Monthly Archives: February 2011

"The Seven Samurai" remind us that martial-arts, like WAYK, are for protecting community life.

Over the past couple years, as we’ve been working to share WAYK with a larger audience, we’ve collected a lot of feedback on how to present the game.

One piece of feedback, that we’ve received many times, has to do with WAYK itself. It runs something like this:

“Do I have to learn sign language to become fluent in languages with WAYK? That seems like a lot of work.”

On the one hand, the answer is “no”: though signed languages, maintained by fluent deaf signers, offer the most fluid and useful hand signs to act as a bridge language (and simultaneously provide the first step towards speaking with Deafies too), you don’t have to learn a sign language. You can make one up, contracting your own signs to carry the target language. You can also choose not to use signs at all (and sometimes, if your hands are full, you won’t have the choice). Technique Signing, though massively powerful, is just one of hundreds of techniques that accelerate learning – it is the TPR act of gesturing and mime that accelerates play.

But this opens up a larger question, and that is: “how much time are you willing to invest to transform your ability to teach and learn?”

We think of WAYK as a mental martial-art. It is comprised of a system of moves and attitudes that look different in the hands of different players, and simple moves at the beginner’s level transform into complex elegance at the expert’s level.

Certainly WAYK can be a casual, fun hobby – and this is an important point. It has to be accessible this way, casually, by a whole community, from children to elders, from the learning disabled to the natural linguist. For most people, WAYK can be just simple fun.

However, for those inspired by the idea of becoming a language hunter, WAYK opens up a whole other world. For these folks, no amount of time spent training the skills of language hunting is too much – and what they are capable of can seem like magic.

At the highest skill level, martial-arts are peace loving tools for creating more life.

But it isn’t magic – it is simply the ability to use the simple “moves” of WAYK on the fly, in chaotic situations, adjusted for changing contexts. It is important to note that a major accelerator to becoming a language hunter is simply going for it – drilling the skills without questioning them, without choosing which ones you “think” will work, and which ones you think won’t.

Just like in a physical martial-art, WAYK is a product of natural evolution – it wouldn’t be a technique if it didn’t work.

You’ll never know if, how, and when a technique works, until you’ve mastered it.

No technique works all the time, but all of them exist because they are the “perfect move” for the right context.

You never stop learning in WAYK; even experienced language hunters are still exploring new worlds of endeavor, according to their level. Rather than simply mastering the game at the table, language hunters are exploring how to “court” fluent fools, how to set up the most enjoyable conversations, how to design more satisfying immersion weekends for their communities. New techniques are emerging for these contexts all the time.

So, does WAYK take a bunch of work? Well, yes, and no. It depends on what inspires you. If you are looking for casual games with friends, than a casual investment is plenty.

If you are looking to join the ranks of the language hunters, then there is no telling the amount of time you’ll spend training your skills – and you’ll hardly notice the time go by, because in WAYK, getting there is more fun than arriving.

Otherwise, you’re not playing “Where Are Your Keys?”.

Close enough is good enough.

You may have hunted dozens of skills and languages – or none. But no matter what, every time you sit down with a new fluent fool to fluency hunt their skill, you will always start at the beginning, by copy-catting, and mumble your way to fluency.

Attaining excellence requires you first embrace foolishness.

Perfection is the enemy of accelerated learning. “Close enough” must be good enough. A lack of mistakes or awkwardness indicates a lack of improvement. Where there is action, there is exploration (and thus the discovery of some dead ends).

Technique Mumble may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but it is an essential guide to moving through any skill. Give yourself and others the permission to clumsily begin to work your way through the first steps of skill-building, as mumble is a time-honored technique in countless fields.

We always like to say that WAYK is not a set of new learning techniques, it is just a new way to bring well-known techniques together and share them. Mumble is a good example. For example, in writing, it’s well known that just writing anything, “getting the creative juices flowing”, is imperative to the process. The uncensored free write is a good example of this, the timed (perhaps 15 minutes) exercise of just writing anything that comes to mind, as long as you keep your pen moving.

The problem of “writer’s block” hasn’t disappeared because of the “free-write” exercise. Every technique is, in itself, its own skill, and the skill of applying mumble is itself something that one can continually improve.

