The total market cap for cryptocurrencies crossed $170 billion today. Is cryptocurrency the future of money? Or is it just a bubble?

The promise of cryptocurrency sounds great–instant worldwide transactions, low fees, money that can’t be inflated at whim by central banks. A technology platform that would enable these things is fantastic, but whether or not cryptocurrencies are viable currencies in and of themselves is a different matter.

Right now, cryptocurrencies are the investment du jour. Even mom and pop investors are starting to put money into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other alt coins as part of their retirement nest egg. And there’s no denying that money is to be made in the Wild West era of cryptocurrency trading.

However, if cryptocurrencies are to succeed at their aims of becoming actual money, then we’ll need to get to a point where people no longer look at cryptocurrencies as investments. We’ll need to get to a point where people get paid in cryptocurrency, get mortgages in cryptocurrency, and use cryptocurrency as actual money for their groceries, lattes, and other purchases.

To highlight the difference, would you buy Euros or Pounds or Yen to put in your retirement account because you think they will grow in value vs. the dollar over the long term? Of course not. The only time most people buy other currency is when going on vacation.

Let’s take a look at where cryptocurrencies are now and what it would take for them to become viable currencies.

The evolution of money

Before we talk about the future of money, we need to know a little bit about the history of money and how we got where we are today.

The traditional story of money taught in school says that in the beginning people didn’t have a form of currency and traded through bartering.

As people become more specialized in their production and the number of goods in society increases you run into a problem. Let’s say you are a cheese maker and you need a chair. What happens if the chair maker doesn’t need or want any cheese?

Eventually certain goods such as seashells, beads, and precious metals became used as commonly accepted forms of value in the same way we think of paper currencies like the dollar today. Now you could sell your cheese to someone who wanted it for a few pieces of the locally accepted currency, and then spend that to buy a chair. The chair maker in turn could use the currency to buy whatever he wanted.

However, not everything makes for a good medium of exchange. Ideal money is typically listed as having 5-7 different properties. The most relevant to discussion here are: limited supply, portability, durability, divisibility, and–especially–stable value.

Over time precious metals beat out other so called commodity currencies for acceptability because they better satisfied these criteria. Metal can be reshaped and divided into any quantity that you want, it’s nearly indestructible, supply is limited, and increases in the overall supply are very gradual which leads to relatively stable value.

However, precious metals like gold and silver are heavy and difficult to transport, which lead to the advent of paper currencies. Initially banks issued paper currencies as IOUs against their gold or silver holdings. The inherently worthless paper was “worth” something because you could exchange it at the bank for its value in gold or silver.

In a move that still alarms some economists today, government controlled banks eventually abandoned the gold standard. Now paper money is backed by the strength of the governments issuing it–what is known as fiat currency.

What makes money “worth” something?

In the traditional story of money, commodities that became currencies had value because they were also desired commodities to begin with. In other words people wanted gold and silver for other uses than just money, like jewelry. In prisons other desired commodities like cigarettes and, recently, ramen noodles have been used as currencies.

The economists who decry fiat currencies do so because they are not backed by anything of value. The currency is only worth something because the government says it is and we all buy into it. It also gives government the power to print money at will which violates the limited supply property of a good currency. Governments are tempted to do this because it makes it easy to pay off debts, but it comes at the cost of inflation. What some call a hidden tax.

What makes cryptocurrency “worth” something?

According to old school economics, cryptocurrencies are doomed from the start because they are inherently worthless–no one has any desire for an otherwise useless bit of code for any other purpose. And unlike the inherently worthless bits of fabric fiat currencies are printed on, there isn’t even a government backing their value.

But is that the whole story?

Nick Szabo, one of the pioneers of cryptocurrencies, proposes an alternate theory of value that says good currencies have a property called unforgeable costliness. Unforgeable because it is difficult or impossible to make fakes. And costly because it’s scarce and difficult to obtain.

Gold, for example, is unforgeable. People have tried for centuries to convert other metals into gold and failed. Gold is forged in the heart of a dying star going supernova as lighter elements are fused together into heavier elements. Good luck replicating that in the lab!

And gold is costly because it is scarce. In fact, because of the way gold is formed, gold is guaranteed to be a scarce element throughout the entire universe.

The benefit of unforgeable costliness is that people can easily identify the genuine article and transact with high confidence that they are not being duped by fake currency.

Unforgeable costliness is very similar to a concept in biology called honest signals. We desire genetic fitness in a mate because we want mates who will produce strong, healthy offspring. But it’s very difficult to assay genetic fitness directly, so we use proxies. Ask a woman what kind of men she likes and the first thing she’s likely to say is “tall men.” Ask a man and the first thing he’s likely to say is “big boobs.” While in the modern world we’re conditioned to consider height and breast size superficial methods for mate choice, historically tall height and large symmetric breasts were biologically costly to produce and difficult to fake which made them viable honest signals for mate choice that we could easily identify at a glance.

Similarly, unforgeably costly currencies could be said to exhibit honest signals that tell us their value at a glance.

Cryptocurrency replicates the property of unforgeable costliness in two ways:

1. Clever use of mathematics and cryptography. Transactions are unforgeable because they must be validated by a network of independent computers. This means the cost of hacking the system outweighs the benefit of hacking the system, and you can’t add new currency to the system as simply as editing a cell on a spreadsheet.
2. Limited supply. Cryptocurrencies have built in, pre-determined supply caps. Bitcoin, for example, has a hard cap of 21 million coins.

Of course the obvious question is, is Nick right? Is unforgeable costliness really the property that gives money its value? Or is money a commodity whose value primarily derives from some use other than as currency?

Continuing with our gold example, I think it’s very difficult to make the case that its non-monetary uses explain its monetary value. Sure, today gold has various uses in electronics, but gold was used as currency long before we harnessed electricity. Historically, gold’s use is primarily decorative. But why gold instead of other metals? Unforgeable costliness presents a much more compelling argument.

What challenges do cryptocurrencies face?

Recall we said earlier that a desirable property of money is stable value. In fact, stable value is the single most important property. Accordingly, the single largest barrier to cryptocurrencies becoming viable money for everyday use is high volatility.

What if you were paid a fixed salary in cryptocurrency, but the price of a cheeseburger was the equivalent of $6 one day, $1,000 the next day, and then $20 the following day. Budgeting becomes impossible. This level of price swing is the current reality for cryptocurrencies.

“But,” you object, “no currencies are completely stable!” Of course, but if one currency changes even 1% in a day relative to another currency on the Forex market, that is a big move. Even inflation in major currencies is relatively predictable which enables banks to make 30 year fixed rate mortgages. If a currency slips in value by even 10% in a year you start to worry that any country using it is headed for serious trouble.

Cryptocurrency advocates are quick to point out that the value change for cryptocurrencies is generally up. In fact, dramatically up over the past few years. A welcome change from fiscally irresponsible governments devaluing their currencies.

Even if we posit that cryptocurrencies are not in a bubble, this is still not a good thing if cryptocurrencies are to become viable currencies for day to day spending. Imagine if a friend lent you 10,000 bitcoin in 2009 and demanded that he be paid back in kind. In 2009, that was enough to by two pizzas. At the time of this writing you would owe your friend the equivalent of $49,000,000!

Or imagine you want to buy a house and need a mortgage. How could the bank possibly issue you one with a currency that varies wildly? And even if they were willing to, how could you possibly accept the terms of the loan?

Even if we posit that cryptocurrencies have some kind of value via unforgeable costliness, we still need that to be stable value.

Will the value of cryptocurrencies ever stabilize?

That’s the trillion dollar question. Generally as trade volume of a commodity increases, volatility decreases. Eventually demand for any given cryptocurrency may become saturated. Taken together these two things will have stabilizing effects.

More merchants accepting cryptocurrencies as payment will also help contribute to transaction volume, and, consequently, stability.

I am hopeful. But there is still a large gap from the Wild West cryptocurrency-as-investment speculation phase we are in now to using cryptocurrencies for their intended purpose–as our everyday money.

