In this blog post, Sky Hopinka tells about his experiences so far with the Chinuk Wawa group at Portland State University.

For the past eight weeks now, the Chinuk Wawa language group has been meeting two nights a week at the Native American Student and Community Center (NASCC) on the Portland State University campus here in Oregon.  The NASCC has been kind enough to donate space for us to have this class so many thanks to the NASCC Specialist Rachel Cushman (Chinook Nation) and everyone else at the Native Center for their support.

This language class isn’t run by any department, student group, or governing body, and for the time being we’d like to keep it that way.  BUT, we welcome and appreciate any and all support.  To have the driving force behind this group be students and community members who are self motivated and have a sincere desire to save languages and build communities is essential in keeping the language living at this location. Having the support from the NASCC and the Native community is amazing, and the support from Native American Studies is great in giving students the academic ability, through internship and independent study credits, to pursue this unconventional, and somewhat underground, approach to language revitalization.  And Where Are Your Keys? is providentially unconventional.

Getting this language class going has been quite the experience.  For the past three terms I’ve been able to get internship and independent study credits through Native American Studies (now Indigenous Nations Studies) to learn Chinuk Wawa to meet my Foreign Language requirement and intern with Evan and “Where Are Your Keys?”  Now this term we are trying to help other students do the same.

WAYK Interns, Jordan Mercier and Stevie Lemke

WAYK has three new interns this quarter, Stevie Lemke (Cherokee), Taija Revels (Tlingit), and Jordan Mercier (Grand Ronde) who are all seniors.  They have been learning the language and learning WAYK since we began in the beginning of October and have really been crucial in keeping the momentum of the CW class going strong thus far.  None of them are interning for credits this quarter, which is definitely a testament to their desire to support this class and the language.  Also, we are actively looking for freshman, sophomores, and juniors to take the reigns over for the next school year and take advantage of the opportunity to meet the B.A. foreign language requirement with an indigenous language.

Now to talk a bit about the class itself…it’s been both challenging and daunting while being exciting and invigorating.  I have not yet not looked forward to a class night and I can honestly say I don’t see that happening. We’ve had about 15-17 people come through the class with about 8 regulars for the Tuesday class and another 8 or so on the Friday class.  Seeing this many people who consistently attend is wonderful.  The main points that are challenging to me and the other interns is finding ways to organize and structure the night to account for the ever varying and fluctuating levels of fluency that the students are at.  Every class is different and we are always looking for ways to keep everyone engaged and progressing in the language and WAYK.  Listening to the WAYK podcasts with Dustin debriefing his language classes has definitely been helpful in figuring out how to navigate similar issues that have emerged.

We’ve begun using the Plus/Delta technique to close our class each night and recap what we’ve covered.  Giving the students that come a voice in this developing community is necessary and the feedback we’ve received has been indispensible in maintaining and helping this language group grow.

WAYK Intern Taija Revels (third from left) teaching the AISES (American Indian Science and Engineering Society) student group

I’d also like to add that it has been great to have fluent Chinuk speakers in the Portland area come to our class and support the new speakers with their presence and their knowledge of the language.  In addition to the Chinuk night at PSU, there is also a class at Portland Community College and the Grand Ronde Tribal Office so basically, there are at least four Chinuk gatherings going on somewhere in Portland and given week.

We will keep this gathering going throughout the school year, with the times changing to accommodate student’s schedules, and we’ll probably keep going through the winter break, too.  We also might have some reflections from the other interns in the group on this blog, so keep a look out for those.

Sky

WAYK was asked by UISHE, the United Indian Students in Higher Education, to come and present at the Native American Student and Community Center on the PSU campus in honor of Native American Heritage Month.  UISHE is one of two Native student groups at PSU and have been very supportive of the Chinuk Wawa class and our efforts in language revitalization.

We will start the day at noon and go until 4pm.  After that, those that wish to stay for the Chinuk class at 5 are more than welcome to do so.  This is a free event and open to everyone.

I am very excited to offer some details of our upcoming event:

Nov. 5th and 6th at the Native American Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto Ca.

Presented by the Stanford Languages Club

The cost for this event is donation based. We are unclear at this moment how the University rules will apply to this type of presentation as it is landing in a strange grey area. This is nothing new for us at Where Are Your Keys? We often find it is a challenge for administrations to categorize what we do. We are working with them to find a solution to this issue but in the meantime please be prepared to bring your own money for food, lodging, and transportation costs. To cover the costs of the presenters, feel free to make a donation of food, food money, or gas cards. Thank you for your understanding and willingness to help us navigate this issue. The last thing we wanted to do was postpone this event. Languages are more precious than lunch money.

The schedule for the event is loose as we are open to a variety of possible language opportunities depending on who shows up. The most effective, interactive method for teaching the techniques of Where Are Your Keys? is to actually learn a language while learning the techniques. We have chosen Mandarin as the vehicle for Saturday’s presentation. On Sunday we will use what we have learned on Saturday to “hunt” or “pull” a different language from a fluent speaker. We will experience how quickly the new language can spread throughout a community of Where Are Your Keys? players who are using specific techniques learned just yesterday.

This weekend will be full of techniques for building strong vibrant healthy language communities as well as specific techniques for learning and teaching languages.

For now the schedule is:

Friday night:

6:00pm – 8:00pm dinner and presentation by the Stanford native student recruiter.

(bring your students)

Saturday: Community Building and WAYK techniques of accelerated learning and teaching.

8:30am – 9:00am light breakfast

9:00am -12:00 Where Are Your Keys? Mandarin!

12:00 – 1:00 lunch

1:00pm – 3:00pm Where Are Your Keys? Mandarin

3:00pm – 4:00pm Debrief and plan for tomorrow

Sunday: Community Language Revitalization!

8:30am – 9:00am light breakfast

9:00am -12:00 Where Are Your Keys? Latin? French? Cherokee? Salish? Cree?

