Learn Australian English in this Aussie English episode of Walking With Pete where I chat about the subscription plans & the 2017 language learning challenge.

WWP: Aussie English Subscription & 2017 Language Learning Challenge

What’s up guys? (I’ll) start the episode with an Aussie Salute. I came out here to the park as usual and there’s just already flies all over me attacking me. Too funny. What was I going to talk about today? So, I’ve got a few things to announce. Firstly, it’s New Years day. So, happy New Years to all of you guys. Thanks for your on-going support. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Thanks everyone on Facebook who’s always engaged and chatting to me. (A) special shout-out to Amir, Ali, Thibault, Juan, Juliana, Vanessa, Estefania, everyone who’s been a real big part of the online community on Facebook. Thanks so much guys, I really appreciate it. Uh! (there’re) flies everywhere.

So, yeah, hope you guys had a really merry Christmas, an awesome Christmas, and I hope… you’re probably still enjoying New Year’s Eve depending on where you live in the world as it’s only New Year’s Day just after lunch, I think it’s early afternoon, so it’s about 4 or 5 o’clock here in Melbourne at the moment.

So, yeah, I had a pretty good night. I had to work unfortunately until probably about 1030PM, but it was pretty good at the end. We had paella, or paella, if you want to say it with an Australian accent, paella the Spanish dish, rice dish with I think it was seafood and it had a bit of chicken in it as well, but it was amazing. We don’t normally get to eat that, but obviously it was a special occasion. So, we had that with some beers after work, we had a few shots, and then we had churros for dessert. So, that was fun. And then I… I feel like I’m feeling my age a little bit, I came home around 1130PM, (I) got changed, (I) had a shower, and then when I came out the fireworks started going off. So, I was sort of able to hear them and see them out the window, but (I) didn’t really go and party after work ‘cause I was incredibly tired after walking around for five hours. So, this was probably one of the least wild New Years for me.

Friggen flies! They’re so invasive.

Yeah, so aside from that I’ve got a few announcements to make. Obviously, I’m trying to set up the monetisation of Aussie English where I will try and create more services for you guys and charge a certain fee depending on what that service is. So, I’ve got quite a few ideas at the moment. I was debating whether or not to make all future transcripts private from now on, and really improve the quality of the transcripts and add a lot of other exercises on there and even daily missions or missions for going out and practicing the vocab that you learn. I’m still thinking of doing that but I’m not 100% sure if I am completely comfortable with not publishing some kind of transcript for you guys, because I don’t really want to take away what I have already given away for free, and I know that a lot of you may not necessarily be able to afford the transcript subscription or maybe you live in a country where you can’t pay online with PayPal or whatever system I set up, or maybe you’re just incredibly young and you don’t have, you know, a bank account and your parents can’t afford… Whatever it is, I feel a bit weird and yeah, I don’t know, I’m not 100% comfortable with taking the stuff that I’ve already started doing and implementing on the podcast away. So, I’m still thinking about it but I’m going to obviously try and talk to you guys more about this and see what you think and what you think is fair.

So, the first idea was to have an Aussie English Supporters subscription, which would be a small amount of money, maybe $5 or $10 a month where for that subscription service you’re just supporting Aussie English at a small scale, but also getting access to all of the really good quality transcripts. So, that would be the small first package.

The next one up would be inclusive of the transcripts as well, and then hopefully include specific Australian related culture, society, whatever it is, an Australian themed episode per month with potentially a review episode of the different vocabulary used in that episode, and then maybe a few other bonuses.

Again, I’m going to try and chat to you guys about this more on Facebook. So, give me some feedback, make sure you let me know what you think, and what I can do for you, how I can add more value to this products from Aussie English, because that’s what I’m here to do at the end of the day. I want to make a living, but I also want to best serve your needs. So, if you have any ideas or suggestions please feel free to let me know. I’m all about doing what you guys want.

And then, so, I wanted to create three packages, the first one being the transcripts, the second one being a bunch of bonus paid only episodes that would be on the website where you get like an Australian themed episode, a break down of the vocabulary, and maybe a few other things like bonus Expression episodes, Like A Native episodes. There would be an episode MP3 and video pack that you would get on a monthly basis. So, you would pay a certain fee, you have access to all the transcripts from the Supporter Pack and then you would have all those episodes, videos and MP3s from the Australian themed set of episodes for Aussie English.

And then, on top of that, I wanted to make a more high premium end subscription service where you get everything below, so you get Pack 1 and obviously Pack 2, so the subscription to the transcripts and then the bonus or the themed episodes and all of the material, the bonus material with that. And then on top of that I was thinking about including maybe an hour lesson or an hour chat with me, you know, whatever amount of time it is, some kind of Skype call that you can do with me online where I can either help you with improving your Aussie English. I can answer any of your personal questions. So, you get to contact me personally and I give you 100% of my attention for a specific amount of time once a month. So, you get to check in with me and I get to check in with you and see how you’re going, answer any of your questions, and potentially come up with a language learning plan that is tailored to what you need personally. So, where if say you are an engineer and you want to move to Australia and you want to learn the engineering vocabulary specifically related to whatever area of engineering you’re doing I can help you with developing a plan for how to go about learning that vocabulary, and any other questions you would have, any other services you would need that I could sort of include in that lesson on Skype. And then each month, as well as obviously getting all the other material that I would have as the subscription stuff on the website we can check in together and I can just keep helping you with ideas, helping you with whatever you need whether it’s specific questions relating to English or language learning questions more generally where you just want to know how you can jazz things up a bit, keep motivated, use different resources online. So, there’s a whole heap of resources online that I use and that I’m going to also spend this year trying to really dive into and get to know better so that I can help you guys use them if you like them, if you want to use them.

