call it in Spain el futbolin. That game really demanded another level of skill, accuracy, power and teamwork. It was just perfect. And there were different levels of players. You came to know of this when you joined a game and someone set the rules, like no scoring with midfield players, no scoring with the inner-most striker. Stuff like that. Those were some of the most enjoyable moments for me as a kid. You had a great time with friends, and if you didn’t have any friends, it literally took a minute to make some. As you may have guessed, any nostalgic from the 80s misses those days at the arcade for sure.

Hmmm that was nice. It felt really good to talk about arcades with you. It felt great! Let’s see what else we could talk about? Well yeah, there’s this thing that gets me really nostalgic, well, I don’t really know if it’s nostalgia, or me just missing my childhood. Wow that sounds tragic, but well, you know what I feel really nostalgic about making a mix tape. Do you remember those? It would a total act of love when you made a mix-tape for someone. It meant you really liked the person you were making it for. A mixed tape consisted of a cassette you recorded for someone with songs you thought he or she would like. It took a lot of time and effort to actually make a tape, because you needed to record each and every song. 

All mixed tapes started as a blank tape you got from the store or most of the times from a tape you had lying around at home. It could be either a 60-minute-tape or a 90 minute-tape. There was something you essentially needed and that was a tape recorder with an FM or AM dial. You’ll see in just a few seconds why this is important or you could have a double-deck stereo system. People were really successful if they had a stereo system at home that had a double deck. Now, you had two ways to go about filling up that tape. 1. you had all the original songs on different tapes and you needed to play each song on your double-deck, let’s say that deck A would play the original song you wanted to record and deck B would record that song onto your tape. So, if you wanted to record a song, let’s say Billie Jean from Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, you had to search for the song on the original tape and push play on deck A and push record on Deck B to transfer the song onto the new tape you were making for someone special. You needed to stay until the end of the song and stop both deck A and Deck B at the same time. You would often listen to the click of stopping the recording on your mixed tape. Complicated right? Well, that’s all the trouble we went through when showing someone how much you cared. But wait there was another way to record a mixed tape and that was from the radio. Yes, we used to record the songs we didn’t own straight from the radio. The process was quite dodgy, if you will, first you needed to listen to the radio all the time until they played the song you wanted to record, once the radio host announced that your song was coming on, you got the tape ready at the exact position you wanted it to be recorded and then you needed to wait for the bloody host to stop introducing the song and once he did you just hit the record button. The most common thing was to lose the first few seconds of the song. Jesus, That was the struggle back then, and it was real.

Usually a mixed tape was made up of 12 or 13 songs no more and you had to repeat the whole process we just talked about 12 or 13 times that is assuming that all of your tries were successful, it was long, and painstaking, but it was beautiful when you finished one. But the process didn’t just end there, no. The next step was getting creative with the covers. All the tapes we made back then needed to have our signature design. It was a way of saying I made this for you. So, it wasn’t just a collection of songs you put together, it was a work of art. Besides having a top taste in music, my artwork on the covers wasn’t too shabby either. I must say. 

Those were the good old days, weren’t they? I don’t know why I always feel that. Even though now we have playstations and Spotify. Why do I still feel so attached to the past? I have a feeling it was because I was naively happy with the things I used to do. 

Well, well, well, that was our first podcast episode. We really hoped you liked it. It would be great if you could tell me what you liked and what you didn’t about our Podcast, and we promise we’ll try to have a podcast every week. Remember listening to as much English as you can is the best way to learn, and if you listen to us much better.

My name’s Rohit and I’ll catch you in our next episode. The GoGetter Team says see you and don’t forget #beagogetter

tend to be

galore

pocket-money

to recall

come to know

the struggle is real