12:00 – 1:00 lunch

1:00pm – 3:00pm Where Are Your Keys?

3:00pm – 4:00pm Debrief and plan for the future

Here is a list of the Stanford area hotels.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/rde/chs/general/hotel.html

This link is a shuttle schedule for the university to and from area locations.

This may help those of you coming from out of town without a car.

Marguerite shuttle routes:

http://transportation.stanford.edu/marguerite/

Recorded September 18th, 2011

This past September Dustin Rivers and WAYK had the opportunity to present at the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS) conference.  AICLS is a great non-profit organization that supports language revitalization through various conferences, workshops and through their Master Apprentice Program.

The conference was held at the Marin Headlands Institute in Sausalito, CA and we presented on both Saturday and Sunday morning.  Before the presentation began, April Charlo was playing a WAYK game with a fluent elder of the Washo language, who she had been picking up language from all morning.  This provided a great Set-Up for the presentation, giving those in attendance a preview of what WAYK has to offer, and really, showing them just how fun this can be.

We had an amazing time at the conference and meet a lot of great people who are passionate about language revitalization.  We got to share what we do and also see and participate in what others are doing as well.  That sort of sharing of ideas and goals is a positive thing to see in the development of this language revitalization community.

We just want to thank everyone that came and everyone we met and AICLS for having us. We hope to continue to work together and foster those relationships we made.

These gatherings are open to everyone and free of charge.  For more info, you can email Sky at skyhopinka@gmail.com

We’ll keep you all posted on how it goes!

Planning the next move.

35 minutes and 41 seconds.

[direct download]

Recorded July 28th, 2011

In this episode, the overarching theme is getting everyone to manage their Full levels and really examine why we are here.  We’ve reached a point in the program where the facilitation techniques and methods of WAYK are being handed off to the students and we all need to reassess our roles and how we can continue to grow and contribute to the group.  Enjoy this episode! And please let us know if there is any part of the post that needs clarifying.

00:50

We begin the podcast talking about an experience with one of the students running a bucket on their own and owning the ride

01:45

The Great Race

In the Afternoon, we had three teams attempt to get through as many of the rides as possible, starting at the beginning, in a half an hour in order to find holes in the language and see who is strongest in which ride.

05:00

Unfilling by running rides

We talk about the way Leanne described becoming unfull by running the rides and the discussion shifts to ways in which they can unfill and return to the language.

07:10

Why are we here?

Earlier in the morning, we had a group activity discussing our reasoning’s for being involved in the program, and here we discuss the outcome of that.  The group was broken into three buckets, with a facilitators bucket for Evan, Sky, and David, while April facilitated the activity.  The main topic we discussed during that activity, was “leave if you don’t want to be here.”

10:30

Perfect timing

Shirley, Verleen, and Gerald come in during the end of the activity and are concerned that something might be wrong.  They join us and each of them goes around and tells the kids how proud they are of them, of the work that they are doing and how far they’ve come in the language.  (We don’t discuss what was said by the three Numu teachers in great detail, but it had a very positive impact on the whole group and was a sort of catalyst for The Great Race that took place in the afternoon.)

15:00

Building the “Full” muscle

We move to the dinner table and Evan brings up difficulties some of the students have with calling full on themselves and after a mid-program assessment on Techiniques, a desire to explore the Techniques further.

16:55

Bringing in guests

A topic during the past few weeks was bringing in guests to learn what we had been doing.  John plans on bringing in his cousin Nick, who knows sign language.

18:35

Y’all are lapping me

Evan talks about how he is being lapped in the language by everyone.  He talks about how that is a good feeling for him because other people are being trained in WAYK and making it work.

19:30

How can I hunt faster?

David asks Evan how can he hunt faster, and Evan answers, “build a pack of hunters.” April then tells of her experiences in hunting and sharing her language with Shirley.

21:10

What’s the lunchroom going to be like?

Sky tells of how earlier in the day, Walter and John were excited to speak Numu at the high school.  Also, there is a change in some of the student’s attitudes towards the program.

23:35

The Con Game

In order to hunt for where/under/above/inside in Numu, David uses the three cups and plays the old street side “Con Game” with Shirley and a dollar bill.  He gets a lot of mileage out of the game and tells how the game went and all the extra language he is getting out of it.

27:35

It’s all rigged

Evan talks about how, really, WAYK is all rigged through the use of Set-Up.

29:35

A little faux pas

David is concerned he made a slight cultural faux pas earlier in the day, but Evan fills us in on the rest of the context, and really, it wasn’t so bad.

32:40

How the day turned out

We talk of the outcome of the day and our hopes for the upcoming weeks and managing Full levels.

Lunch the WAYK presentation at Salish-Kootenai College

Here’s an account of our recent trip to the Flathead Reservation by our very own April Charlo.  Also, expect more podcasts and blog posts to come soon, we’ve been very busy these past few weeks and are just now starting to get caught up on the nitty gritty.

This is my first blog post and I had a really fun time writing, and writing, and writing.  So it is very long and detailed.  If you need to be quick about it, read the synopsis and watch the videos.  Enjoy!

Synopsis of this Blog:

On the drive to Spokane I downloaded a lot of rides to Sky.  We had a great time at a language program in Usk Washington.  Our Salish Social on my Reservation was amazing and my language community enjoyed their experience of seeing how the WAYK system works.

The Gist:

September 7th, 2011 interns Sky Hopinka, David Edwards and April Charlo (that’s me) were all packed waiting on the stoop for Evan Gardner.  Ok, not really.  We aren’t those kinds of interns.  We are the “too busy to pack and do laundry kind” because we are working on podcasts, websites, and bylaws.  So it was a surprise to find out at the breakfast table that we all had to do laundry.  Nevertheless, when Evan arrived we strategically packed all our belongings in the trunk of Sky’s shiny new blue race car.

We left right about 6pm with buzzing excitement for what is about to happen in the upcoming days.

