In this Christmas bonus episode, I answer listener questions.
- Listen now:
Playlist:
Fanfare
Opening War Theme
Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor (“Für Elise”)
Composed in 1810 by Ludwig van Beethoven. Public domain.
Performed by Simone Renzi. Recording used pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0 license. Source.
Closing War Theme
Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5.
Hi Mark,
A very enjoyable episode that I listened to on my morning walk.
On the subject of foreign languages you mentioned you said you use Goggle Translate. There is nothing wrong with it, however –
I started to seriously learn German in 2020, I had some basics from my time serving in the Army in Not the Germany in the early ’80s and found that DeepL was a better tool as it is generally better at picking up on nuances and idioms and it was also recommended by the native speakers who provide support to learners on r/German.
Last year I also started to learn French and found DeepL to be the better tool as well.
A few tips if you are looking up a foreign language as part of your research:
Beware taking the first single word translation given especially in Google Translate as this is the most common translation and not necessarily the one you want. You may remember the tragic stabbings in Solingen in Germany? A lot of English language news outlets picked up on the word “vielfalt” on the towns website which comes out first in most dictionaries as “diversity” because that has become a common usage and took it to mean the event was a diversity event in the sense of LGBTQ+ and it was a “hate” crime.
In fact, the translation in this case was “variety” because the town was celebrating its anniversary with “vielfalt” of events: poetry, archery, music (where the stabbings happened) and many other local event. So what was a tragic event was picked up as a LGBTQ+ hate crime when it wasn’t, it was just a tragic event.
The town quickly took down the relevant page, but too late.
Anyway, more tips:
If you want a translation always put in a complete sentence in to the translator you use because that helps pick up any nuances or idioms.
If you want help with pronunciations, especially names, put these in to the translator and hit the little speaker button at the bottom of the frame. In the case of pronunciations I find Google Translate is much better, at least in German and French.
Anyway, thanks for your hard work and I wish you a long healthy retirement so we get to hear more of your enjoyable take on the History of the C20th.
PS We are the same age and I’m also retired and I refer to my language learning as my “brain hobby” because the brain needs exercising just like any other muscle.
PPS We travel a lot in German and France in our motorhome, the main reason for learning the languages.
PPPS I’m a Brit in case you hadn’t woken it out and am happy with metric or the US system
Thanks for the tips. Yes, I am aware that Google Translate is not 100% reliable.
Mark,
What a terrific Q&A from your listeners, and your answers were sublime.
As for those two curmudgeons who complained about our use of metric units. As I think I have mentioned previously, I too am an engineer, but I am old enough that I did not have to learn metric, but I quickly ran into the quirkiness of US “metric” measurements. For example, in the chemical plants I worked at in the 70s, all the units were in USCS, but the temperatures were metric. I don’t know why, and I never questioned them. Only one temperature was in Fahrenheit, the “cold water” system. As it was later in other plants that I worked at, even after the US “brush” with the metric system in the late 70s under Carter. (Maybe that is a topic for a later episode.) Even though I am a history buff, especially military history (all those Avalon Hill wargames) I have thoroughly enjoyed your discussion of all those topics. They should have court-martialed Mark Clark for NOT blocking the German return in Italy, but I don’t know the full story. Your ability to cover the bigger picture has always been your strength. Your coverage of WW1 and the causes of the German-Austrian collapse was very good. I will be curious to see how you close out WW2. (I will remind you, though I imagine that am preaching to the choir, that the Battle of the Bulge was not just Bastogne, but also the stand at Elsborn Ridge, which required the Siege of Bastogne.)
I am looking forward to hearing about technology developments in the postwar, the Cold War, the Moon Race, Vietnam, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally, how will you close out the 20th Century? I will be here to find out, if you and I continue.
I also appreciated your comments on the metric system. I remember talking to my Mechanical engineer father in law when I was studying thermodynamics in undergraduate. We used as an example, how long would it take to bring the temperature of the family swimming pool up to a target temperature. In the 1940’s, using BTU’s, gallons, degrees F, etc, it required use of multiple conversion tables and a whole lot of slide rule time. With my 1970’s metric education, I wrote down a couple of things on a scrap of paper, but otherwise could do everything in my head.
Great episode as always, I’ve been a listener from the very beginning!
I’ve been listening since the beginning. Yours is the only podcast I haven’t drifted in and out of through the years. A podcast about he twentieth century is nothing shy of a Herculean task and you’ve done it thoughtfully and with wit.
I have a photo that relates to a previous podcast in which one of the offshoots of the jukebox is mentioned. I can’t remember the name of the machine, but it’s the one that you can line up a LOT of records to play in sequence so you can hear an entire symphony end-to-end. I found the image when I was cleaning out my iPhoto library. Some years back my wife and I were visiting Frank Lloyd Wright homes in the upper Midwest and we toured the home of Herbert F. Johnson, of Johnson Wax, in Racine, Wisconsin. There, in the center of the house, was one of the machines. I hope I can attach the photo I have here: apparently not… too bad. It’s a cool sight to behold!
Mark, I work in one of the industries here in the USA that is one of the reasons we are still using the US Customary System (Civil Engineering in the area of Transportation). I remember as part of my internship at the Kansas DOT in the mid 2000’s, I had to convert documents back to miles from kilometers because metrification had stopped. I appreciate both because many times, I am just using the conversions in my head, which may or may not be entirely correct.