Monthly Archives: April 2011

Our merry band of Boston-area language hunters.

In the grassroots spirit of WAYK, we held our workshop hosted at a private residence of one of the participants. For language communities, our first recommendation is to do just that; language and community begins at home! There’s nothing like playing WAYK in someone’s living room to remind us of that.

Willem (me) ran the workshop, and I wanted to try a new experiment. As my skill increases as a language hunter, I find that I need to keep upping the scale and challenge of my experimentation to “stay in the zone”: neither overwhelmed (sorry, charlie!), nor bored (heaven forfend such a thing!). This is an ongoing obligation of every player – if you don’t apply technique to keeping the “flow” state, you’ll find yourself losing the spirit of play. It takes work to to make things effortless!

My major experiment was to pick a new language, present in the group, to hunt. We had a choice of Hindi and Tamil. According to tq A Few of My Favorite Things and Same Conversation, I chose Hindi, because I have players at home hungry to hunt just that!

So the attendees got to witness an experienced language hunter at his most awkward and foolish, mumble-ing his way through the first steps of a totally new language. This allowed us to form a tq Bucket Brigade almost immediately as the various learning speeds differentiated out into different levels, after lunch on the first day.

5-year-old Shreya mugging for the camera. She played a critical role, pulling players through Hindi, though she was just learning it herself - no joke!

The hunt was such a success, I plan to do this from now on: pick an available language, and form the bucket brigade accordingly. If I can continue working languages I have at a low proficiency and pull them up to Superior, so much the better!

One of the attendees, Alex, found himself somewhat under-challenged; it manifested at first by a frustration over not understanding “the meaning” of what he was saying, but strangely he didn’t want to kill fairies – he wanted to keep playing but something was missing, something else was going on. It took him a while to realize that he had moved out of flow, in the direction of “bored”.

The ever-present carb-free food table. We do indulge the coffee habit.

This happens periodically, usually with younger, whip-crack smart players, this “falling out of flow” can happen fast because they catch on to the techniques in spurts (almost like a delayed reaction). We collaborated on a solution that would help both our attendee Alex, and others in this same situation, and we now have a new technique for language hunters with his same temperament. TQ “More, Faster!” This means just what it sounds – when Alex (and players like him) experiences a frustration over “not knowing what I’m saying”, the technique to throw is to speed up the flow of bite-sized pieces, or make them larger bites. “More, Faster!” The player then doesn’t have time to worry about “what it means”.

There was one other, major new insight that I received as a culmination from both Agile Games and the Boston WAYK workshop. I’m going to save that for its own blog post, so stay tuned!

Here’s some of the feedback from the workshop:

Rekha, Agilist and mother of 5-year-old Shreya:

A very interesting workshop. I wish I had encountered this when I was a little girl. Better late than never. The technique is very simple to use and it was fascinating to see how much Hindi was covered using simple WAYK techniques. My quest is to see how I can use these techniques at my work to learn new technology. Willem is a wonderful teacher. I had given up the hope that my daughter will ever be multilingual. WAYK technique makes me hopeful – that I can teach my daughter my native language [Tamil] in a playful, un-intimidating way. Thank you Willem and Evan for putting so much thought and effort to develop this simple, easy to use technique.

Shreya:

I love learning and my mom taught me hindi.

Alex Baranosky, Agilist:

-Use of techniques as the solution is much better than the usual “try harder” response.
-Language fluency = being the language
-Hunter can hunt the core structure of a language and has the tools to fill in the details.
-Techniques are for accelerated learning, not just languages!

Nancy Van Shooenderwort, Agile Coach:

I’m usually a big “note-taker” but this workshop helped me see that the WAYK methods are only slowed down by doing that – it really is not necessary. For Agile practitioners, I believe time will show that WAYK’s dynamics are as “game-changing” for us as Architecture’s “patterns” concept was over 10 years ago.

Doug Ross, Agile Coach:

I am afraid of NOT having you around! The workshop  unlocked my fear of learning language. I now (finally) have techniques and a game I can use to pull language to hunt fluency! Thank you so much Willem for sharing this gift.

Michael De La Maza, Agile Coach:

WAYK techniques have the potential to greatly improve workplace communication. I was surprised by how quickly and easily and painlessly I learned the techniques. My hope is that I will be able to share them with agile teams.

Thanks so much to SolutionsIQ for hosting us at their training center – a great space and a very supportive partnership.