Full Disclosure

At the time of this post, I hold cryptocurrency. Not much, but I intend to experiment more.

Resources

The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency–Nick Szabo

Bitcoin vs Gold: The Future of Money

Bitcoin Myths Exposed!

Free Banking and the Fed

Money Under Laissez-Faire

Infographic: The Properties of Money

Ramen Noodles are Now the Prison Currency of Choice

If you’ve ever played a video game from the ’80s, you know that not all translations are created equal. Just see the humorous All Your Base Are Belong to Us meme for a taste of what I mean.

Which translation of a classic you choose to read greatly affects your reading experience.

Most classics have multiple translations in print, which is both good and bad. It’s good because translations tend to get iteratively better over time–after all, why do yet another translation unless you think you can improve on what’s already out there?

However, it’s also bad because choosing from a vast array of options–each with its own merit–can perplex you.

This post discusses why translations differ and how to choose a translation that gives you the best reading experience.

Formal equivalence vs. dynamic equivalence

Before we talk about how to choose a translation, we need to know something about the translation process itself.

Broadly speaking, translators use two different approaches to render the original text into another language.

With formal equivalence, translators attempt a literal word-for-word translation. If you haven’t spent much time with foreign languages, you might wonder what else in the world a translator would do if not that. However, literal word-for-word translations are often not possible.

For example, let’s say we want to translate the sentence, “John croaked.” A literal word-for-word translation would probably make the reader think that John made a sound like a frog. Of course, that’s not what we mean, we mean that John died. However, if we simply translate the sentence as, “John died,” then we lose some of the original text’s flavor.

To correct this problem, we can use dynamic equivalence. Instead of word-for-word, we will try to translate the sentence meaning-for-meaning. Now we might choose from options like, “John bit the dust” or “John kicked the bucket.” Either of these maintains a folksy flavor in our translation, but we still don’t capture exactly what the original text said. Such is the translator’s dilemma.

In actual practice, translation is a balancing act between formal and dynamic equivalence.

If the translator emphasizes literalness too much, the story can become dull, lifeless, or even incomprehensible. However, the more the translator uses dynamic equivalence, the further the translation diverges from the original text.

Dynamic translations can be more dramatized and exciting. However, I–and most scholars–prefer translations that err on the side of fidelity to the original text. I want to read as close to what the author originally wrote as possible.

Age of the translation

When a text is translated affects the reading experience in two important ways.

Firstly, over time translations tend to get better. As I already mentioned, why do yet another translation unless you think you can improve on what’s already out there?

Of course, that is not always the case. While classics are usually public domain, many translations are still under copyright. This means that, for example, even if Penguin Classics already has a fine translation available, Bantam Classics and Hackett Classics would need to commission their own translations for their respective repertories.

Secondly, a classic may be translated in very different eras.

The King James translation of the Bible sounds like Shakespeare not because the original language of the Bible resembles Shakespeare, but because it was translated in the same era that Shakespeare lived. Modern translations of the Bible, like the New Revised Standard Version, dispense with archaic forms in lines like, “He that receiveth you receiveth me,” in favor of the modern sounding, “He who receives you receives me.”

That said, even modern translators sometimes try to cast the classics in archaic English–presumably both to reflect the age of the work and add a sense of gravitas. In my view, this is a huge mistake for two reasons:

1. It leaves the modern reader behind.
2. The original text would not have sounded archaic to people reading it at the time it was written, much less resemble Shakespearean English.

You might still enjoy older translations or the poetic sounding language. Many people still prefer the King James Bible despite newer, more accessible translations.

However, I prefer recent translations into modern English. All other things equal, I will simply choose the most recent translation.

Nationality of the translator

For English speakers this typically boils down to whether the translator is American or British.

Nationality only makes a subtle difference in translation–typically just a turn of phrase here and there. But the difference is enough to cause misunderstandings.

Since I am American, I prefer translations done by Americans. But this is not a hard and fast rule. When you want to read Gilgamesh, you choose the translation by Andrew George–the world’s foremost expert on Gilgamesh, and a Brit.

How to choose a translation

Here are two different methods to choose a translation and how I apply them to my criteria.

To summarize the discussion so far, I prefer:

• Fidelity to the original text
• Recent translations in modern English
• Translations done by Americans

The easy way:

Hackett Classics editions typically fulfill my three criteria. While I always research my options before purchasing, more often than not I just go with the Hackett edition.

If I were British, I would look to the Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics editions. Although there are two caveats: 1) these do tend to be older translations than the Hackett editions, 2) some translations are by Americans.

If you like archaic English you can find a lot of public domain translations for free–or for cheap via Dover Thrift Editions. But why punish yourself with archaic English? Why?

The hard way:

Okay, so this isn’t really hard, it just takes more time and research.

My process generally looks like this:

1. Google “best [book title] translation”
2. Read first page or two of search results to get a preliminary short-list of candidate translations
3. Check reviews on Amazon for my short-list–often the reviews will contain detailed comparisons with other translations
4. Google “[translator’s name] [book title] bryn mawr” to see what academics say about the translations

Bryn Mawr Classical Review is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal of–you guessed it–classical studies. Who better to give you input on choosing a translation than leading experts in the field? Especially when it comes to fidelity of a translation to the original, we are wholly dependent on the opinions of experts. Bryn Mawr reviews typically compare the translation under review to other translations as well.

And sometimes, you will just get lucky on the first shot and an expert on the field will tell you everything you need to know about extant translations of a text in one brief article.

I want to read the best stories ever told.

I also want to read the stories that show up over and over again in our culture–the culture of the English speaking West that is. You know the ones I mean, you’ve no doubt heard countless references to stories like The Iliad, War and Peace, and Moby Dick.

Even cartoons like The Simpsons are rife with literary references from Homer’s name to Moby Dick.

To guide my journey, I chose The Western Literary Canon in Context course by The Great Courses.

This is the first in a series of posts written as a companion piece to my journey through the Western canon. I invite you to join me for as much or as little of this journey as you like.

How and why to read the Western canon

The Western Literary Canon in Context course comprises 36 lectures. Each lecture covers one or more thematically related books. I plan to go through each lecture, one at a time, and read the associated book(s).

My goal is not just to read these books, but experience them. Homer’s epic poems were not meant to be read, but heard aloud. Shakespeare’s plays were not meant to be read, but seen on stage.

I might even dip into other courses along the way like Herodotus: The Father of History or take up the challenge of learning enough Middle English to read Chaucer in the original. Wikipedia will be consulted liberally.

Many decisions need to be made along the way–which translations to read, which performances to watch, which side trips to take.

I look forward to not just enjoying each work individually, but the whole developmental arc of Western literature. The Western canon forms a continuity with one generation of writers influencing the next. Virgil wrote his epic The Aeneid as a continuation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, passing the torch from Ancient Greece to Rome. Later, Virgil appears as Dante’s guide to the underworld in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I expect finishing the course to take a long time–likely several years or even decades. However, I establish no timeline to complete the course. As I have a life outside of literature, I will no doubt read the books in fits in starts as time allows.

Ground rules

You know what happens when you buy a big stack of books? You don’t read them. The larger the stack of books, the less likely you are to read any of them at all. They just sit there in a pile, taunting you from the corner of the room.

In order to keep enthusiasm high and prevent overwhelm, I plan to observe a few ground rules:

1. Buy only one book at a time, and do not buy another book until I have finished it.
2. If I need a break from the canon, do not buy another book until I am actually ready to read it.
3. Don’t re-read any books. I read The Odyssey in high school, and I don’t need to re-invest 20 hours of my life into it.
4. If at any time I decide working my way through the Western canon is no longer relevant to my life, I will simply abandon the project–guilt-free.

Choosing which editions to read

Reading the classics poses a problem that reading contemporary books doesn’t–which of the dozens of different editions to read.

