Happy 2017! See you later!

See you in a while!

It has been a great year in 2016. I’ve been able to write more about the motivations for learning languages—and have successfully stirred up some controversy. My goal has been to highlight privilege among language learners and to shine light on those who speak less-commonly studied languages. For example, here is my most controversial post from 2016: “Language hacking ≠ language love”.

One problem has been that I didn’t spend as much time learning languages as I would have liked. So for 2016, my goal is to spend more time on Oromo and Somali. I may work on a little Serbian, since I used to know some and we have a Serbian exchange student living with us currently. Tagalog may find its way in there, too, as an associate from Manila recently joined my team at work.

In this time of growing intolerance and shrinking globe, learning languages has never been more important or political. While I have been writing discoveries made by learning languages and focusing on the languages of my community, I want to turn back to those languages for a while. Time to get back in the trenches.

I will also work on some other writing projects that have been requiring more attention.

So, I will take the next month off. I will come back in February with a summary of progress up to this point.

See you in a few weeks!

Photo by UW Digital Collections – UW Digital Images, No restrictions, Link

Related articles

• The hard work of loving language
• Loving a language that plays hard to get: Studying rare languages
• Over my head in language love

The biggest struggles language-lovers face: Solved!

Let’s overcome the struggle together!

I need your help. I’m to solve some of these, the most difficult questions any language-lover has encountered.

Are you learning to speak a language? What do you do if you have the following problems?

First steps at language love

Time to get started again!

Last week I told you to do the minimum for language love; don’t try so hard.

Today, I want to give you some resources for how to start. Basic. Nothing complicated.

First, though, you have to do your research. You have to go on your ecolinguistic exploratory expedition to find out what people are speaking around you. What do you hear spoken? What do you see on signs, not the formal ones, but the hand-written signs taped to light posts and pinned to bulletin boards?

Now you have your language(s). Let’s begin.

Don’t try so hard: Do the minimum for language love

Don’t get worried. Just open up and start speaking.

I recently met the inventor of Fetch-a-Phrase, a method of keeping all the key phrases you need for a language in your back pocket. You take basic phrases for you language, correlate the words from one language to the other, and then use the correlations to build new sentences.

You don’t have to be great at languages. You just have to care. You don’t have to be fluent in a language. You just have to try. You don’t need to understand everything. You just have to say something. You don’t have to impress anyone. You just have to do something for someone else.

Lower the bar. Perfection is not the friend of language-love.

Why are you learning languages? Is it love?

Why learn languages?

In Simon Sinek’s TEDx Talk, “How great leaders inspire action”, he posits that great ideas begin not with the “What,” but with the “Why” and then the “How.” That is, every company produces a “what,” but not all delve into the more profound areas of why and how they produce what they do. I’ve learned a lot from this presentation in how to examine what I love doing and what motivates me to keep on going.

Language means everything to me, but so does service to others. In this blog I’ve been trying for many years to express why love and deep connection with others motivates my language-learning.

Now I’m going to lay out why love lies at the center of my learning languages.

I believe that we all should put ourselves out there to love. More specifically, we need to sacrifice for one another, especially for those in need.

How do you teach adults a foreign language?

Lauaxeta Euskaltegia, Getxo, Spain–the school I visited

Ever since I planned on going to the North of Spain, to the Basque Country, aka Euskal Herria, I was on the lookout for where I could learn more of the local language, Euskara.

Euskara is a language unique to the North of Spain and Southwest of France, unrelated to any other language (though many theories exist regarding its unlikely relationship to other languages). For more information about the language itself, I would direct you to its Wikipedia page. I will focus here on my own experiences with the language.

When I went to the North of Spain in July, I had the opportunity to sit in on a class of Basque for adults at the Lauaxeta Euskaltegia in Getxo, Spain. This school offers classes to locals who want to become better at this language. They offer various levels of courses, and I sat in on the basic class.

Loving language to save your life

Friends who do not know loneliness. How do we learn from them?

Loving language can save your life. Some talk about languages helping you get a better paycheck or offering cognitive benefits. If you aim to make yourself richer or smarter, learning a language gives you marginal benefits. They will not save your life, though.

Or will they…?

Our society in the US—and more and more in the first world—is developing a serious, deadly condition, that is, loneliness. Note, though, that this is a problem of the first world. It does not afflict those of the third world nearly as much.

By learning a language, especially one of the immigrant groups living near you, you may have a chance of dodging the deadly bullet of isolation that is literally killing people in our society.

What do ISIS, the CIA, and the Mormons have in common? Languages!

How do you reach her? recruit her? Do you speak her language?

People use languages to spread their own ideas. If they have ideas they believe deeply in, they gravitate towards learning languages and recruiting speakers of all different languages to further their message more quickly to a broader audience.

ISIS, US defense agencies, and the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS, or “Mormons”) all look to spread ideas. I am not discussing the validity of their different ideas or overall tactics, but the post compares how they use language to reach their objectives. Most institutions with an important idea or object can learn from what each of these organizations is doing.

Best ways to learn to hang out in Spanish

What do you need to know to enjoy hanging out in Spanish?

The main reason people want to learn a language is to hang out with new, cool people. This week I asked myself, is that what our schools are teaching? I wanted to interview my children to see how well school Spanish helped them do what was most important to teenagers: socializing.

My kids just got back this week from Spain. We went as a family for 10 days, and then they stayed for another couple weeks. They stayed with two families. One was the family of our former exchange student. The other was the grandmother of my daughter’s friend.

Of my two daughters, the older had taken a year of standard high school Spanish. The younger had no formal Spanish other than a few weeks of Duolingo practice.

I interviewed them to see how it went.

• How well did they feel prepared? What could they do successfully in Spanish?
• In attempting to learn Spanish, what worked? What didn’t?
• If they could spend the next year learning Spanish, what would they focus on?

Peace comes from speaking another language…or does it?

Is language enough to bring peace between peoples?

 I’m a bleeding heart when it comes to language. In post after post, I write about how learning your neighbor’s language will help bring more understanding and peace.

Let’s be honest, though. Does learning the language of another really bring peace? Young Palestinians know Hebrew. Almost all Ukrainians are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian. Most Ethiopians and Eritreans speak mutually comprehensible languages, as do many Indians and Pakistanis.

This week I had to rethink some of my rhetoric, to tighten it up.

To achieve peace and understanding, learning a language will not be enough. We language-learners must submit and become the students of those who speak other languages. Listening to them, not imposing our view, not manipulating them, must be our goal so that we can challenge our assumptions and gain wisdom.