We had a diverse crowd at our April 1-3 workshop in the Seattle area. Some attendees came with fluency, wanting to learn more how to teach – Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Lushootseed, Latin. Others just came hungry to learn how to learn. And yet others, experienced WAYK players, came to keep pushing their play proficiency up the scale, getting closer to running weekend events themselves, without the need for help from Evan or Willem (me).

This is our goal, and the goal of the WAYK play community – to spread the ability to self-sufficiently maintain the vitality of languages, to diffuse the skill of language hunting far and wide. We (Evan and I) want to make ourselves obsolete as “gurus”, to become just two more experienced players in a thriving community of conversational play and accelerated learning.

We’re always taking player input and improving the WAYK system. WAYK is not one method, but a system for employing anything that works; and we’re constantly generating and receiving new evidence and information concerning “what works”.

In this workshop, I wanted to continue to accelerate the pace at which attendees can bring home applicable language hunting skills. To this end, we started applying technique “Último” almost right away, the idea that there is a series of games in the at different levels that players can set-up and move through. These games are most effective if they happen together in the same space – rather than splitting folks into separate classrooms. The group consensus was that “Último” was a misleading name, and we all rechristened it “Bucket Brigade”. I was very impressed! A perfect technique name; almost no explanation is required, illuminating the concept of working together moving language from a fluent speaker to the rest of the community without hierarchy or ego.

For this workshop we used Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa), the trade creole of the Pacific Northwest, along with PSE (Pidgin Signed English), as a target language to demonstrate the WAYK system. Chinook Jargon is a language with a lot of rich history, with a core of Chinook language (from the Columbia River area) wrapped in French, English, Norwegian, Nootka, and more.

Jay, wisely hydrating.

This meant that when we played “Tea with Grandpa”, I needed an assistant. In the past Evan and I have hosted workshops as a pair; we recently decided to start doing separate workshops so that we can fill the tq Comedy Duo gap with a WAYK apprentice who is climbing the proficiency scale and getting close to running their own workshop. We hope to see this accelerate the pace of new players becoming self-sufficient WAYK language hunters. For Redmond, Jay Bazuzi stepped in to fill the gap.

While I sat with the language hunters at the “Tea with Grandpa” table, Jay managed the rest of the workshop – the flow of players, tq no-grief debriefs, and so on. He’s been to several previous workshops, runs his own local language games and “Tea with Grandpa” language hunts, so he was well prepared to start turning his play up a notch. This made it possible for me to focus on being the best Grandpa possible – playing the fluent fool, enjoying conversation with the players, helping them with the language (but not too much), encouraging them by example to apply their techniques of set-up, limit, obviously!, and so on.

Diana and Anjali hunting language from Grandpa (played by Willem).

“Tea with Grandpa” was such a rich, fun experience for us all, that it has made me consider again how central it is to learning WAYK. If you don’t have a fluent fool for your language night, encouraging the most fluent speaker to “play” that role really enriches the game and the accelerated learning.

I plan to emphasize this role play even more at our language nights and events. It was surprising how earnestly players wanted to hunt language from Grandpa, and how much respect and care Grandpa received as the fluent speaker. So much of language hunting is courtship of your fluent speaker, and showing them sincere care and consideration, enriching the human relationship, rather than just seeing them as an object of your hunt or intellectual pursuit of the language.

An almost carb-free breakfast spread.

Our catering partners, Harmony and Emily, did an excellent job of supporting one of the most difficult elements of WAYK – the food! Many folks are aware of the impact that carb-heavy foods can have on their mental process – resulting in the infamous “food coma”! Vital to a WAYK workshop is good food, vegetables, fruit, protein, and so on. We had several workshop participants remark on how suprised they were what a difference the food made. Do Food is a very important technique! The usual muffins and pastries you see out at workshops are an insidious element in generating fatigue and decelerating the group process. So thanks to the catering team of Harmony and Emily for the 3 days of great breakfasts and lunches.

Virginia, Michele, and Natosha, Lushootseed teachers from Tulalip, WA

We shot video of helping Emily, a Scots Gaelic speaker and instructor, with her Scots Gaelic WAYK game, and also of the Lushootseed instructors, Michele, Natosha, and Virginia, setting up their game for when they returned to the classroom. Expect to see that in the next few weeks.

Until then – good hunting!

From April 14th-24th, I (Willem Larsen) will be presenting WAYK at various venues in Boston, MA.