I have a few rules for this as well:

1. It must be available for Kindle.
2. Footnotes and endnotes must be hyperlinked. These add a lot to a text, but I simply won’t read them if they are hard to get to–another reason to eschew paper books.
3. Whenever possible, choose one that is Whispersync-ready with an Audible audio edition. Most English books have an Audible edition, but books translated into English from other languages are harder to come by.

For English books I typically prefer simple, unadorned Dover Thrift Editions. Their Kindle formatting is usually clean and I have an affinity for them from my school days. Sure there are many free editions of the classics, but I don’t mind paying 1 or 2 dollars for consistent, easy-to-read formatting.

Books translated into English are a completely different beast, and will be the subject of a separate post.

As I read through the canon, I will also discuss which specific editions I choose to read and why.

At the philosophy group I attend, we were discussing the final chapter of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR) about her views on art. At first glance, the chapter appears a cursory postscript to the book–an obligatory nod to esthetics since it is one of the five branches of philosophy.

But art–including literature–is not just an afterthought to philosophy. It’s the main show, the primary delivery vehicle of important ideas.

Case in point, how many people have read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead compared to OPAR? No doubt it’s a 100 or even a 1,000-fold difference in favor of the novels. In fact, none of us would even care about OPAR if something about Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead hadn’t captured our imagination first.

What exactly do we mean by art? Ayn Rand defines art as: a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgements.

“[Art] concretizes man’s fundamental view of himself and existence,” she says, “Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.”

In other words, art gives you something to look at in the real world and say, “look this is what I mean.”

For example, instead of simply saying that integrity and individualism are ideals, Ayn Rand shows us Howard Roark–the ultimate individualist who holds unwaveringly to his principles.

Instead of simply saying “forgive the repentent,” the Bible gives us the story of the prodigal son who returns home. Despite being a spendthrift who squanders his inheritance, his family joyfully receives him. In effect, saying, “this is what forgiving the repentent looks like.”

My favorite painting–Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the sea of fog, which adorns the top of this post–speaks strongly to my wanderlust and sense of adventure. It shows a well-dressed man perched above a rugged and half-exposed landscape as if to say, “exploring all this majesty is what life is really all about.”

Art changes the world because it allows the artist not just to tell us what the world is or could or ought to be like, but to inspire us with a vision of that world.

Popularity of bodyweight training (aka calisthenics) has exploded in recent years. Much of that is down to folks like popular trainer Al Kavadlo, YouTube phenom group BarStarzz, and hit books like Convict Conditioning. However, the biggest influence is unquestionably CrossFit, which has taken many gymnastics training methods mainstream.

The signature move of this new golden age of bodyweight training has to be the muscle up. The muscle up requires serious strength and coordination, and it just looks cool in a way that no other exercise does. If the question weight lifters ask each other is “how much do you bench?” the question people ask about bodyweight exercise is, “have you got your muscle up yet?”

I assume if you’re reading this post you know what muscle ups are, but if not here they are in all their glory.

A few months ago I decided to make training for the muscle up a priority. I’ve been reading calisthenics books and watching endless YouTube tutorials on pull ups, muscle ups, dips, kipping, bar grips, and more.

This post is a half time report on my efforts to date, what worked, what didn’t work, and how I plan to proceed on my mission to the muscle up. As one final bit of housekeeping before we dive in, this post is about doing muscle ups on a straight bar. I have no plans to train for a muscle up on the rings at this time.

To kip or not to kip

Whether you are for or against kipping, I guarantee you are not thinking about it the right way.

CrossFitters have embraced kipping pull ups and kipping muscle ups whole heartedly as a way to bang out as many reps as possible as quickly as possible. Outside of CrossFit, most people still think of kipping as cheating. Both views are wrong, wrong, wrong.

The kip is best viewed as a plyometric move that is an addition to maximal strength training and not a replacement for it. By way of comparison, you wouldn’t call box jumps and other mainstays of plyometric training “cheater squats.” Nor would you replace squat training with box jumps. Likewise, kipping is simply a different tool in the training toolkit.

Many folks have no doubt listened to the Coach Christopher Sommer of GymnasticBodies interview on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. He says that kipping is dangerous for beginners with mobility issues and claims his gymnastic training produces athletes with superior strength to CrossFit. He is probably right on both counts. But, in my opinion, if you have good mobility and a strength base kipping is an irreplaceable training movement.

It’s also not like gymnasts don’t kip. Kipping is a fundamental gymnastics move. Just watch any gymnast on the high bar and you will see kip after kip after kip. Although if you watch gymnastics you are probably more used to seeing something that looks like the glide kip than a kipping muscle up.

From a real world application standpoint, pull ups and muscle ups are often talked about as a way you might escape from a predator into a tree in nature. Not if you’re doing a slow, strict muscle up to a 5 count with a lion hot on your heels you are not. You will be lunch. If you really had to escape in a hurry, you need to kip up that tree as fast as humanly possible.

My view is that you should train for both strict and kipping muscle ups. The respective training methods both reinforce each other as well as provide mutually exclusive benefits.

How to grip the bar

In addition to simply failing the movement, gripping the bar wrong can lead to frequent hand rips, popped blisters, and tendonitis in your elbows and shoulders. Correct hand placement and bar grip enable you to get maximal leverage on the bar and enable you to perform the exercise safely and effectively.

There are four main bar grips we need to concern ourselves with:

• Thumbs over the bar (aka the “suicide grip”) – Avoid this grip. Even though this is arguably the strongest grip and many people–especially those with small hands like me–prefer it to thumbs around the bar, it is called the suicide grip for a reason. It’s very easy to send yourself flying off the bar when you are learning how to kip.
• Thumbs around the bar – The preferred grip for most training. Wrapping your thumb around the bar is safer and makes it less likely you’ll go flying off the bar when kipping. To maximize skill transfer, I recommend training with this grip for both strict and kipping movements. To get the best grip, wrap your thumbs around on top of your index and middle finger to form a hook grip. Also focus on keeping your pinkie knuckle on top of the bar to keep your hands from rotating inward. Watch Carl Paoli demonstrate (skip to 2:00).
• False grip – This grip builds forearm strength and arm positioning crucial for the muscle up transition. Make fists and hook them over the bar so that you hang from your wrists. I guarantee the first time you try this you will immediately drop like a rock, but keep at it and just practice hanging at first. You will make surprisingly quick progress. The key is really trying to keep your bodyweight directly under the bar and your head through your arms at the bottom. This puts your weight directly into your hands perpendicularly instead of at a sheering angle that makes it easier to slip off. Don’t lean back. Watch a demonstration.
• Pseudo-false grip – Similar to the false grip, but with thumbs around the bar. I find this much harder because it forces the bar further out toward the middle of your hands and puts more grip-breaking leverage on your wrists. Nearly all CrossFit trainers recommend training this grip for pull ups and muscle ups. Not a single one of them actually does it in their videos. However, it can be done and if you want to do a strict, no momentum muscle up on the bar it is the only grip in town. Watch a pseudo-false grip muscle up.

As far as hand placement, generally a little bit outside the shoulder line is optimal. Play around with it and see what feels strongest to you. At the top of the pull up you want your forearms to be perpendicular to the ground when viewed from your front or back side. For false grip and pseudo-false grip you will generally place hands a bit narrower to achieve the same perpendicular forearm position.

One focal point I’d like to reiterate is to focus on keeping your pinkie knuckles over the bar. This prevents your shoulders from getting compromised by internal rotation. Inward rotation of the shoulder also causes inward rotation of the hands, which puts sheer force on the skin causing rips and tears. Especially when you are kipping.

Exercise progressions and drills

The way not to train muscle ups is to go flail around on a bar until you somehow miraculously make it over the top. You want to break the muscle up down into its constituent skills and build those up with targeted exercises.

The bulk of muscle up training is a steady diet of pull ups and dips. Though you will want to transition from doing regular dips to Russian dips as quickly as possible.