But first, here’s a little of my background: I am from the Flathead Reservation which is located in Northwest Montana.   We have three tribes and two languages, Bitteroot Salish, Pen d’Orielle and Kootenai.  Salish and Pend d’Oreille are pretty much the same, the only differences is a word here or there that is different and Kootenai is completely different.   I have actively been in the trenches working with my language since 2007.  We looked at many programs like TPRS, TPR like the Maori and Hawaiians use, and finally settled on using a new system that was just being developed by the Kalispel Tribe in Washington.  We had decent success, I can hold a conversation pretty well at about intermediate mid level on the ACTFL scale.

When I was introduced to the “Where Are Your Keys?” system that fateful day in Portland, I immediately understood how the methods and techniques could get a person fluent in no time at all and from that moment on I knew I had to bring “Where Are Your Keys?” home.   Then we were in Madras doing our awesome “Where Are Your Keys?” thing and one day the opportunity presented itself to broach the subject of going to Montana with Evan and the team.  Next thing I know Evan is saying something like, “Well of course we are going to Flathead!” Just like that, the date was set, plans were made, and now you are up to speed.

The Car Set Up:

Energy Levels:  High with excitement

Driving:  Sky

Passenger: April (me)

Back Seat: David-driver side, Evan-passenger side

About 8.5 miles out, Sky asks me, “Do you have the want, have, give, take Salish rides down?”

I answer “Yeah”.

Next, Sky says, “Well, run me through them.”

In a scamper I dug through my purse and pulled out a pack of gum and a pen.  I put the pen on his side of the dashboard and the gum on mine and off we went.  That was about 6:37 and in an hour Sky, with having no previous lesson in Salish, was speaking like a pro.  He had the target vocabulary, along with “what is that?” “make me say yes” and “make me say no” and “mine, and yours.”

In an hour Evan stopped us and did a full check.  Sky wasn’t full at all and to my surprise I was pretty close to drowning.  I felt myself becoming full but didn’t want to stop because of how I was once again mesmerized at how amazing the WAYK system works.  Here I was downloading rides in a car to a person who was driving a car and signing at the same time and learning a language faster than I have ever seen anyone learn my language.  And this is a language that has been proclaimed by some to be “unlearnable”.   But also at the same time I hadn’t tested out the rides on anyone and I had to create some pieces on the fly, and not being sure if those pieces were correct was so very filling.  Also, I didn’t want to stop either because I wanted to see Sky get to want, have, give, take.  So I applied the WAYK dirty little secret and TQ: Rise Above and we got into mine, yours, want, have, give, take for the next half hour.

And here is a little video of the car ride:

Sky did an amazing job pulling me through the creations of the rides by stopping me and helping me to create and hone the Criagslists for “want, have, give, take.”  At some point Evan flexed his Bruce Lee muscles and called full on us.  And he was right, we were both super full but still, neither of us wanted to stop.  One of us tried to pacify him by saying “Ok we will stop when we get to the next mile marker.”  But still we couldn’t stop.  Finally he had to say “Ok stop now…ok that’s enough now” in his kind, Bruce Lee voice.  Looking back on it now the only way it makes sense to describe it is you know those vampire movies where the new vampires don’t know when to stop sucking blood before they kill their prey? I think its kind of like that, but instead of blood, its language downloads.   We stopped for a break at Biggs and before we got out of the car Evan said, “Now I mean it, take a break.   No Salish for at least an hour.”

I walked in the store laughing, cracking jokes with Evan and David and even though my head felt like it could explode at any moment, my heart was giddy.  It had been a long time since I have taught my language, but never in my time as a teacher have I been able to create a speaker with whom I could have a solid conversation with in just an hour!

We get back in the car and I gotta tell ya, it was really hard to keep the agreement.  At one point Sky and I were whispering to each other in Salish about wanting candy.  About 40 minutes later one of us asks Evan, “Can we start yet?”  Evan of course laughed and gave us our wishful green light and again we were off and running.  And my novice downloading skills filled Sky up in about half an hour.  I think I was so excited that Sky was learning so fast that I just wanted to download everything I possibly could and so I started throwing more at Sky without a solid set up.  He called limit on me more than a few times and eventually because I kept doing it, called full.  In my defense, HOW FACINATING!

Sky got in the back and David got in the front with me.  David hunted me before and had a pretty good handle on enough language to visit me in Salish.  So I was able to keep rattling Salish off with him, but of course our rattling ended up in a shouting Salish match.  Again, HOW FACINATING!

During operation Plan Flathead Presentation, I suggested we also meet up with JR Bluff, a pretty smart guy who is running a language program in Usk Washington.  The Qelispe (Kalispel) language is also Salish with the same sort of minor differences like with Pend d’Oreille.  I put in a call to JR Bluff to see if he would like us to come through and show him what we were doing and being the cool guy he is, scheduled us to present to his class and my god dad, Johnny Arlee.  So that was added to the itinerary for Thursday morning.

We arrived in Spokane at Zan Azigian’s apartment right about midnight.  Zan is not only one of my Dad’s really good friends but is his co-playwright.  We planned on making the pit stop at her house and getting up super early to get to Usk the next morning.

Sleeping arrangements:  All of us in the living room

Floor: David and Evan

Cot:  Sky

Pull out Bed: April (me)

The gang and Zan

We arrived in Usk Washington about 9:30am with a plan.

Qelispe Agenda:

Observe their class in session

Evan talks about Techniques and ACTFL

Me and Sky run through rides and strategically seat fluent speaker Johnny Arlee next to me so he could verify, fix or tweak as we went along and Evan doing a TQ: Sportscaster during our demonstration.

David puts on a hunting show with Johnny

We have a visit, eat lunch and answer questions

What ended up happening was we got there and they didn’t have class but made a huge impression with their introduction.  They had eight students, JR, Johnny and another elder.  Every single one of them introduced themselves in the language.  And it wasn’t just a, “Hi my name is______”.  Pretty much almost all of them introduced themselves in a paragraph.  The last time I had seen JR was when I met him during his demonstration on our reservation several years back.  Needless to say I was very impressed with the success of the program.