So, those were the three packages, the three subscription services that I had been thinking about. Again, this isn’t set in stone. So, it’s not carved in stone, it’s not solidified, it’s not definitely going to be this, because ultimately I’m going to put it up in a survey and see what you guys think and what you guys want. So, I’m going to do that with the pricing as well, because I want you to sort of give me some feedback on the kind of, I guess, worth that you would think these services are, that they’re worth. So, instead of me just deciding on my own I’ll probably set up a survey where you can tell me as it were $5, $10, $100, $1million, you know. I’m going to give you a list of different prices and then use that to help work out how much to charge for these services, because ultimately I don’t want to make ridiculous amounts of money, but I would love to be able to support myself, to be able to make enough to do this full time and better serve your needs and create both paid services as well as more free services for those people who can’t necessarily afford to get on any of these subscription services.

So, that was that part of the announcement that I wanted to make, guys. This will be the Aussie English subscription stuff. I really really hope you guys are keen and interested. Again, give me some feedback, tell me if I’m totally off the mark with what I’m doing, and if you’ve got some better ideas please please please tell me what you think I should do, because at the end of the day I’m here to serve you.

So, that’s that part of the episode that I wanted to get out of the way. The second part was to talk about my 2017 language learning goals. So, I think I’ve decided, in fact I’ve decided now, I’m going to focus on French and Portuguese for the next year. I’m not 100% content with where my Portuguese has gotten after a year because in the last 2 or 3 months I have kind of slacked off, and to slack off is like be lazy, not do as much as you could. So, if you don’t work very hard, if you’re a, you know, a tradie who works on a construction site, if someone sees you not working hard they could say you’re a slacker or you’re slacking off. To slack off. So, I felt like because I’d been working so hard on the podcast that I had slacked off somewhat with learning Portuguese, and I definitely haven’t done as much French as I would like to. So, I think I’m going to try and spend the next year really getting to the upper levels of French and Portuguese, at least with respect to what I can achieve at home in Australia when I’m not in the country where that language is spoken. I really want to show you guys what you can achieve with regards to using the internet and using the different kinds of services online in order to learn languages and improve your languages, because I definitely think that you guys can do so much, even if you’re not in Australia, even if you have access to no Australians, no native English speakers in person, there is definitely a lot that you can do online to improve your language learning skills or your language skills in general, (that) you can do to improve your Australian English or just your English in general. And yeah, I want to do that with French and Portuguese and show you how I go about doing that.

So, again, this is kind of like the language coaching stuff. And I think at the moment I’m going to focus on a different resource every month. And one cool thing that I thought about doing is giving myself daily challenges for how to use this resource and also including you guys. So, you guys can use the same resource, you can use it exactly as I’m using it that day, so tackle that same problem, try and learn a certain aspect of grammar or the “equivalent” grammar in English if I’m learning it in Portuguese and French. And we can talk to each other. We can give each other feedback. We can talk about different tips and tricks about using that resource. And the first resource that I’m going to use for all of January, so I’m going to do one month/one resource, is going to be Lang-8. So, “Lang” like the first four letters of the word “Language”, L-A-N-G, hyphen or dash (-) the number 8. Lang-8.com.

So, I’ll put a link below. Check that out. If you haven’t signed up already just go there. It’s incredibly quick. You can sign in with Facebook, and what Lang-8 does is it allows you to upload text that you’ve written in whatever language you want to write it in, but obviously in this case English. You can upload that English and submit it to be corrected by native speakers. So, this is a really good way I’ve found, at least, with French and Portuguese for practicing different aspects of grammar, different ways of using words more naturally as well, you know. You may directly translate something from your native language into English and even though you can directly translate it it may not sound natural. And so, this is a really good resource where native speakers of English who are also learning foreign languages, whether or not it’s your language, can correct your work and comment on it. So, it’s literally like a teacher from high school correcting your work. And they do it for free, right? So, you don’t have to pay for anything. It’s 100% free. If you want to use it for more than two languages that you’re learning I think then you can potentially buy a package that allows you to learn or to be focusing on multiple languages, but obviously if you’re just using English for now or one other language as well as English you don’t have to pay.

But, yeah, I absolutely love this resource. The plan at the moment is to try and upload say 200 words of text a day, you know, 100-200 words, a handful of sentences. So, maybe 10 sentences at max, and submit those practicing a specific point in English, or in Portuguese and French as I’ll be doing. And then, you’ll get the corrections back and then just sort of go over those corrections, improve, and then we’ll do this every day where you’ll submit a little something every single day and slow improve your written English as well as the grammar and vocabulary as well. So, we could do days where we’re focusing on camping vocabulary, days where we’re focusing on the Past Tense. So, we could talk about what we did yesterday. And then we could use the Past Past Tense. So, we could talk about what we used to do in the past, what we did as kids, all of that sort of stuff. We could talk about the future. So, we can do all sorts of tenses. We can use adjective orders. We could do all sorts of vocabulary lessons. So, these are things that I’m going to do with you guys side by side. So, you and me together, we can do this. And we can chat about it on Facebook every day or every week, and you guys can stay up-to-date, you can comment. I’ll put a post up every day about the specific aim of the day, the challenge of the day for you guys to write about, and that I’ll be writing about in French and Portuguese. And we could even correct each other’s work. If you guys speak French or Portuguese I can give you my username and if you want me to correct your work or another Australian or English native you can also just find them online, but you can also just tell me your username and I can look for your post as well.

So, yeah, those are the plans, those are the plans for 2017 so far. Let me know what you guys think below and I will see you soon. Thanks again guys and happy New Year and merry Christmas! See ya!