The trick is, to actually master the art of applying techniques themselves, which always begins with mumble. There is no way to break a WAYK game, really; any mumble-ing of the general gist of the game is a good enough start. The game can be mumble-ed through, the target skill or language can be mumble-ed, the hand-signs can be mumble-ed. Close enough is truly good enough – you’ll still experience accelerated learning. By improving, you’ll just experience more and more acceleration.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
Short: “Technique Mumble: ‘Close enough is good enough’.”
Long: “You can mumble your way through the speech and the hand signs, no worries, close enough is good enough in the beginning.”

Applying the technique in language acquisition
Give constant permission to your players to mumble through everything in the beginning. As they build fluency, they will naturally make a greater effort to enunciate and copy-cat more exactly. You can help this along through tq Correct One Thing. Mumble does not mean players will mumble forever – it means it’s good enough for now.

But what about…?
New players may protest that they prefer to learn the perfect pronunciation first, rather than mumble-ing.

• tq Fluency directs players to dive in, and start doing.
• tq How Fascinating! turns awkwardness and mistakes into accelerators for game energy.
• tq Bite-sized Pieces guides us to only take on what we can easily handle – and perfect pronunciation can elude even experienced speakers of the target language.

Here’s the fourth video in the series, which covers the third persons, He/She.

It’s worth noting that, as always, we are applying tq mumble to leading a game in Irish – this is not perfect, fluent adult Irish, of any accent. But it is the Irish game that any new game leader will be leading for new players that come to Irish night.

Any mangling of Irish accent or language is on us as language hunters, not due to our fluent speaker Bob!

And yet being willing to chew through the first sounds and conversation in Irish is part of being a highly skilled language hunter -  it will always be this way, for every new language we hunt.

This is someone's English, even if it's not yours...

You want to hunt a target skill, so therefore you need to find a fluent fool. You choose the fluent fool according to the accent you’re hunting, or simply accept their particular accent as your target.

“We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.” – Maya Angelou

“Diversity is the primary good.” – Jason Godesky

The common concept of dialects and accents is mostly fiction. There is no language anywhere without its own accent, or that could be counted as a dialect itself. Meaning, there is no standard, accentless version of any language – in fact, there is no French, no English, no Spanish, Russian. There are only countless variations on the overall common theme of any one of these languages, often blurring into the language groups around them.

The urge for “standardization” that has swept the modern world merely belies the fact that languages are alive, and that choosing one frozen accent to be the “standard” means destroying or stigmatizing all the other equally significant accents.

Say you want to teach English to immigrants – well, which English do you teach? Which is “correct”? The “Queen’s English”? Australian English? Scots English? Californian English? New York City English (which neighborhood)? Hindi English (Hinglish)? Singapore English (Singlish)? Chinese English (Chinglish)? All these Englishes (and English-impacted languages) either are, or may be, spoken by native speakers who grew up speaking them. So which one do you teach?

The “correct” language to teach is almost always the one spoken by the most fluent speaker in the room – meaning, the one to which you actually have a live speaker. “Correctness” is not found on the page, but in the daily vitality of the living language itself. So which English? Usually the best option is to teach your English accent – you can never teach “English”, but you can teach an English dialect. And if you’re an English speaker, it’s easiest to teach the one you speak.

This goes for any skill or knowledge base – they are at their most adroit and relevant in their own particular context. The generalized, decontextualized, standardized skill is, by its nature, less applicable to any particular context, than a skill developed for just that context.

And perhaps paradoxically, by learning one accent that truly belongs to its people, place, and lineage, we do deeply learn a generalized approach: that of adapting our fluency to the particular context we find ourselves in. The art of fluency hunting.

By hunting for the unique, we are fluent in the universal.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
Short: “Technique: Accent. Accent means you are learning just one particular accent – there is no such thing as “French”, or “Spanish”,  just countless accents or dialects. Today we’re learning just one – the one I know.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition
Accent means, whoever our fluent fool is, or whatever accent the fluency hunter/game leader has chosen, that is the accent in play. Accent is a living thing – we almost never play with theoretical accents (unless with conlangs, or “dead” languages like classical Latin). We always prioritize live speech over “correct” language found on the page. You can answer any objection to the accent in play by a shrug of the shoulders, and marking technique Accent.