Another important note: Johnny introduced himself and signed through his introduction which blew my group away.  After the introductions and we had a little break Evan asked me, “Does Johnny know sign?!” When I said yes, he almost went into convulsions.  Once I saw Johnny signing, I remembered that he used to teach it back in the day.  If I hadn’t forgot, I would have told Evan a long time ago.  I think it was cooler for Evan to find out the way he did though.  Johnny doesn’t use ASL, but Salish Plains signs and we were able to incorporate the signs he used for “yes” and “no.”

After the introductions, JR took about 20 minutes and talked about what they were doing and it’s pretty intense.  They are getting tribal money to fund the program and pay three tribal members full time and the other students are hired out of another fund.  They are in immersion all morning and then some of the students go to the high school and teach, and the others go to the preschool.  The system they are using has been designed and developed by Chris Parkin and  implemented by JR and Johnny.  JR said that they had a vocabulary of about 2500 words and that the students are blazing through it.  I know the first year curriculum pretty well because that is what our program was modeling our curriculum in the past, but our program ended before we could start to explore the second unit, and the third unit is still being created.

Next Evan did his thing and they of course thought he was entertaining and laughed at all the right moments.  Heck he still cracks me up.  The man puts on a pretty good show.  After he was done we took a little break and me and Sky set up our bucket.

I explained to the group before we started that Sky had only started to learn Salish the night before IN the CAR while DRIVING and this is how far he got.  I also explained to them that I knew a lot of Salish but didn’t realize until I sat down to start creating rides that I didn’t exactly know how to say “What is that?” I knew there were like 4-5 different ways to ask but didn’t know which one to use and realized that even though I rank close to advanced I had some pretty big holes in my language.   I told them that I know with the WAYK system I could quickly be able to determine what the holes are and fix them immediately.

The set up: Small table, me and Sky sitting across from one another with a black pen in front of Sky, and the gum in front of me.  Johnny was flanked on my right and the rest of the class was standing around or sitting lunatic fringe.

We went through the whole ride and to my amazement it only needed minor tweaking.  I was worried about Sky being thrown a curve ball with the fixes but he adapted right there on the spot which was so cool to see.

We knew going in that JR has done a lot with his program and we weren’t aiming to change his curriculum, rather we wanted to share WAYK techniques with the idea of helping him shave off pennies.  From our perspective everyone enjoyed themselves and had a good time including us.

We were told that if we got in the car and left at 1:30pm we would make it on time to Montana by 6:30pm for my presentation at Salish Kootenai College.  This was a non-related WAYK presentation but in hindsight I should have showed them techniques.  It was for the juniors and seniors in the SKC Elementary Education Department.  I have a Healthy Native Community Fellowshiw team member who is still active in using the fellowship tools in our community named Linda Ferris.  Our agenda for our hour included an HNCF ice breaker called Rez Life and an activity called “Deep Listening”.  I hadn’t been able to use this tool in our Numu family because of time constraints and I really wanted the guys to do it, so I used my cleverness and FINALLY, the guys are deep listeners.  Or, kinda…listening is like a muscle, it can’t be learned in one shot, but they got to experience the activity, which is pretty powerful in itself.

The presentation was a success and I walked out of there full as full can be.  Then we went to my mom’s house, which is an hour south of the college.

Sleeping arrangements at Jan Charlo’s house:

April was in the small guest/kids room.

Evan on the couch, Sky on the floor in the living room

David Edwards was given the room downstairs because of his allergies of cats.  Mom said the cat “NEVER” goes downstairs and of course David Edwards woke up with Shere Khan sleeping on his face.  So needless to say, David was miserable with allergies the rest of the weekend.

The next morning we were planning on waking up at 7am.  I woke up at 9:30 staggered out to see Sky still asleep on the floor and my mom making coffee.  “What’s going on?” Was all I could muster out of the nonsense I was seeing.  Turns out, Evan didn’t take into account the time difference.  Not a surprise because we were completely exhausted from not getting very much sleep at Zan’s the night before and blazing across a few states in one day.

We get ready, readjusted our game plan for the day and zoomed up to the College and arrived with a half an hour till go time.  This is where I would like to say, if my mom hadn’t been there we would have been in trouble.

Event: Salish Social with WAYK

Where: Salish Kootenai College

Lunch: Sponsored by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Tobacco Prevention Program (Cristen Two Teeth, you ROCK!”

Time: Noon-4pm (but I scheduled the room until 6pm just in case conversations lingered into the night)

FaceBook Attending Confirmations:  27

How many actually showed up: 21 (Not toooo shabby)

I kept the invites to a minimum and didn’t want to go all crazy.  I knew that I didn’t want this trip to be about selling WAYK, rather I wanted to share it with my language community, how this could be a fast way to learn Salish.

Salish Social Game Plan:

Greeter: April (me)

Get the Party Started: Sky and David running a bucket

Food Prep: Jan and Evan

The bucket...waiting...wanting to play.

The buckets were in party mode with people busting in and out of the inner circle.  When lunch was ready, Evan said he counted the people in the line and there were 25 people.  The after lunch plans included the group watching me and Sky demo, and then they would bust out into three other buckets and run the rides.

Sky and I got the party started in the bucket and were demoing the rides we created.  I had fluent speaker on my right and the party is rocking.  Then all of a sudden, the fluent speaker throws a TQ curve ball into our plans and starts grilling the process.  She is a feisty one but I think she doesn’t want to be at that kind of lower level speaking, where there is a lot of repetition and such.  So after that Sky and I finish the rides out and we take a break.  I became aware that there were buzzing conversations happening around the room and since I couldn’t’ be in every conversation I suggested that we group up and start the Q&A.