Of course, pull ups and dips alone will not get you to the muscle up. A muscle up is conventionally taught as having three parts to work on: pull, transition, and dip. However, I would actually encourage you not to think about it that way as I don’t think it is particularly helpful.

I instead propose four milestone exercises to build up to:

1. Pseudo-false grip pull ups – Exactly what it sounds like, do a pull up with a pseudo-false grip. It will help to get the false grip pull up first before you try the pseudo-false grip pull up.
2. High pull ups – Pull explosively. Try to get your self as high above the bar as possible. A good beginning target is to get the bar below your chest. Then work higher and higher until you’re getting your waist and thighs up to the bar. There should be no kipping or leg drive to this movement. Use raw upper body pulling power only. Watch Marcus Bondi show you how it’s done.
3. Kipping pull ups – Aim for chest to bar. Don’t assume these are going to be easy. The cadence of kipping pull ups is likely much, much faster than you are used to doing pull ups and they require lots of coordination. I still struggle to do these correctly and string them together.
4. Russian dips – Performed on parallel bars. Lower chest to bar height then rotate your forearms back and down until your elbows are outside the bars and the inside of your biceps are touching the bars. Do not rest elbows and forearms on the bars as seen on YouTube videos. Think of squeezing the bar into your chest on the way down and then pulling backward hard on the bar to get your elbows back up over your wrists on the way up. See demonstration (try to use more control at the bottom than the video, also not necessary to do these in an L-sit).

Many bar muscle up progressions tell you to practice doing straight bar dips as low as you can go and then working lower and lower into the transition. I don’t recommend this in the beginning as most likely you will just drop like a rock as soon as your elbows move behind your wrists.

Russian dips on parallel bars allow your chest to dip between your hands and also allow you to fall back on the bars without completely dropping out of the movement while you are still learning. Get good at them first before trying to practice transition dips on a straight bar. At this point, I’m actually thinking about trying to get the strict muscle up on the parallel bars first before I do it on a straight bar. But, in either case, I still have a lot of work to do first.

Programming

I’m currently training 5-6 days a week doing short daily workouts of 2-3 sets of 2-3 reps. I think this will be appropriate for the duration. High rep workouts are great for endurance, but generally ineffective for building peak strength. Since getting your first muscle up requires primarily an increase in peak strength first, keep sets and reps low and aim instead to increase the difficulty of the movement you’re working on.

Also don’t worry so much about specific sets and reps. Think of your workouts more as technique practice sessions. For example, when learning Russian dips just focus on getting in and out of the bottom position with control and minimizing use of momentum. Just do individual reps allowing for plenty of recovery time to really get it right and feel your way through the movement. In the beginning your goal should be to constantly work on developing better control and range of motion.

One single rep with perfect technique should be easy before you start worrying about sets and reps.

However, don’t push your limits every day. I only explore my limits once or twice a week. I typically do 2 hard days, 2 easy days of low rep basic pull ups, and 1 or 2 days doing other exercises like handstand pushups or bridges. The focus of every workout–even the easy days–is perfect technique.

Developing the kip

The most technically demanding aspect of the training is undoubtedly the kip. If you call kipping pull ups cheater pull ups, you’ve probably never tried them. Even many erstwhile strong folks lack the full body coordination to pull one off correctly, let alone string them together.

You really need to see this rather than read it described in words, so here is a two-part video tutorial by the excellent Laurie Galassi. In the beginning, invest lots of time doing the swing, hop, pull drill described in part 2. However, since I advise using a thumbs-around grip instead of thumbs on top grip, I do this drill with one slight modification to the “hop” part. Instead of hopping on the bar I get enough air to loosen my grip a little, rotate my hand forward around the bar and “regrip” it. Regrip practice is very helpful for later on when your hands inevitably start to slip off the bar during a kipping set.

Jessica Estrada of CrossFit Jääkarhu (I’ll save you the Google search, it means polar bear in Finnish) also has a number of excellent training videos on kipping pull ups and how to string them together.

And of course eventually you need to develop enough power in your kip to get yourself up over the bar into position to press out at the top.

Bringing it all together

I have not mastered all of my milestone targets to my satisfaction yet. But I can already see how pseudo-false grip pull ups and Russian dips on the parallel bars will eventually bridge to a full muscle up.

I feel that I am further away from the straight bar muscle up. I still find the kipping motion quite frustrating, though I am making progress. Per the recommendation of some trainers, I’ve been considering using a stretch band for assistance on the bar so I can focus on really dialing in the movement pattern. But then again I might not because I really hate to involve equipment beyond what I can find at my local park.

I hope this post serves as a good starting point in your muscle up journey. In my mind once all four milestone exercises have been mastered, you’ve basically got the muscle up. But of course it probably won’t prove so easy. If I find more insights along the way I will post them, but for now it’s time to hit the bars!

Shoes are a critical, but surprisingly overlooked part of your golf game. I recently got a pair of Barefoot BERBS golf shoes and I think they fix several critical problems that most other golf shoes have.

How many times have you felt lined up correctly, but then as soon as you went to swing the club you felt completely out of balance and wound up topping or chunking the ball? It could be your shoes rather than your swing that are to blame.

Shoe design principles

When you swing a golf club you put a tremendous amount of angular force through the soles of your feet as your weight gets transferred from one side of your body to the other.

In general, there are three shoe design principles that can help stabilize the weight transfer and help keep you in balance:

1. Flat soles – Zero heel-to-toe drop. In other words, no raised heel. Does standing on an uphill or downhill decline make your swing easier or harder? Harder of course. You don’t want a decline built into your shoes.
2. Minimal soles – The thinner the sole the better. This puts you into closer contact with the ground and contributes to lateral stability.
3. Wide toe box – Feet are naturally widest at the toes, not the ball of the foot. Allowing toes to splay over their natural range of motion helps lateral stability.

How many conventional golf shoes fit these criteria? None. In fact, they are typically designed the exact opposite–with raised heels and a narrow, pointed toe box. You might as well try to play golf in a pair of pumps.

The Barefoot B.E.R.B.S. experience

I had been wanting to try the Barefoot BERBS for a few years now, and I have to say that they are everything I hoped they would be. I shot a lifetime best at my neighborhood course on my second outing with them.

Before I got my B.E.R.B.S. I was endlessly frustrated by all the swing compensations I had to do because of the heels in my golf shoes. I often wound up just wearing flats, which was not ideal since they didn’t have the added traction of spikes and were slippery on wet grass.

With the BERBS on I never felt out of balance, and I feel like it helped bring a higher level of consistency to my long game. When your shoes stop working against you and allow your feet to move naturally, that’s just one less thing you have to think about during the golf swing. The adjustable velcro strap and stretchy neoprene saddle on the upper also enable an easy snug fit.

The only real negative to these shoes is the leather strip that runs up the back of the heel along your Achilles tendon. You know that feeling of leather dress shoes cutting into the back of your ankles? That’s what I’m talking about. You will need to tape Doctor Scholl’s Moleskin to the inside of the heels or get some blister pads or you won’t even make it through the front 9 without significant discomfort. But once that is handled, it’s smooth sailing.

The bottom line

I highly recommend Barefoot B.E.R.B.S. golf shoes. Given what to me, as an avid biomechanist, are the obvious advantages of the zero drop, wide toe box “barefoot” design, I’m amazed that the entire PGA Tour hasn’t been outfitted with these yet. No matter how well you think your current golf shoes fit, the raised-heel, pointed-toe design is working against you.

As I mentioned earlier, the only minor quibble I have with these is that you just need to make sure to apply some Doctor Scholl’s Moleskin to the inside of your shoe heels or take other precautions to protect the back of your ankles.

However, at only $69, there is really no reason not to try them. There is no other piece of golf equipment where you can literally buy your way to a better golf game for so little of an investment.

You can purchase your pair at www.barefootberbs.com.