But what about…?
New players may spend too much effort trying to get a ‘perfect’ accent.They may also do the opposite – object to the accent in play, or claim one accent is “right”, and another is “wrong”. There is also the problem of playing more than one accent in the same game.

• tq Mumble encourages players that “close enough is good enough” – no need for a perfect accent in the beginning.
• tq Accent and Fluent Fool means the game leader learned their accent from a particular person – and that is the game we’re playing. Next time we can play in a different accent, if players would like, as long as they can find a fluent fool to lead them.
• tq Accent means the game leader learned exactly this accent, and no other, from their fluent fool – even if players think they should be speaking this accent differently. Also, Mumble encourages everyone to just get close enough – accent concerns will clear up on their own, as players climb in proficiency, interacting with fluent speakers.
• tq Limit encourages game leaders to stick to one accent in one particular game – multiple accents can get confusing, and make it difficult for the Lunatic Fringe to Pull us through it, because they won’t all be saying the same thing.
• tq Language Hunter – you have two options for which accent to guide you: the accent of the most fluent speaker in the room (the fluent fool), or the accent of the most fluent game leader (language hunter). Language hunters often defer to fluent fools, simply because language hunters have greater ability to manage and learn multiple accents – and this fluent fool’s accent is yet another valuable fluency to add to the community treasury.

A game of WAYK in the Sechelt language, in Sechelt, B.C.

The good folks at SolutionsIQ are partnering with us to bring you our first public workshop in a while.

Please check out the event details  and register for the April workshop at the SolutionsIQ Agile Learning Center.

Register now for an early bird discount! Though this workshop will apply to all experienced levels, returning WAYK players also get an extra discount.

Thanks for supporting us, everyone – we hope to see you there.

Mister Rogers, master of the Same Conversation, and icon of Intermediate level language proficiency.

You’re fluency hunting a fluent fool,  and choose the most common activity in that skill to start at the beginning with the simplest level of performance, that first bite-sized piece. For the context you find it in, and driven by a few of your favorite things, you create a set-up and build a same conversation that you will return to over and over, the foundation of your travels with charlie as you climb the proficiency scale.

As you climb the scale you create new same conversations in this same way, each appropriate to the new level of proficiency you’ve reached, each opening up new interactions and capacities within the overall skill, building on each other.

Technique Same Conversation is the natural result of applying fundamental parent techniques such as obviously!, fluency, TPR, limit, copy-cat, and start at the beginning. A same conversation is an emergent property of these techniques.

It is a consistent, repetitive, reproducible, incrementally improving interaction that begins with the smallest bite-sized piece appropriate to its place in the overall travels with charlie.

Same conversations are built on what already happens, what is already habitual, accelerated by technique These Are a Few of My Favorite Things (the players’ favorite subjects, objects, and environment).

Same conversations are not level specific; they can be foundational conversations that truly start at the beginning (like learning to drive in an expansive parking lot, bowing rhythms on a fiddle without any melody, playing Tee-ball, etc.), or they can be experiences along the way to Superior proficiency (driving in a neighborhood before on a highway, learning to fiddle the melody “Give Me a Chaw of Tobacco” before “Old Corn Liquor”, playing Little League baseball before Junior League).

Every routine too can be seen as a same conversation, as a coherent skill-based interaction; getting dressed, commuting, making and eating dinner, filing income taxes.

Ritual and ceremony are often expressions of the most powerful application of accelerated learning techniques onto a same conversation, such as weddings, funerals, graduations, boot camps, and so on. These rituals must be relied upon to deliver competent, familiar, comforting interactions, even for participants totally new to them.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition

Short: “Technique: Same Conversation. A same conversation is any conversation that we have over and over, to build fluency in our target language.“

Long: “It’s best to build our same conversations on things we already habitually do, with objects and situations we are already familiar with. It’s especially helpful to include a few of your favorite things in these conversations, whether chosen by the language hunter, or the fluent fool you’re hunting.“

Applying the technique to language acquisition

As mentioned before, same conversations are built and improved by applying as many techniques as possible to them. Your overall goal, as a language hunter, is to use same conversations as a guide for how to break up your target language into achievable pieces, looking at the favorite and habitual activities of both you and your fluent fool.

But what about…?