I was really hoping that my friends would see how amazing this system is just like I did when Sky ran me through it that one Friday in June, and they did, they got it.  They are still asking questions and one friend is going to try to run through a couple of the rides with her students.    So now all we need to do is find the money to get us there so we can pass off the WAYK system to my ready and waiting community.  I feel that the group was impressed over the process and I think surprised at how much Sky could wield in the language.  On a side note Sky was told by the elder that he had good pronunciation!  Made my day AND proves even more that the WAYK system works.

-April

Under About the Game, you can find a bite sized explanation of this system starting with What is WAYK? Then, read a more detailed overview of the game in The Big Picture, which will help guide you towards understanding an aaaaamazing new page created by David called simply: Techniques.  David has created a detailed technique map that will help guide players through the first stages of play and help you visualize the WAYK process of learning.  Be sure to scroll over each box for a brief explanation of these techniques.

There is also a new Services page that outlines what is possible with a team of experienced WAYK players coming into a community.  From a One-Hour Demonstration to a One-Year Revitalization program, there are plenty of realistic and accessible options for jumpstarting and assisting a living language community

Another new feature is the Community portion of the site.  We’ve added a Player Bios page with the idea in mind to add any and all players that are interested in sharing their story, and their experience with this game.  Our Partners page is dedicated to those organizations that we’d like to support for their ongoing efforts in language and community revitalization.  The WAYK Facebook page and Players Map have been added under this section also.

Those are the main new features added to the site.  Also, if any of you have a recurring WAYK event that you’d like us to include on the site, please email me and we’ll help spread the word.

The Bunker: basement bucket brigades.

62 minutes and 37 seconds.

[direct download]

Recorded July 25th, 2011

Our discussion over dinner involves accents, talk of facilitation issues and how important it is to have a strong healthy community in order for a language to survive.  We question which comes first; the language hunter, or the language teacher.  This question goes hand in hand with, are we saving a language or building a community?  A new TQ is born, the Hunting license, and we talk about how the kids check out during talks and together we brainstorm an alternative to get messages across without the discussions feeling like lectures.

7:16 – Are we saving a language or are we saving a community?

April questions Evan what the group needs to be focusing on, language or community.  Sky follows with, “what comes first, the language hunter or language teacher?”

10:16 – TQ: Teach it Off

Evan shares his vision of how the teaching process should work.

12:06 – Language Hunter vs. Teacher

Sky answers the question of are whether we are training teachers or hunters.

15:06 – Facilitation

Discussion turns back to the idea of pulling the kids into the facilitation part of this program.  April shares her feelings on her disappointment for not having the ORID happen because the kids are having a conflict and it’s not being resolved.  If they were helping with the facilitation they could help with ideas on resolving the issues.

19:38 -Panda Analogy

David Edwards compares saving a dying language to trying to save a dying Panda.

23:03 – Dealing with the conflict

Evan and April talk about how important it is to work out the conflict and get the community/family back on track.  The plan get the kids refocused is eluded too which includes asking them “Why are you here?” and “What are you going to do today to help accelerate the learning of Numu?”

24:10 – Alternative to Lectures

Recognizing that the kids aren’t trained adults who can sit through three hour classes and so we need to devise a plan to get across important information without it feeling like a lecture.

26:40 – Laboratory

April brings up the idea of having clipboards and pencils to observe the hunts.  David discusses what he needs to do during the TQ Sportscaster.

28:11 – Pairing WAYK and Healthy Native Community Fellowship tools

April discusses her idea of combining buckets and the facilitation tool Boldest Idea.

31:04 – Finalized Laboratory Plan

35:45 – Hunting

Sky brings up the point that we are having all the kids learn how to hunt and while some of them are good at it, for others it’s the other way around.  The discussion turns to Evan explaining that the game shifts when someone is hunting and pushing the language.

39:00- TQ: Grandma Hunting License

David is shocked to learn that he is now Chuck Norris.  As Chuck Norris, David would help guide the hunting.  This leads to the contract of the TQ Grandma Hunting License.

47:10 – Next Time

Evan shares what he would do the next time he runs a program in dealing with hunting nouns.  Evan shares how much mileage he was able to get from using a huge glass at the Latin Language Conference.  Realizing that jumping from hunting nouns to hunting glue words was a TQ Sorry Charlie for the kids.

53:26 – Finding the Structure in Languages

David shares that he and Evan know that the goal of hunting is to find the structure in language but the kids don’t know what that means.

55:30 – Extreme Barter!!

David shares his idea of having a huge want, have, give, take, exchange which leads to the Extreme Barter plan.

71 minutes and 56 seconds.

[direct download]

Recorded July 22nd, 2011

In this episode, we introduce the “Where Are Your Keys?” Summer Institute of Play at the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Indian Reservation, and the interns: April Charlo, David Edwards, and Sky Hopinka. We discuss some of our experiences so far using WAYK with the Numu language, working with seven Warm Springs high school students and working with each other.

5:51 – Extreme Haga

David tells the story of how Warm Springs student Courtney Fasthorse invented a game inspired by her favorite ride.

7:11 – Knives in the Sky

Students invented another game of where they lay on their backs to learn Numu.  Discussion shifts to how learning while laying down was an accelerator.  April was worried that lying on the ground wasn’t WAYK approved.  Evan explains that WAYK promotes anything that accelerates learning languages.

21:00 -TQ: Sportscaster

David defines the new technique and how it was used that day.

21: 45 -TQ: I’m not a Genius, I’m a veteran

Evan and David discuss the invention of the new technique that helps people who feel like language acquisition is beyond their reach.

22:19 – TQ: Extreme TPR/Be Here Now

Sky discusses how using these techniques help save fairies

25:20 – Healthy Native Community Fellowship Tools

Evan discusses how April’s knowledge of the tools helped make an impact on the group.

