Monthly Archives: September 2009

So we’ve piqued your interest – and now you just want to learn the game!

You can learn WAYK by using technique “Copycat” (which means just what it sounds like), copying along with the videos. Your first goal, asides from your particular eventual spoken target language, involves simply learning the sign language portion of the game. Once you’ve mastered the first four bookends to fluency, you can translate the Universal Speed Curriculum into your target language, and change how you use the signed grammar in the game to fit it.

Watch an overview of the game.

Start with the Bookends.

Bookend #1: “the Big Set-up” will teach you the roadmap, and how to prepare for the game.

Bookend #2: “What is that” will teach you how to begin interactive play.

Stop There.

Don’t go further into the bookends until you can play “What is that” with total fluency. Once you have achieved that, and with that philosophy, tackle the next two bookends, each in turn, only proceeding once you can play the prior bookend fluently.

Bookend #3: “Who/Whose is that” will take it to the next level.

Bookend #4: “Want, Have, Give, Take” will take you about as far as we have time to share.

And believe us; if you can get up to Bookend #4 in your target language, you will have built massive language learning and teaching skills. Play, play, play.

Brush up on the Techniques.

Watch individual technique videos for clarification on how they work, and to see them in different contexts. The game uses 100+ techniques, but you need only know a few to get started. We’ll continually make new technique videos until we complete the technique library.

Technique “Technique!”

Technique “Set-up!”

Technique “Travels with Charlie”

Technique “Obviously!”

Technique “Craig’s List”

A Caveat.

We haven’t made videos for three important techniques: “Limit”, “Sorry, Charlie”, and “Fluent”. Until we do, let me sum them up.

“Limit”: limit the words you learn, and the scope of the conversation, as narrowly as possible. You can get all the way to Superior fluency with just 10 nouns – and you’ll get there incredibly fast. Don’t let yourself fall prey to wanting to “know more words” – practice the game as it stands, in bite-sized pieces, to fluency.

“Fluent”: repeat, as shown in the videos, everything over and over, each one in turn, until you feel totally comfortable and “fluent”. Don’t settle for just “knowing” the answer; go all the way to speedy ease. Only then move on, bringing in the next tiny piece. Just play the game – and the game involves passing language back and forth, playing with it till you’ve got it down and can add another piece. This doesn’t differ much from when you played tag as a kid, and added special rules one at a time, until you mastered every one, to make it more and more challenging. Play the game!

“Sorry, Charlie”: part of the technique “Travels with Charlie”, includes the idea that you must police yourself and your “fluent fool” in not bringing in or including any new language beyond your current fluent proficiency level; no hunting for new words, or new grammar, out of sequence! Just add each piece in its turn, one at a time. Go for less, rather than more, as encouraged by “Limit”.

Applying the Game to Your Target Language

Grab the Universal Speed Curriculum, and translate the English exchanges into your target language (check out a Spanish language example). Now that you understand the basic game, and can play it fluently and easily, you can modify the signed grammar you use to fit your target language.

In order to transition to playing the game in your target language, you’ll need to play some transition sessions of signing in your target grammer, without vocalizing. Just “think in your language”, while modifying the signs to fit.

After you feel comfortable with that, you can start vocalizing and fleshing out the game in your target language.

Bringing in the “Craig’s List” of “Want, Have, Give, Take” now kicks the game into an entirely different sphere – now we can DO stuff! Take stuff, ask for stuff, have stuff, trade, steal, all kinds of mischief! As we move objects back and forth across the table, we really get into the meat of conversational fluency. Typically the game acquires a whole lot of laughter and energy at this stage, with the more players, the merrier!

Wondering how you manage to learn the vocabulary of your target language so quickly and successfully? “Craig’s List” plays a key role in this, transferring information in connected lists and relationships, that you expand and grow ever larger as your conversations become more proficient. Whenever you have a new word, find a list in which it belongs, and repeat the list. You can also make an art out of “Craig’s Lists”, by making them as sticky, fun, and memorable as possible.

The second question you ask in the WAYK game: “Who is that?/Whose is that?”, setting it up with a “Craig’s List” of pronouns: Me/Mine, You/Yours, He/His, She/Hers.

Why do we start out so simply, and add bite-sized pieces, one at a time, constantly “starting over, starting at the beginning”? Abbot and Costello’s famous routine shows you what happens when you try to learn a new language without keeping things as “Obviously!” as possible:

A core technique of the game, “Obviously!” shapes the props, setup, conversation, and play of the game. We strive to make everything as obvious as possible – we want the “right” answer to be the first thing that pops into the players minds, naturally and obviously.

We started with objects by asking “What is that?”, now we’ve begun to add in people, 1st/2nd/3rd person, and possessives, depending on your target language. Everything added in bite-sized pieces, one piece at a time.

After introducing the game to your players, in WAYK you always first ask, “What-is-that?”, beginning the first step of the conversation that will take you to fluency.

This five-minute short by Constantin Pilavios reminds us why we always come back to that question, exemplifying the technique, “Start over, start at the beginning.”

With the question “What is that?”, now the conversation really begins! Starting at the beginning, with the most basic exchange, step-by-step we create fluency, and take that fluency for a ride down the proficiency roadmap, limiting the scope of the conversation so we can make speedy progress.

As I mention towards the end of the video, you really can’t spend too much time mastering this base conversation. Find ten “fluent fools” and play this game with them, in ten different languages. Or focus on one language and teach it to all your friends.

Have fun discovering what you can do with “What is that?”!

This video begins a series that purpose to teach the flow of the game, the sequence in which we slowly build fluent proficiency. Do not confuse the bookend “the Big Set-up” with the technique “Set-up!”, an important (but much smaller-scale) piece of introducing the game.

Every game starts with an eye towards this technique. Though seemingly “obvious” (like any good technique), a game leader can easily get sloppy and not thoroughly and clearly set-up a game. This technique directly requires several others:

“Obviously” (only use obvious, clear props, that people recognize immediately, like a completely red pen that also writes in red ink)
“Same Conversation” (set-up the same conversation you had before, and that other people have with this game, using the same props of red pen, black pen, stick, stone, and dollar, as often as possible)
“Lunatic Fringe” (Using extra players to form an outer circle of helpers)
“Angel on Your Shoulder” (positioning the lunatic fringe to help particular players across from them)
“Imaginary Friend” (With few players, filling the game in with Salmon holding stick, Coyote with the dollar, and the stone in front of Bear, and placing them correctly at the table)

I plan to make a free downloads page somewhere on the site, and to kick it off, I thought I’d post up Evan’s “Universal Speed Curriculum”, a conversational curriculum composed of English questions and answers, between two people.

So, how do you use the “USC”? Essentially, you’ll recognize in it the base conversation occurring in all the “Where Are Your Keys?” game videos, just without the marked techniques. So on the one hand, you can use it to bolster your understanding of what happens in the game (and we plan to make further videos to “chunk it down” too), and on the other hand, you can pick the language that interests you, and simply “write-in” the translations of each sentence.

This Universal Curriculum works in any language; it embodies the most basic conversation you can have. For now, I’ll let you discover on your own how it translates into other languages (no two languages quite have the same concepts, no matter how simple), but I’ll also happily answer questions.

So there you have it: the Universal Speed Curriculum! Use it well!