Same conversations are the bedrock of fluent proficiency; new players may want to skip them or degrade the consistent, repeating quality of them.

• tq Último means players cannot proceed to the next conversation, until they can teach another player to lead the current one. This is kind of a mind-bender, so we’ll repeat it: in a community of play, a game leader only progresses to the next conversation, when they can pass off leadership of their current game to the next player. Language Hunters who are hunting alone, with no community of play supporting them, clearly can’t implement Último, but they know that generating such a community of play is a major accelerator just waiting to be implemented.

Google "fail" for an endless supply of "How Fascinating!"-worthy moments.

You’re fluency hunting, and to maintain game flow and momentum, you call “How Fascinating!” every time you or another player gets stuck or struggles. You also call “How Fascinating!” to celebrate learning milestones as they whiz by.

“Out beyond right doing, and wrong doing, there is a field – I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi

Whether it’s years of institutional schooling, institutional workplaces, or perhaps an unforgiving family culture, many (if not all) new WAYK players arrive with some degree  of concern (from mild to neurotic) over getting things “correct” and avoiding being wrong. They may hesitate to fully play due to the possibility of making mistakes, and then furrow brows and hunch over when they feel they’ve made one, perhaps even culminating in a magnificent single or (double!) facepalm.

In the beginning, before they’re used to the culture of game play, new players may even shut their eyes, shutting off all help from players trying to pull them through it by being angels on their shoulders, as they wrack their brains for the “right answer”.

In a sense, many new players arrive skilled in a comprehensive, but completely mismatched, set of “rules of the game” that they have learned at school, work, and home. Rules that single out errors as a focus of concentration, rules that remove the possibility of mutual help, support, and collaboration. They may have learned these rules well, but these are not the rules of WAYK.

In WAYK game play, we’re playing “wrong” from the first moment, guided by technique Mumble (“close enough is good enough”). The burden of perfection is enough to crush any game. WAYK therefore provides an array of techniques to release the obligation of correctness and perfection, like Let it Go, Mumble, Correct One Thing. The more tools to support free play, the better, and “How Fascinating!” plays a key role in this.

We first witnessed “How Fascinating!” in a video presentation by speaker and music conductor Benjamin Zander, and immediately tried out his innovation in a WAYK game. We’ve since run into other versions – like the “Failure Bow” from improv theater.

Technique “How Fascinating!” changes for different languages, signed and spoken, but the energy of it is always essentially the same. We perform it as a full body, graceful, slow motion, backwards-stretching reverse bow (like trying to touch the back of your heels with your fingertips by reaching over your head), and simultaneously an unplanned group “wave” as everyone copy-cats the first person to call “How Fascinating!”.

WAYK, in the end, is only concerned with what works. And “How Fascinating!” works – dispelling personal and group tension, and making the pursuit of correctness just a little bit too ridiculous to take seriously.

Introducing the technique

Short: “Technique: ‘How Fascinating!’. Call “How Fascinating!” every time you or another player gets stuck or struggles. You also call “How Fascinating!” to celebrate learning milestones as they whiz by.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition

This is another technique to use early and often.

• “How Fascinating!” is a skill – call it early, and often, and don’t skimp on doing the full “failure bow” of it. Players will often want to rush by “how fascinating!”, thinking they don’t need it. Everyone can use some practice with applying “How Fascinating!” to their life.

But what about…?

If players are too serious and rigid, or reluctant to call “how fascinating!”, or slow to copy-cat others’ call of “how fascinating!”, set aside a moment to combine this technique with tq In Threes and tq Copy-cat. After a round (or three) of the entire group copy-catting the game leader as they call “How Fascinating!” three times in a row, the group usually surrenders to fun and free play of the game.

• tq You Go First – your energy and application of “How Fascinating!” will set the culture of the group.
• tq Overdo It – make “How Fascinating!” as ridiculous as possible, so that no one can take their mistakes seriously.
• tq Mistakes and Milestones – “How Fascinating!” applies to both, mix them up in the players’ minds so that “failure” truly feels like “success”, a vital element of accelerated learning.
• tq It’s a Copy-cat Game, Not a Learning Game reminds players to open their eyes and stay in the moment, rather than wracking their brains for the right answer.
• tq No Thinking Allowed can add extra “oomph” to reminding players not to think, just to copy-cat and play.