A few years ago I wrote a balanced, but still unfavorable review of a book that claimed to debunk the paleo diet called Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live. Not being entirely unsympathetic to the message of the book, I followed it up with an article of my own about things I frequently heard from paleos that just weren’t quite right.

Since then, I’ve greatly furthered my own education on nutrition, evolution, and biology. Research has also moved on, and many of the prominent paleo writers have revised their recommendations. I’ve found myself wondering, is the paleo diet still even really the paleo diet anymore?

Many times I’ve contemplated changing the name of the Paleo Diet post category of my blog to Ancestral Health or even just simply Nutrition.

The flash point came when I received this comment on my review for Paleofantasy:

… To Paleo followers science is all well and good until it threatens to debunk their little caveman fantasy, and then it’s a strawman. If I had a nickel for every time I read a Paleo follower blathering on about how of course lactose tolerance proves evolution is still working but then turn around and claim we’re adapted to some arbitrary, meat-centered diet from Ice Age Europe, I’d be rich…

I happen to think this commenter’s analysis is flawed–more on that later. But I figured it was high time to put my thoughts to paper on whether “The Paleo Diet” as such is still a meaningful concept or just a fad that has passed its time (“If it’s a fad, then it’s a 2 million year old fad!” sound bite notwithstanding).

What exactly is the Paleolithic anyway?

As the commenter on my Paleofantasy review says, the Paleolithic evokes images of cavemen and ice-age Europe. The famous cave paintings at Lascaux and Neanderthals also probably come to mind.

Paleolithic literally means “ancient stone” and is the name given to the era of stone tools. However, the Paleolithic is much longer than most people think. It starts around 2.6 million years ago with the first stone tools and ends about 10,000 years ago as civilization as we know it began to take shape.

The Paleolithic era is often referred to interchangeably as the Pleistocene era, though strictly speaking the two are not the same. They begin and end at approximately the same times, but the Pleistocene is a geological era demarcated by a series of repeated ice ages ending with the last ice age about 10,000 years ago.

Significantly for us, the first members of the genus Homo also appear around the same time the Paleolithic and the Pleistocene began. It was, after all, our forebear, Homo habilis, who was making most of the early stone tools. Depending on estimates, Homo sapiens–us–appeared in Africa around 150,000 – 200,000 years ago, and started leaving Africa to populate the rest of the world around 60,000 years ago.

During the Paleolithic we shed our fur, learned to cook with fire, developed ever more sophisticated hunting tools, began leaving piles of bones from animals we had consumed, our brain size increased 2-3x, and at some point we began to speak to each other. Paleolithic history is to a large extent the history of us as a species and the era in which we evolved most of our distinctive features.

Evolution and human diet

I’ve never once doubted that evolution can tell us something about a healthy human diet. As eminent geneticist and biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

We not only need to inquire into human evolution, but into the evolution of the plants and animals that we eat as well. Sweet tasting fruits like berries and apples often have a happy co-evolutionary relationship with humans and other animals. In the wild, they provide us with a rich source of sustenance and in return we help them reproduce by spreading their seeds around through defecation or simply discarding them after consuming the tasty parts.

Edible seeds, nuts, and grains often have an antagonistic evolutionary relationship with humans and other animals. In their case we do not help the plants reproduce, but rather consume the reproductive parts directly. Plants often retaliate with chemical warfare by evolving compounds that damage our health or fertility. And indeed today, nut allergies are among the most prevalent, while blueberry allergies are all but unheard of.

That said, as I mentioned in the opening, the name paleo diet has been troubling me for years. We aren’t, and never were, trying to literally recreate the Stone Age and the glory days of hunter-gatherers before the “evils” of farming took root and we started growing amber fields of pain.

Since the end of the Paleolithic, farming has also dramatically changed the selection pressures on plants. Now we grow massive fields of grains, and plants like wheat do reap enormous reproductive benefits from our activities–but we should not rashly jump to the conclusion that nuts, seeds, and grains have fully disarmed their WMD arsenals since signing the peace treaty.

What Paleofantasy says about the paleo diet, and what I think of the book today

The main argument of the book with regards to the paleo diet is that evolution never stopped and there was no single, monolithic diet in the paleolithic to begin with. The paleo diet is, therefore, debunked. Never mind that neither of these were claims paleo authors were making to begin with.

I knew I was drinking the paleo diet Kool-Aid pretty hard around the time I reviewed Paleofantasy. So I put extra effort into keeping the review balanced, and tried to avoid it turning into a simple knee-jerk reaction piece.

However, time and distance have given me more perspective on both the paleo diet and criticisms of it raised in the book. As I was re-reading my review, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still stand behind my main points. In fact, if I were writing the review again today I would probably only give the book one or two stars instead of three.

It’s painfully evident that whenever Zuk refers to prominent paleo authors like Mark Sisson and Art DeVany, she either did not actually read her sources or deliberately took them out of context. Had she been more thorough, she would have realized that in some cases not only was she not refuting their claims, she was actually retreading material that they had already been writing about for years–especially her two cornerstone points about lactase persistence and increased amylase CNV.

As much as I found Paleofantasy entertaining when Zuk was simply taking us on a tour of studies related to evolution and the human condition, the glaring problems with her coverage of paleo authors leaves me with a gnawing concern about the accuracy of her representation of research in the rest of the book.

While the name paleo diet still sits somewhat uneasy with me, the content of authors’ actual prescriptions does not. Another reviewer of Paleofantasy encapsulates what may be my biggest concern about the book: “… Zuks [sic] book could dissuade people from acting responsibly regarding diet…”

Should we still call it the paleo diet?

Mat Lalonde put it best when he said that the paleo framework is best thought of as a framework for hypothesis generation. To that extent, I think the watershed mark of approximately 10,000 years ago when farming began to rapidly and dramatically change dietary composition is still a salient point in history for generating hypotheses about what types of foods humans might be best suited to.

As I replied to the commenter on my review, Zuk provides no evidence of any dramatic species-wide changes in humans in recent history. The best we have on offer is a simple mutation in an enzyme that the body already produced–lactase–that is only present in about 35% of the global population. This does not contradict, but rather supports the notion of human evolution as a slow process that hasn’t produced much more than cosmetic change in recent history. And in no way constitutes proof that the human body is completely malleable to whatever you feed it.

Inter-individual variation certainly exists, but the evolutionary framework is still very salient. That is a take home message that paleo authors have already been writing about for years. Chris Kresser exemplifies the “paleo template” approach in his book.

That said, in my view paleo authors have been drifting more towards what I would call evidence-based nutrition in recent years.

Foods like white potatoes that were not originally considered paleo, are now considered paleo by many folks because selective farming has reduced the alkaloid content to the extent that they are no longer poisonous like many other nightshades. Yes, I really just said that. Farming techniques in the neolithic have made these foods “paleo.” If you find that a head scratcher, you are in good company.

So should we still call it the paleo diet? I really don’t know. I was hoping that by the time I got all my thoughts out on paper I would have a clear stand on the matter, but I’m still irresolute.

However, I do think the dietary recommendations of authors like Mark Sisson, Chris Kresser, and others that broadly fall under the paleo monicker are sound and worth following. If Paleo Diet is the catch phrase that directs you to their work, then I think your health will be all the better for it.

If the findings that have come out of the paleo movement are at all valid, and I think many of them are, they will eventually fold into mainstream nutrition. While we have seen slight shifts in this direction, by and large it hasn’t happened yet. I’m sure the dietary landscape will continue to evolve in the years to come, but for now perhaps the paleo diet is still what we need.

Could it be possible to put together the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in Biology entirely through free massively open online courses (MOOCs) offered by top tier universities?

Lately I’ve entertained ideas of going back to school for a PhD in Biology. Most programs require that you have the equivalent of a B.S. in Biology, but… I don’t have that. In fact, I never took a single biology course in college. I didn’t even take biology in high school!

Money-wise, many PhD programs cover tuition and provide a living stipend. However, not working and paying potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket for a second bachelor’s degree in order to even qualify to apply is not a viable option.