31:07 – TQ: Party Boat

Evan discusses how he is beginning to notice that people around us want to get involved in what we are doing.

35:18 – Building a Community

April discusses Evan being supportive of her incorporating the Fellowship tools to build a community/family with the group, not just with the students but with the adults in the house.

39:46 – Culture Shock

David shares his experience of working on the Warm Springs Reservation and how he didn’t expect to have culture shock.

45:18 – Needs for next year

Evan shares his thoughts on how this month has affected him and how much he has learned for what could be bigger and better for next year.

52:58 – Questions: What changes have you seen in the students? What stands out the most in this system?

The group answers the questions in the order of Sky, David, Evan and April.

101: 16 – TQ: Wingman

While Evan answers the questions, he and David discuss how the students are confidently using technique Wingman.

107:19 Fellowship Tool: Group Agreements

April shares how the students reacted to the incorporation of the tool.

This summer the WAYK interns and I have been living and breathing “Where Are Your Keys”.  We have been facilitating an 8 week Numu (Northern Paiute) language teacher training on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon.

Working in partnership with the Warm Springs Language Department, the Warm Springs WED (youth work force development) program, the Warm Springs Community Action Team, and the Central Oregon non-profit Partnership to end Poverty, we are creating 7 high-school-aged teachers.  These young teachers are learning techniques, hunting language, building “rides”, and teaching other community members how to learn and teach the Numu language.

The Summer Institute of Play 2011 has been head quartered in Madras Oregon just south of Warm Springs.  The house was rented and furnished in true WAYK “OBVIOUSLY!” style.  You can think of it as Amish Kindergarten… sparse, but clear, bright, solid colored objects.

Each of the 3 interns has their own color coded room: Red, Green and Black.  Each room came with corresponding colored sheets, blankets, towels, curtains, desk lamps, laundry basket, clothes hangers and stapler.  The kitchen was populated with color coded dishware to clearly coincide with the room color.   The set-up for conversations is perfect: “You stole my red bowl!”

The shared living room and bathroom are a rainbow of obvious colors.

Now let’s meet the interns:

In the Red Room,

April Charlo is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, located on the Flathead reservation near Missoula, Montana.  April’s commitment to restoring her tribal language motivated her to pursue a master’s degree in Education Leadership from the University of Montana.  April intends to utilize her knowledge and experience to aid in the recovery and revitalization of Native Languages.

After graduating, April was introduced to Evan Gardner and the “Where Are You Keys?” concept.  After only one short demonstration of “Where Are Your Keys?”, she signed up for the Summer Institute of Play internship.  April has also recently graduated from the Healthy Native Communities Fellowship and has been experimenting with combining her new facilitation and community building skills with her understanding of working with Native youth.  April sees the massive potential of incorporating community building methods into the “Where Are You Keys?” language learning techniques.

In the Green Room,

David Edwards is an undergraduate student at Stanford University, working on an interdisciplinary major between the computer science, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy departments. He got interested in languages in middle school when he tried inventing one for fun; that led him to research other world languages, which fostered an interest in language revitalization and Native North American languages in particular. He discovered “Where Are Your Keys?” in March of 2010 and quickly became addicted to “language hunting,” sharing the system with friends in classrooms and workshops in California, Colorado, and Mongolia. Just recently he returned from a study abroad program in China and is looking forward to further expanding his cultural horizons while helping to strengthen the languages of the Warm Springs community.

In the black room,

Sky Hopinka is of the Hochunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians.  He has been interning with Evan and “Where Are Your Keys?” since February, 2011, and learning Chinuk Wawa, which he will apply to his university foreign language requirement.  Sky is graduating in the fall from Portland State University with a BA in English and minor in film studies.  Currently, he is interning with the “Where Are Your Keys?” Summer Institute of Play through the Indigenous Nations Studies department (formerly Native American Studies) at PSU.  After graduating, he plans to work in filmmaking and with WAYK in learning and teaching the Hochunk and Luiseno languages.

This summer has been a fantastic experience and experiment in rapid community language revitalization.  We have shared so many techniques of accelerated learning between the students, interns, and language department staff.  We hope future Institutes will be even more successful as we share ideas with future interns.  If you are interested in participating as an intern please contact WAYK at evan@whereareyourkeys.org.

Keep a look out for the podcast where we discuss our successes and challenges of language revitalization and community revitalization.

Even small gatherings deserve a food table - a spread from a recent WAYK event.

In any fluency hunting environment, whether leading a game, or setting-up for a one on one with a fluent fool, you can acknowledge the human need for nutrition and comfort by feeding your mind.

“Have you eaten?” – a traditional Mayan greeting, traditional Chinese greeting.

Feeding Your Mind [formerly "do food"] is a hallowed human activity, a social lubricant, a biological requirement. Having food present humanizes spaces and attracts attendees to events (“there’ll be food there!”); it allows players to relax, to stay longer and more comfortably. Like its parent technique, Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing, it is easy to agree with while also easy to neglect. The most powerful techniques are the ones we all know, but don’t use – and everyone knows that feeding your mind works.

Feeding your mind doesn’t stop there however; for an accelerated learning environment, the bar is raised a bit higher than just providing any kind of food. Across the vast landscape of meetings and events is an epidemic of low nutrition foods: muffins, pastries, doughnuts, croissants, cookies, the apparent staples of organizational life, in spite of their well-known soporific effects. Breads, pastas, and sugars slow down mental processes (the infamous “food coma”) and divert physical attention.

After thousands of hours of game play, we’ve come to recognize certain foods as more “clean-burning”, filling stomachs without slowing minds, primarily meat, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. There is no one right answer to the problem of providing healthy food (watch out for players’ food allergies and personal or religious restrictions), but paying attention and experimenting with food that maintains the clearest and most supported mental state is a critical element of creating the set-up for accelerated learning and play.