In this video, you’ll see Willem mentoring RaVen in WAYK game play over Skype videoconferencing, in exchange for mentoring in ASL. Willem and RaVen are probably signing too fast for beginners to learn – but for ASL educators this video provides a good example of how to apply the game to American Sign Language.

Willem is in Oregon, and RaVen lives in Colorado.

RaVen Sequoia is a Deaf ASL educator. You can learn more about her at her website, http://aslmastertutor.com.

Learning to sign fluently is simply logical.

You’re fluency hunting with fellow players. In order to rapidly communicate team strategies in the form of techniques, you are all signing. You’re hunting a target language from your fluent fool, so you boost obviously! by using signing as a bridge language to carrying and remembering the spoken language.

Gesture is likely the oldest and most accessible form of human language.

Though sign languages can be just as complex as spoken languages, they seem to come naturally and can be learned especially rapidly.

The advantages of sign language are numerous. Using sign with babies accelerates their acquisition of spoken language. As silent communication, sign languages can be used in noisy environments, in situations where making noise is undesired, or simultaneously with spoken languages (to make your meaning more obvious). They can be used through sound-proof windows, from a distance, underwater, in a vacuum, and by being fluent in them we bring deaf elders, adults, and youth back into our daily communicative lives.

With all these advantages, it’s pretty hard to excuse a lack of fluency in a signed language.

Almost every culture (and hence, every language) has a signed language (and most have a wide array of dialects) – for the purposes of language acquisition, it’s ideal to learn your target culture’s sign language, and use that as a bridge language, rather than to impose ASL on it. Each sign language carries some of that culture’s mind; culture and language are inseparable.

However, we are rarely able to do this, due to some common constraints, such as the time it takes to find an appropriate fluent fool. We then use our native sign language as a default bridge language, always ready to switch out all (or parts) in favor of the target culture’s gestures and sign.

In addition to language issues, we’ve observed that teams of all kinds can vastly accelerate their communication by pairing hand-signs with working agreements, elevating their level of accord and teamwork. There is something about gesturing together that seems to bring us closer, raising levels of trust.

We believe that at one time, every community had its own signed language, to speak with deaf elders (and the occasional deaf youth or adult), for silent communication while hunting, and during the many instances when voice communication didn’t suffice, wasn’t available, or simply wasn’t elegant enough.

By making sign language a cultural commonality again we may be reclaiming a lost universal heritage.

Sign language is awesome.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
Though we use it from the first moment, we only introducing the techinque Signing late in language play, usually to keep advanced players signing.
Short: “Technique: Signing. Keep on signing for as long as you can; even though you no longer need it, as your spoken fluency has risen a lot, any new speakers in the “lunatic fringe” will be better able to keep up with your conversation, and thus more quickly advance in proficiency, if you sign when they’re present.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition
Sign has many uses – first and foremost, it is a boost to tq TPR and tq Obviously!

• Give each newly innovated technique a hand sign (from a fluent signer if possible, if not, improvise one on your own).
• During fluent advanced conversations, use hand signs to boost obviously! for a less advanced Lunatic Fringe.
• Hand signs allow advanced players to communicate techniques while staying immersed in the target language.

But what about…?
At first, players may have “heavy hands”, they may be reluctant to copycat, consciously or unconsciously. Copycatting is a skill!

Advanced speakers new to WAYK will find signing slows their fluency. Fluent signers, surprisingly, may struggle, since they’ve either mapped their sign to their mother tongue (such as ASL to English), or have a difficult time learning a new dialect of sign, used in the WAYK game.

• For reluctant or unsure copy-catters, you go first modeling the Rules of the Game, and Pull them through it.
• For advanced speakers and fluent signers, remind them they’re learning a language too, the game language, not just acting as teachers of their own – We’ll All Get There Together, in bite-sized pieces. And How Fascinating it is!

In this video Willem Larsen sits down with Michael Ismerio, old time music fiddler and workshop leader, to discuss his recent workshop that they both boosted with an array of carefully chosen WAYK techniques.

WAYK is a design system for generating and improving accelerated learning environments, not just a language fluency game!

Check out Michael’s website for information on his great fiddle workshops and square dance calling events: http://michaelismerio.com.