I was already a biology MOOC enthusiast, so I decided to see if I could take it to the next level and put together an entire undergraduate biology program with MOOCs.

At the time of writing I’ve personally completed about 80-90% of the courses on this list, and even had the opportunity to serve as a Community Teaching Assistant for one of them–Useful Genetics.

(Inspiration for this post also came in part from aGupieWare’s online computer science curriculum)

Why do this?

Why would someone with no formal background in biology want to go back to school for a PhD in it?

Since my mid-20s I’ve been progressively more interested in health. Like most people, I got my information second-hand from books and blogs published by various health gurus and experts. One question I constantly ask myself is, “how can I take what I’m doing to the next level?” And to me it seemed the next level was to read the primary literature itself (i.e., the research papers referenced in the books and blogs).

I tried, but much of it was utterly incomprehensible to me. Often I’d see study reviews talk about studies being good or bad for this or that reason, and I didn’t fully understand why. Were the criticisms legitimate? Did the results of the study simply violate whatever preferred bias was held by the reviewer?

Eventually I became fascinated by emerging technologies like CRISPR/Cas9* (genome editing) and iPS Cells (restoring cells to a stem cell-like state) that hold promise to revolutionize treatment of ailments that are virtually invulnerable to current treatments. This marked a shift from simply wanting to read and understand medical literature to being interested in doing research myself and being part of the development of cutting edge health technologies.

* Quick shoutout to former AP Chemistry classmate Feng Zhang who may be in the running for a Nobel prize for revolutionary work on CRISPR/Cas9.

How the curriculum was put together

This biology curriculum is based on the Stanford undergraduate biology degree requirements. Why Stanford? Because that is where I did my undergraduate degree, and it is the university whose curricular structure I am most familiar with.

While many universities offer recordings of their actual course lectures online through YouTube, this program primarily leverages MOOCs that more closely emulate the classroom environment by providing assignments, exams, and interactions with course staff through message boards.

Although for some requirements–notably organic chemistry–where MOOCs simply are not available, the requirement is “fulfilled” by a YouTube lecture series.

I did the best I could to match courses in the Stanford biology degree requirements to their exact MOOC counterparts. However, curricula and courses vary from school to school so often the match is only an approximate one.

Lab courses

Unfortunately, there is just no good self-study way to replicate lab courses. Some of the MOOCs have very elaborately designed digital labs (notably MIT’s Introduction to Biology – The Secret of Life), but you won’t be able to do any actual wet biology.

Electives

There are many different ways to organize a biology degree curriculum depending on both your interests and goals. This curriculum skews towards human biology, statistics, and genomic data analysis–key skills for interpreting health-related research.

Many other electives could have been chosen, and you can browse the course offerings on Coursera and edX to see what else interests you. I have also taken many great MOOCs not on this list.

The Biology curriculum

Note that the equivalent on campus courses are often split into 2 or 3 parts when they are converted into MOOCs, so at first glance the course list may look deceptively long. If you discover a broken link, please let me know and I’ll try to find where it has moved or a replacement course.

1. Core courses

• AP® Biology – Part 1: The Cell
• AP® Biology – Part 2: Genetics
• AP® Biology – Part 3: Evolution and Diversity
• AP® Biology – Part 4: Ecology
• AP® Biology – Part 5: Review and Exam Preparation
• Introduction to Biology – The Secret of Life
• Molecular Biology – Part 1: DNA Replication and Repair
• Molecular Biology – Part 2: Transcription and Transposition

2. Required foundational breadth courses

Either Introduction to Chemistry or eCHEM 1A. Though eCHEM 1A doesn’t offer assignments, it is highly recommended viewing. It may be the best taught introduction to any subject ever.

• Introduction to Chemistry: Reactions and Ratios
• Introduction to Chemistry: Structures and Solutions
• eCHEM 1A: Online General Chemistry (Part 1 of 4)
• eCHEM 1A: Online General Chemistry (Part 2 of 4)
• eCHEM 1A: Online General Chemistry (Part 3 of 4)
• eCHEM 1A: Online General Chemistry (Part 4 of 4)

Either Chemistry 51 or Khan Academy’s Organic Chemistry. Chemistry 51 follows the Janice Gorzynski Smith textbook. Organic chemistry requires a lot of learning by doing, so I recommend doing the end of chapter exercises. Khan Academy is perhaps a more “Organic Chemistry Lite” experience, which may be preferable depending on your time and interests.

• Chemistry 51A: Organic Chemistry
• Chemistry 51B: Organic Chemistry
• Chemistry 51C: Organic Chemistry
• Organic Chemistry (Khan Academy)

• Introduction to Physical Chemistry
• Preparing for the AP* Physics 1 Exam – Part 1: Linear Motion
• Preparing for the AP* Physics 1 Exam – Part 2: Rotational Motion
• Preparing for the AP* Physics 1 Exam – Part 3: Electricity & Waves
• Preparing for the AP* Physics 1 Exam – Part 4: Exam Prep
• AP® Physics 2 – Part 1: Fluids and Thermodynamics
• AP® Physics 2 – Part 2: Electricity and Magnetism
• AP® Physics 2 – Part 3: Optics and Modern Physics
• AP® Physics 2 – Part 4: AP Review and Exam Preparation
• Calculus: Single Variable Part 1 – Functions
• Calculus: Single Variable Part 2 – Differentiation
• Calculus: Single Variable Part 3 – Integration
• Calculus: Single Variable Part 4 – Applications
• Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python

3. Electives

• Statistics in Medicine
• Introductory Human Physiology
• Useful Genetics Part 1: How Our Genes Shape Us
• Useful Genetics, Part 2: Genes and Genetic Inheritance
• Epigenetic Control of Gene Expression
• Introduction to Genetics and Evolution
• Principles of Biochemistry
• Introduction to Human Evolution
• Introduction to Genomic Technologies
• Genomic Data Science with Galaxy
• Python for Genomic Data Science
• Algorithms for DNA Sequencing

4. Writing in the major

• Writing in the Sciences

Many of these courses allow you to purchase an optional verified certificate of completion. While I think the real world value for these certificates is still very much an open question, please do support the universities offering these fine courses if your finances allow.

If you have any questions about this curriculum or suggestions to improve it, please leave them in the comments.

Like my earlier post about learning Swedish, my motivation for attempting Danish also stems from a TV show. In fact, a TV show that is in both Swedish and Danish called The Bridge (Broen in Danish/Bron in Swedish).

In The Bridge, a body is found on the bridge between Denmark and Sweden, right on the border, and the respective police departments work together to solve the case. The plot may sound familiar if you’ve seen the UK/French remake of The Bridge.

If Swedish learning resources are few and far between, Danish learning resources are practically non-existent. But fortunately, the few resources that do exist are pretty good. In this post we’ll take a look at my plan of attack and how it went.

5 Fun Facts about Denmark

Before we really get into it, let’s set the cultural stage with some fun facts about Denmark that you might not know about.

1. Legos are from Denmark

Every kid knows their Nintendos and PlayStations are from Japan, but I bet few realize that their Legos are from Denmark. If you ever make it to Denmark, visit the Legoland theme park.

2. Danes call Danishes (the pastries) Viennese bread

The Danish word for a Danish is wienerbrød, meaning Viennese bread. But what do the Viennese call them? Danishes!

How did that happen? It turns out the originators of the Danish were a couple of Austrian bakers who came to Denmark and setup shop there.

3. Famous Danes you didn’t know were Danes

Don’t let his superb British accent fool you, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jamie Lannister) of Game of Thrones fame is Danish! A couple others that took me by surprise were Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn in Lord of the Rings) and Lars Ulrich (drummer for Metallica). As a ’90s child who grew up on Metallica music, I had to see this for myself. So here is an interview with Lars in Danish.