For the first few days, I’ll be at Agile Games 2011, April 14th-16th.

From the 17th-21st I’m available to do talks and demos on “Where Are Your Keys?” and the Fluency Hunting Model of accelerated learning. If you’d like to invite me to do a talk or demo, contact me ASAP: info@whereareyourkeys.org.

Then on the 22nd-24th I’ll run a three day Boston-area WAYK weekend workshop. I don’t know when WAYK will be coming back to the Boston area, so I hope any nearby East Coast players (or wannabe players!) take advantage of this opportunity.

For all of you dying to get a written version of the WAYK techniques, we’ve self-published about 15 copies of a 60 page booklet. This book covers about half of the techniques we consider vital and fundamental to play, 24 in all, giving more in depth background. The technique entries are almost the same as you’ve been seeing on the blog lately.

If you’re interested in having one, they cost $20 plus $5 shipping/handling (anywhere in the world!). Each one will be signed by Evan Gardner and Willem Larsen. We accept paypal (info@whereareyourkeys.org) and mailed checks. Address checks to:

“Where Are Your Keys?”, LLC
4846 NE 9th Ave
Portland, OR 97211

As I mentioned, there is a limited run of these books – snap them up while you have the chance. We hope to create a 2nd edition later in the year or early next year.

The founders of Lonely Planet, Tony and Maureen.

From Lonely Planet’s website (maker of guidebooks, phrasebooks, and other media):

‘Responsible travel’ means assessing our impact on the environment and local cultures and economies – and acting to make that impact as positive as possible. We’re including more information in our guidebooks and on this website on how you can personally travel more responsibly.

In the WAYK community, we think a lot about this – the relationship between guest and host, traveler and resident, learner and fluent speaker of an endangered language.

Many dying languages, and struggling communities, are very well documented, in writing, photographs, and video, and yet if help stops there it has done them little good – without inter-generational transmission, without community esteem for the language (and culture), without retaining traditional identity and sense of place in the face of colonizing forces and global corporate culture – their decline, slow for some, rapid for others, continues.

How do we continue to change the relationship between traveling guest and host community, so that visitors to communities who are struggling economically, culturally, and linguistically, make greater and greater positive impacts as the years pass?

In the work of endangered language revitalization, we had to solve this early on. We needed an answer. Learning an endangered language for your own benefit, without contributing to the language community, can speed its decline. Fluent speakers’ time spent interacting with you, rather than invested community members, is wasted, unless you can give back and support the vitalization of conversational life. This means every new learner must also immediately become a new teacher, able to “teach-off” to others what they know. In addressing this issue, a new kind of language learner emerged, the language hunter, a natural result of applying all these understandings, techniques, and accelerated language learning/teaching skills through play.

A language hunter is a person skilled enough in WAYK game play that they can learn (and teach) any language through casual conversations with fluent speakers and other learners. The more skill, the greater the community-wide impact. A language hunter doesn’t just “take” language, they vitalize it, with play and conversation, including as many people in on the fun as possible.

This means as language hunters travel the world, not only can they offer the courtesy of addressing hosts in the local language due to their accelerated ability to learn, but for all languages, both struggling and successful, they contribute to the overall vitality of the speech community due to how they interact with other speakers.

We’ve seen the spirit of the WAYK game, and language hunting, completely rewire negative attitudes toward the target language, since now the relationship has become about play with each other and a respectful, engaged visitor. Then, due to the techniques of accelerated learning and rapid success, the infectiousness of fun and conversation take over. Children and teens pick up the game and begin to play with each other. Adults see and remember the joy of their language, and its connection to family and home.

For us, this is true responsible travel – not just an economic boost, but the vitalization of personal relationships, respect for other cultures and languages, and a sharing of grassroots ways for making the world a better place.

WAYK staff Evan Gardner, Willem Larsen, and others, will be playing four days of WAYK at the Life (“Learning in Freedom Everyday”) Unschooling/Homeschooling conference in the Portland area.

http://lifeisgoodconference.com

Registration is only $60 for adults and $40 for children over 3, for 4 days. WAYK will staff an exhibitor booth with a game table from 9am to 4pm each day. If you do the numbers on this you could basically get a four day WAYK workshop for dirt cheap!

So come on down and play – bring a fluent fool you’ve always wanted to hunt, bring a friend you’ve always wanted to play with, bring your family, and join the fun as we play through all four days.

Register here.