In addition, remember to include drinks so the players can hydrate themselves. This includes options such as coffee and tea. Many games have been sabotaged because the coffee drinkers did not have their coffee fix! Be realistic and provide what players will need in order to play at their fullest ability.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
We usually introduce this technique later, after players have led enough games that they are approaching becoming apprentices for running larger events.

Applying the technique in language acquisition

• Lunatic Fringe/the Meadow – place a food table in an outer fringe position, so that players can use it as an excuse to wander about the room and refresh themselves even if they don’t eat anything. Feed your mind is like another Meadow, another way of changing pace and scene before returning to play.

But what about…?
New game leaders may question the relevance of feeding your mind…they may seem skeptical that the extra work that feeding your mind requires is really worth the impact it may have on the learning environment. We run into this objection enough that it may simply be part of modern culture that many people have not made the connection between nutrition and an awake, alert mind – hosting traditions, such as providing a food spread for gatherings, are on the wane and part of an older generation’s culture. The only way that we have found to address this objection is to invoke tq Rules of the Game – master each technique before looking to see how to improve or eliminate them to speed up the game. After mastering this technique, players then tend to have seen enough positive results for themselves, over a period of time, that they no longer need explanations or convincing.

Claude Duhamel (on right).

Join us at WAYK French Camp, in Quebec, for seven days of high-energy fun, music, campfires, good food, and accelerated French language learning on the farm with the “Where Are Your Keys?” learning game design system.

For this event, we will be hosted on Claude Duhamel’s farm-land in Ulverton, Quebec, having conversations with local French speakers.

Register now!

Two of our interns: Sky Hopinka (Hochunk) on left, Norah Zaharakis (Greek) on right.

We’re now filling intern positions at WAYK; we rely on these volunteer interns to help us carry WAYK games deeper into the community, and develop the WAYK system further. Thanks to all our interns: David Edwards (a student at Stanford, helping with our Numu/Paiute language program this summer), Sky Hopinka (Hochunk and a student at PSU, helping with video), Norah Zaharakis (Greek, helping us further explore the connection between theater games and WAYK), and Ariel Margulies (Jewish, helping us develop our Yiddish language program).

Would you like to revitalize your heritage language? Become a language hunter? Help other communities revitalize their languages? Please contact us for more information on becoming an intern at WAYK: info@whereareyourkeys.org.

How do you apply WAYK techniques to building a video curriculum?

As you know, WAYK is a design system for accelerating and improving the learning in any environment. So then how do you apply techniques obviously!, set-up, limit, and so on, to video?

Video presents certain challenges – the biggest is the loss of the in-person TPR (total physical response) environment. However, all the other techniques are still in play. How much can we engage the viewer, and include them in a conversation (tq fluency, everybody plays, same conversation)? How much can we apply my turn/your turn?

For us at WAYK, we’ve also been handicapped by the limitations of our technical video know-how. If you’ve been on this ride with us for a while, you’re aware of the infamous audio problems in our early videos, the confusing (via video) set-ups, and so on.

Recently we’ve had the chance to partner with videographers more skilled than us (fluent fools at last!), and so in that partnership we’ve been developing an “ideal” format that we’re modeling for you to copy-cat.

To be perfectly clear: our goal is to develop a same conversation for how language videos are made, a near-universal format so that anyone can experience accelerated learning for any heritage language video on youtube or other video hosting sites.

For video there will always be learning decelerators in play (such as the lack of TPR), but the ability to access them anywhere via the internet brings a massive amount of acceleration to learning that more than makes up for the challenges.

Compare the Chinook Jargon video at the top of this post to this video of Irish:

Yikes! Note the difference. Both videos have some important techniques applied to the video format; both have obviously! close-ups of the props in play, for example. However, the visual field for the Irish video is extremely cluttered. The Irish video is twice as long as the Chinook video. There are multiple players, but no one is pulling you (the viewer) through it. It has a lengthy intro, so you’ll need to edit it to be shorter if you want to put it on a loop and listen/watch until you’ve got it (or have it running over and over in the background). Also, one of the objects on the table is almost impossible to see (the penny owned by Patrick).

The Chinook Jargon video is ready to go; it has been stripped of an intro and outtro (application of limit) making it perfect for looping, the visual field is completely focused on play, with tq bluescreen/greenscreen applied to the environment. Now we’re talking! Keep in mind, the Chinook Jargon videos were filmed in an empty classroom at the Portland State University Native American Student and Community Center – not a specialized studio. It doesn’t take much to limit the set-up!

We encourage you to copy-cat along with the rest of these Chinook Jargon videos and experience the improved format, while thinking, “what other techniques can I apply to improve this?” One question we still have is, “how many (and which) techniques should we introduce at the beginning of each videos? How should we vary that?” For example, I mark bite-sized pieces at the beginning of each of these videos, and for the first one, also mention copy-cat.

Here’s the rest of the videos, up to want/have/give/take, I hope you enjoy them. One big opportunity for improving these videos is to have two players in the video, so that they can more obviously! model the goal conversation for the viewer-player. However, sometimes you only have one speaker who can put together a game like this for video – so these provide a good example of dealing with the toughest situation.

Chinuk Wawa 2
Chinuk Wawa 3
Chinuk Wawa 4
Chinuk Wawa 5

Recently, I watched a video of speaker/author Stephen Covey talking about the power of what he called the “Indian talking stick”.

By definition, self-sufficient indigenous communities have mastered creating and maintaining the accelerated learning environment tuned to their place and time. This is what makes them self-sufficient – everything that the community needs, the diverse array of tools, materials, skills, are learned and relearned every generation, on a very small scale. If you’re paying attention, this should strike you as miraculous! Such a variety of cross-training and specialization on the village scale is remarkable. So it makes sense that such communities could develop a robust, effective conversational process that works even when relations are strained.