4. You might be part Danish and not even know it.

The Vikings didn’t just launch raids against Western Europe, many stayed behind. Particularly relevant to those of British descent, the Vikings managed to capture and rule an area known as The Danelaw encompassing nearly all of Northern and Eastern England. Over time they merged with the local population and their Scandinavian genetic legacy can still be found ubiquitously today.

5. Bacon is the unofficial national food of Denmark.

Yum… bacon. And the unofficial national dish is stegt flæsk med persillesovs (fried bacon with parsley sauce).

Online Danish language courses

I hope to see a Danish university put out some free quality online courses some day, but today there are still two self-study Danish programs that I can recommend.

The first is Pimsleur Danish. You can get the first lesson free from the Pimsleur website. No matter what language you want to learn, the first thing I would always do is get the free first Pimsleur lesson to start getting a feel for how the language sounds and is pronounced.

The second is DanishClass101. DanishClass101 is run by a company called Innovative Language that produces high quality courses for many languages, and their Danish courses are no exception. DanishClass101 is hands down the best self study course available for Danish.

DanishClass101 also makes you an offer that you can’t refuse. For only $1 you can get 1 month of full access to their entire Danish course catalog including lessons from absolute beginner all the way up to advanced. You also get a digital download of their Ultimate Getting Started with Danish Box Set. After the first month it converts to a monthly subscription service unless you cancel.

With DanishClass101 you can play lessons online, via their Android or iOS app, or download and play from your computer. The lessons follow a typical format of a sample dialogue followed by explanation and vocabulary practice. One of my favorites is the Top 25 Danish Questions You Need to Know course. I wish something like that had been available when I was learning other languages. I’m also a big fan of their Danish in Three Minutes series that you can preview on YouTube.

While DanishClass101 is still the best available for Danish, there are some aspects that could be better. Since Innovative Language produces courses for many languages following the same model, their courses can be a bit cookie cutter and not as tailored to the language as they could be. Danish pronunciation, for instance, is very complicated and merits much more detailed explanation than the time allotted for it.

It would also be nice to have some grammar practice exercises to drill in sentence patterns, conjugations, declensions and the like. I looked around for a Danish grammar book with exercises, but couldn’t find one available online.

Danish pronunciation

Danish pronunciation almost comically bears no resemblance to written Danish. Written Danish is probably best considered more like a rough guideline for pronunciation. Or as one person I saw online put it, “Danish orthography is a vicious lie.”

There are also these glottal stops called “stød” randomly inserted into various spots in Danish words that aren’t indicated by anything in the writing. You just have to learn where they are.

For the first time I think I really understand how people must feel trying to learn English, and all its irregularities, as a second language.

What makes it worse is that Danish people tend to talk really fast and mush their words together. Even though Swedish and Danish are very closely related languages, I feel like it takes ten times as much time and effort to wrap your ears and mouth around Danish.

That said, written Danish is not quite as disordered as it seems at first glance. Like English, eventually you get used to sounds made by certain combinations of letters together.

At the end of the day though, you just have to hear a native say a word to know what it’s supposed to sound like. Fortunately, there are some excellent resources for this:

• Den Danske Ordbog is an authoritative online dictionary that contains phonetic transcriptions, as well as audio pronunciation for many. You need to know something about the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to interpret the phonetic transcriptions.
• Google translate provides a machine based voice that can be spotty, but it’s the only way to generate pronunciation for full sentences on demand.
• Forvo.com is a crowd-sourced pronunciation dictionary that typically has excellent coverage.

Study plan and approach

Like with Swedish, my goal wasn’t so much learning Danish, but enjoying a more full experience of the TV show by being able to understand a little bit of the language in addition to just reading English subtitles.

Accordingly, my goals for Danish were modest. Learning a language to the point you can watch and fully comprehend a TV show in another language in a very short period of time is completely unrealistic. My hope was just to pick up on words and phrases that I knew, and learn some new words in the process.

The first thing I did was work through the first lesson of Pimsleur Danish, then half a dozen or so lessons from the DanishClass101 absolute beginner series.

Then I started watching the first episode of The Bridge. I’m not going to sugar coat it, it was a linguistic train wreck. Not only could I not make out a word the Danes were saying, I couldn’t even tell what language was being spoken most of the time! To complicate matters, there were Swedes with Danish accents and Danes with Swedish accents. And the Swedes in the show speak a southern dialect of Swedish that sounds very different than the Stockholm dialect I’d acclimated to.

So I scrapped that project for now, and decided to try a different show first to give my ear a chance to acclimate to Danish. I settled on Rita, a show about a middle school teacher in a suburb of Copenhagen. Standard Spoken Danish and pretty basic day-to-day vocabulary–perfect!

Rita is currently available to stream on Netflix in the US and various other countries. And it also has the Danish subtitles–an absolute must–which are conspicuously missing from the digital versions of many Danish shows I’ve looked for.

From there on out I interwove a few lessons of Danish with episodes of Rita. Pausing, rewinding, and checking the dictionary as I went. The goal was not to understand every word, but just pick out parts that sounded like something I knew or phrases that might be interesting to know.

At first it was incredibly difficult because of the pronunciation issues. The English subtitles would indicate the characters said some words that I should know, but I had completely missed them. I’d rewind and play it again with the Danish subtitles. The Danish subtitles would indicate that the Danish words I expected to be there were in fact supposed to be there, but I still couldn’t hear them! Many, many, many replays later I finally started to hear the rudimentary sound contours of the words that were supposedly there.

It got easier over time. Eventually I discovered that one of my main problems was stød in unexpected places that made the word and sentence rhythm sound very different. So I became a stød detective of sorts. I checked each and every single new word I encountered in Den Danske Ordbog for stød which it indicates in the pronunciation transcription with an IPA symbol that looks like a floating question mark.

Sometimes just saying the sentence aloud myself helped my ears to “find” it in the show dialog.

Now that I’ve finished watching 3 seasons of Rita, I feel pretty satisfied with my progress in Danish. Although it took way, way more work than Swedish just because of the pronunciation difficulties.

Danish learning resources

Pimsleur Danish – An audio only language course, first lesson free.

DanishClass101 – Hands down best self-study courses for Danish. Available online by subscription. At the time of this post you can access their full course catalog for 30 days for only $1.

Den Danske Ordbog – Online Danish dictionary. Note, this is not a Danish-English dictionary. It’s main use for absolute beginners is the pronunciation transcriptions and pronunciation audios.

Google translate – Free Google translator app. Machine translations are often suspect, but still very useful.

Forvo.com – A crowd-sourced pronunciation dictionary. Listen to native speakers pronounce words. Very good coverage.

Netflix – Stream Rita and other Danish shows on Netflix (direct link to Danish category). Availability varies by country.

Vores fællessprog – Online Danish lessons helpful for learning grammar. Despite their basic level, there is no audio so they are better suited to learners who already have a good grasp of pronunciation and some exposure to the language.

Bonus

I’ve become utterly fascinated by sentences in Danish and Swedish that are essentially word-for-word the same as English and just sound like English with a thick accent. Here are a couple.

Danish: Hej. Det var en god ting, at du hjalp hende.
English: Hey. It was a good thing that you helped her.

Danish: Kan du høre mig?
Swedish: Kan du höra mig?
English: Can you hear me?

tl;dr – I watched the Swedish sci-fi series Äkta Människor (Real Humans) and it’s now one of my favorite shows of all time. While the show had English subtitles, it inspired me to learn some Swedish for a more complete viewing experience. This post discusses the Swedish learning experience and links to some Swedish learning resources.

Ten years ago if you had asked me about Sweden the first things that would have come to mind are the Swedish Bikini Team (which it turns out aren’t even Swedish), vikings, Ikea, and the country that Jamie Lee Curtis’s character lies about being from in the movie Trading Places. It just wasn’t a place that I knew much about or had been on my radar.

Even after having worked for a Swedish-owned company for nearly four years, having had daily contact with Swedes, and been on a business trip to Sweden I only knew about one word of Swedish–“Hej,” meaning “Hi” and pronounced like “Hey” in English. They often say it twice in a row and I had giddy, child-like fun running around Stockholm saying “Hejhej” to everyone.

