話匣子英語(yǔ):令人懷念的加拿大兒童節(jié)目

安德魯和莫拉格今天討論的是令人懷念的加拿大兒童電視節(jié)目.....

Andrew: And I guess I should catch everybody up with what this episode will be about

today. We’re going to do a Chatterbox episode. And this is where we have a

natural conversation. We use 100% natural English, just like we would in our

everyday lives, but we speak just a touch slower and we are conscious of the

fact that you are English learners. We keep that in mind to make our

conversation a little easier to understand than maybe a conversation on the

street, for example. But our topic today is nostalgic Canadian kids’ TV.

Morag: I’m so excited.

Andrew: Yeah, so I guess a little background: The other day I was hanging out with

some of my Korean friends and we were speaking in Korean, and the topic

of TV came up. We were talking about TV and I know a little bit about current

Korean TV, some of the popular celebrity talk shows that are on the air now.

But my friends started talking about TV shows that are now off the air and I

had no idea what they were talking about. I wasn’t able to participate in the

conversation. And it struck me that, you know, cultural knowledge, knowing

about the pop culture of the language you’re trying to learn, is very important.

And so this made me realize, whoa, there is a lot of really weird Canadian

TV, especially from the 80s and 90s that our generation grew up with, that if

you’re not aware of it, you might find yourself in a situation that is similar to

the one that I was in.

So here we have it today, nostalgic Canadian kids’ TV.

Morag: I don’t know, Andrew, though, I think you’re really right about cultural

knowledge being incredibly important for communicating with other people.

When I was a kid, I was sort of not allowed to watch TV, but my parents knew

that if I had no idea what the other kids were watching, I wouldn’t be able to

make friends the same way or have the same shared experience, so I did get

to watch a little.

Andrew: OK, so that is very interesting. And what we’ll do to start this episode is we’ll

talk about some of our TV-watching habits when we were kids. So, yeah,

that’s interesting. You said that your parents didn’t really let you watch TV.

Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Morag: Sure. Let’s put it this way: I did not have access to unregulated, unsupervised

television, and for a long time I wasn’t even aware that there were kids’

shows. I was allowed to watch some movies or some things that were prerecorded,

or I was allowed to watch things with my parents.

But the reason for that was actually they were worried about advertising and

me being literate in the sense of understanding what marketing was and, you

know, how some things can be taking advantage of you, or presenting

something that’s kind of messed up, you know? So I had somebody, usually

my mom, sitting with me and sort of asking me questions about—even when

I was a really little kid—asking me questions about what I was watching, and

seeing if I was thinking critically about it.

Andrew: Mmhmm.

Morag: It’s a pretty cool way to go about it, honestly. Like, I’m quite thankful for it

now. But my favourite stuff and the stuff that I really remember, I was just

enjoying, like kids do, you know?