Bad English

We investigate “word aversion” and our host Ivan ends up with a bad case of hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, a 35-letter word meaning fear of long words. Our guest Deng Adut was a child soldier in Sudan. After arriving in Australia as a teenage refugee, he learned English by singing along with The Wiggles, reading the bible and working at a petrol station. He sees English as a 'vampire language', sucking words from other languages like Latin, Italian, Spanish and German. It’s holy mayhem as language teacher Ai-Lin Bhugun encourages them to unpack the bonkers world of idioms and Australian slang. There are over 25,000 English idioms!

English is an ode to uncertainty, as host Ivan explains with his ALDI theory (A Ludicrous Display of Inconsistency). Ethiopian-born comedian Joe White (real name Tilahun) loves his mum and is constantly bailing her out of awkward situations resulting from her loose grasp of English. Language teacher Ai-Lin Bhugun takes 'doing words' to the next level, unpacking what happens when verbs band together like the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story and become phrasal verbs.

The birth rate for new words in English is extraordinary. There are over 170,000 words in the English dictionary but some estimates put the vocab tally at over one million words... Ivan asks if we really need more? Tamil refugee Niro Vithyasekar learnt English and cooking in a detention centre. He now runs the successful pop-up food truck Tuka Tuka Kotthu Roti Man in Melbourne. English language teacher Ai-Lin gives Niro the lowdown on nouns, and what happens when they become uncountable.

Ivan is gutted when he finds out that one of the greatest ever Latino poets Jorge Luis Borges preferred English to Spanish, their shared mother tongue. Award-winning Afro-Brazilian Latinx writer and poet Guido Melo weighs in, trash-talking the English obsession with rhyme in poetry. In-house ESOL teacher Ai-Lin puts our sanity to the test by running through the crazy number of words that sound the same and are spelled the same but have different meanings. Hate, not love, is in the air.

Shortcuts cause Ivan a special level of dread… contractions, acronyms and abbreviations drive him mad. Fellow comedian He Huang is from Chongqing, an area of China known for its spicy food, and has a sense of humour to match. She trained as a linguist but ditched that path to relocate to Australia and pursue stand-up, winning viral success via a clip of her appearance on Australia’s Got Talent. English teacher Ai-Lin puts He through an exercise in decoding how stresses on different words can change the meaning of everything.

Ivan Aristeguieta is obsessed with dialects, comparing them to the myriad different ways people have of making Bolognese. Guest Olana Janfa (who designed our podcast art) throws the menu out the window. He’s a self-taught artist and clothing designer from Ethiopia via Norway who refuses to be limited by 'bad English'. He won't hold himself back for want of perfect pronunciation or grammar. For Olana, speaking a second language is all about expression - doing it your own way. English language teacher Ai-Lin Bhugun tries to interest him and Ivan in the correct use of verbs.

Of the many sins of English, its prepositions are preposterous. Ivan Aristeguieta is worried about landing 'in' Melbourne 'on' a plane. Wouldn’t he die in a horrific accident? Comedian Takashi 'Waka' Wakasugi explains the beauty and superiority of Japan’s three alphabets over English's measly 26 letters. English language teacher Ai-Lin Bhugun unravels the inane secrets of stacking adjectives and supplies Waka with a practical lesson in pronouncing 'Uluru'. Victory is at hand!

Bad English is a new comedy podcast from SBS Audio about the lows of learning the world's most widely spoken and studied language. Ivan Aristeguieta hits back at the illogical rules and infuriating exceptions that govern the English language; the nuances that make the experience of learning English a misery for millions around the world, and leave even Anglophones scratching their heads.