It wasn’t until I went looking for foreign language sci-fi shows to watch and discovered a series called Äkta Människor (Real Humans) that I became motivated to try and learn the language.

Fortunately, having learned Japanese and Korean to a fairly high degree and attempted several others, learning foreign languages is something I had a pretty good idea how to go about.

Swedish learning goals

First a dose of reality. People who’ve never seriously studied a foreign language before are often grossly misinformed about how much time and work it takes to become fluent in another language. Becoming fluent enough to understand a foreign language TV show in a very short period of time is completely unrealistic. You’re just not going to listen to a couple language tapes and be like “pow, I speak Swedish now.”

And watching TV shows is actually one of the worst ways–at least for absolute beginners anyway–to learn a foreign language. Why? Because the level of language spoken is way beyond where you are now, and typically spoken at speed far beyond your ability to pick up even the parts you ostensibly know.

That said, watching Äkta Människor was not a language learning tactic but rather my raison d’être here, so I had to adjust accordingly. My expectations for what I would be able to achieve in Swedish in the immediate future were low. Very low. In fact, my goal was only to be able to pick up the occasional word or sentence here and there.

Watching the show was still going to be primarily a “reading English subtitles” affair, my aim was simply to accent it with a little bit of Swedish flavor here and there.

Swedish study plan

Since my goals were very modest, I was pretty casual about my study plan. The first thing I did was listen to Unit 1 of Pimsleur’s Swedish which you can get for free.

Pimsleur’s speaking only approach is good for learning some basic phrases and getting an introductory feel for how the language sounds and is pronounced. However, completing an entire level of Pimsleur lessons is an exercise in intense boredom and you come away knowing breathtakingly little because there is so much repetition. Pimsleur isn’t cheap either, so after the free first lesson I moved on.

My next stop was the FSI Swedish Course. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) released many of its courses into the public domain a few years ago and they can be found online free. I’m often not impressed by FSI courses, but FSI Swedish is very well done. The introductory unit on Swedish pronunciation and spelling may be the best I’ve seen for any language ever.

In my view the most productive exercise in the early stages of learning a language is being exposed to a firehose of vocabulary within a common sentence pattern. “Can I get… X,” “Do you like… Y,” “A is B.” That type of thing. From the sentence patterns you learn basic grammar and get a feel for how things are phrased in the language. The goal is not to master the firehose of vocabulary, however, but just seed it in your mind for when you encounter it again later.

Fortunately the FSI Swedish course is designed with just such an approach. It may actually introduce too much vocabulary up front, and so that’s where it was nice to have done the free unit of Pimsleur first.

Finishing the whole FSI program meant I’d probably never get around to actually watching my show, so I just did the first couple lessons and called it good enough for now.

Learning Swedish while watching the show

It’s a big help to have both the English and Swedish subtitles on hand when watching Äkta Människor, so you can switch back and forth as needed. You use the English subtitles so you can understand the show, and the Swedish so you can see for certain what is actually being said.

If you don’t care much about picking up Swedish, you can just watch the show straight through without pausing or stopping. You won’t learn much–or probably any–Swedish that way. If, like me, you do actually want to pick up something from the show you need to do something different.

While watching the show I would constantly pause, rewind, and check things on Google translate. I didn’t try to understand every word as that would have been utterly futile. I just paused it when I heard words that sounded like something I knew, or they said phrases I thought might be interesting to know. Often I would have to listen to parts over and over again to be able to distinctly hear all the words that the Swedish subs said were supposedly in the sentence.

Watching the show this way takes longer. Way longer. It wasn’t uncommon for me to spend 2-3 hours watching a 50 minute episode. However, since it was a labor of love it was time joyously spent. I love looking up words and figuring out what things mean. I’m one of those people who’s always Googling things and looking up things on Wikipedia even when I watch English language shows.

After a while it became clear that I wanted something more than just Google translate. If you have ever used it then you know that the machine translations are often exceedingly crappy. I wanted to take things to the next level and start using a proper dictionary. I wanted to find something that was like what Merriam-Webster or the OED is to English.

Not really knowing anything about Swedish dictionaries or what the Swedes use, I reached out to one of my former bosses from my days working for the Swedes. He said that Svenska Akademiens Ordlista contains the “official” list of words that belong to Swedish, and Norstedts Svenska Ordbok is the go to dictionary. He even very kindly sent me a sweet set of Swedish dictionaries! The picture at the top of this post is of them.

An unexpected property of Swedish that makes it particularly foreigner friendly

The unequivocally hardest part of learning a foreign language is wrapping your ear around it and actually being able to hear what’s being said at native speeds. It’s even worse when you’re watching TV and you don’t have a conversation partner who is adjusting to your ability level.

Fortunately, Swedish has a unique property that makes it particularly foreigner friendly. Swedish long vowels are pronounced very long. They are pronounced so long that you can go out and get a cup of coffee and come back before the syllable is over.

For example, just listen to how long the -ol sound lasts when this native Swedish speaker pronounces the word pistol. These very long sounds slow down the dialog and add clarity to words making them easier to pick up.

By way of contrast, Danish is a very, very similar Scandinavian language I’ve also experimented with that is pronounced quickly and mumbled making it extremely difficult to pick up on even the most basic dialog. Side note, I imagine this is how non-native English speakers feel about English.

How much of the show was I actually able to understand?

The short answer is not that much, but more than I expected. In addition to the long Swedish vowels, there were several things going in my favor.

If you were to start categorizing things, it feels like 50% of the dialogue in TV shows is just people greeting each other, saying goodbye, saying “I love you,” saying “I’d like to talk to you,” or saying “yeah, sure” or “no” to things.

It also helped that for a sci-fi show, much of the dialog in Äkta Människor uses fairly basic vocabulary. There is some code that makes the humanoid robots “alive,” but the language never really gets that technical. There were lots of sentences about having the code and looking for the code, but no one explaining the theoretical basis of the flux capacitor or trying to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

You may not know it, but English is classified as a Germanic language. Swedish also belongs to the Germanic language family, which means there is meaningful overlap between the languages.

People who have studied even a little Spanish or French know that there is a broad base of common vocabulary inherited from Latin. These are often somewhat more technical or formal words like “acceptable.”

With English and Swedish many of the most basic words are shared between languages. English words like hear, go, and me are basically the same as their Swedish counterparts höra, gå, and mig (pronounced like “may”). More than a time or two I found myself understanding a sentence perfectly well even though it contained words I was hearing in Swedish for the first time.

Sometimes even long-ish sentences are word-for-word the same as English and just sound like English with a thick accent. Just listen to what “kan du höra mig” sounds like on Google translate.

Swedish and Danish sentences that are the same in their respective languages as they are in English have actually become a fascination of mine. It’s a refreshingly different experience from learning Japanese and Korean where the languages are completely different from top to bottom (well, except for a few English loan words).

Anyway, to wrap up, given the goals I started with I would have to say mission accomplished.

I’ve also found that I rather enjoy the Swedish language for its own sake, and my appetite is whet to check out some more Swedish shows.

Swedish learning resources

Äkta Människor (Real Humans) – imdb, Wikipedia

Svtplay.se – Stream Swedish TV shows from Sveriges Television. Many shows are region restricted, but quite a few are available “utomlands.”

Pimsleur Swedish – A speaking only language course, free first lesson

FSI Swedish – Foreign Service Institute’s Swedish Basic Course, particularly good unit on pronunciation. Public domain and free.

Google translate – Free Google translator app. Machine translations are often suspect, but still very useful.

Norstedts Online – Norstedts is the go to Swedish dictionary. Limited version of the Swedish-English dictionary available online free. The full version and Swedish-Swedish dictionary are only available online with a monthly subscription.

Forvo.com – A crowd-sourced pronunciation dictionary. Listen to native speakers pronounce words. Very good coverage.