When I see something that works, I immediately start applying my “fluency hunter’s eye” to it: what are the techniques that make up that approach (or tool)? What “rules of the game” have they applied to generate that particular accelerated learning environment? Doing this keeps my skills sharp and helps me to understand and borrow insightful new (or old!) techniques. WAYK isn’t a system of brand-new methods, it’s a system for using anything that works. Things that work have often been around for a while – a long while!

The talking stick can be seen as the layering of three techniques: obviously!, my turn/your turn, and total physical response.

All application of technique is a response to a specific context, with particular people. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but only addressing the situation at hand.

1. Obviously!: Perhaps you’re in a difficult conversation, where the intensity of emotions and other factors are making it difficult to have a safe converation. Or perhaps you’re dissatisfied with a superficial exchange, and you want to make it richer. You need something that will make you obviously! aware of what to say, and how to say it.

2. My Turn/Your Turn: You employ the “traffic cop” of all game play, by trading turns in the conversation, using verbal and gestural language to indicate whose turn it is. But perhaps this still isn’t obviously! enough – you’re still getting mixed up due to emotions, or the conversation still doesn’t feel rich enough. So…

3. Total Physical Response/TPR: by passing a physical object back and forth, the participants in the conversation have a whole-body sense of the give-and-take of a healthy conversation. There is no ambiguity or guessing as to what to do, when.

Now, there’s one or two more elements to the “talking-stick” conversational process that Stephen Covey is speaking of, but that’s a good start for understanding how and why you apply techniques to improve the learning, communication, and performance environment. It really is that simple – with this approach you can generate all kinds of tools and games that enrich and accelerate whatever situation you find yourself in.

So get out there and play with your “fluency hunter’s eye”!

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.

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!

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.

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.

Meaning is a complete, whole-body experience, not an intellectual one.

Discovery, revelation, insight, the “Eureka!” moments of our lives are most richly felt, and most deeply absorbed, when they are gifts we give ourselves.

In WAYK language acquisition, there are some things we talk a lot about, and there are other things we never even mention. The techniques, the “rules of the game”, setting-up games and debriefing how they went – these are constantly on our lips and under discussion. But the meaning of the language in which we play is left completely alone, and may almost seem irrelevant to play.

There is nothing so satisfying as seeing a player grasp the meaning of an interaction on a deep, personal, internal level (or being that player yourself). This is often accompanied by giggling, “a-ha!” looks of surprise, or other emotional responses, further strengthening the mnemonic hold the player has on what they just absorbed. In accelerated learning, these personal, emotional experiences are worth their weight in gold, and impossible to fabricate or coerce.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
We introduce this just in time for translation requests, or general questions like “what does the language we’re using mean?”
Short: “Technique: Riddle-me-this. Experiencing the meaning of the language is a gift you get to give yourself – we won’t interfere or take that away from you. Besides, this isn’t a learning game. You’ll riddle-me-this what everything means at your own pace. Take all the time you need.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition
Avoid, as much as possible, any explanations of structure, meaning, or grammar. Any time a player requests such explanations, shrug your shoulders and mark riddle-me-this. Remember, meaning is something that you experience, not something you can explain. Explanations just give the illusion of answering the search for meaning – and they slow down what needs to happen anyway, which is a visceral experience of “what it means”.

But what about…?
Sometimes new players will express a strong opinion that they learn by understanding “why” things mean what they mean, or through translations. This is simply not the way humans acquire fluency, though it is absolutely one way humans learn “about” things. Though a player may sincerely want an explanation for their own comfort, and though we offer many techniques for creating the safest, most comfortable environment possible, we encourage you to not satisfy player requests for explanations.

How you run the game, is modeling for your players, and therefore how you’re asking them to run the game. Explanations breed explanations. To transmit the culture of play as quickly as possible, it’s best to start right away by jumping directly into play and staying there.

According to you go first, we are always modeling behavior – which means that our behavior is always being observed. Children, peers, elders, other animals, they’re always watching us. Humans have mirror neurons, structures in the brain that intrinsically cause us to personally experience that which we see another experiencing, and these neurons predispose us to learning from other humans and animals across a distance.

If we know this, we can design our play environment to support this ongoing observational learning that happens anyway, regardless of our intentions. This is key to involving children; no-pressure modeling, allowing them to absorb at their own pace and in their own way on the sidelines. For ages as young as early teens in the lunatic fringe, with their growing ability for mature “meta-” thinking, we can also give additional tools to accelerate their learning.

Copy-cat, Angel on your Shoulder, Sorry Charlie, with these techniques and many more, mature players can play an active role in skill diffusion and acquisition. Rather than just being an audience, the lunatic fringe can then become an asset, a community-wide safety net supporting and guiding other players.

If you’re playing a WAYK table game, the core group of players sitting around the table (“with their knees touching the table”) is called the inner circle, and any players behind them are the lunatic fringe. Anyone in an engaged, supportive lunatic fringe is called an angel on your shoulder.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
Short: “Technique: Lunatic Fringe. Everyone outside the inner circle is in the lunatic fringe. Your only duty is to copy-cat what is going on in the inner circle. By doing so, you become angels on our shoulders, who will pull us through it.”

Applying the technique in language acquisition
The lunatic fringe can form in many ways. They can be far away sitting in the Meadow, playing in the corner appearing to ignore the game play, getting food, or sitting right behind the players in the inner circle, pulling them through it.

In the beginning, it can take some reminders to fully engage a close-in lunatic fringe. TQ Look at your Players, Look at your Angels is one we use often to remind the lunatic fringe to wake up and start pulling the inner circle through it. This technique essentially consists of saying, “technique: look at your players, look at your angels. Angels, find your players, give ‘em a wink that you’ll be there for them and pull ‘em through it. Players, find your Angels, point at them and say ‘remember to pull me through it!’”

But what about…?
Sometimes after playing for a while your lunatic fringe will have their hands in their laps, and be more of an audience than a group of angels. This tells you that they are full. Remind them to go rest up in the Meadow, get food, hit the bathroom, get whatever they need, and join back in just as soon as they feel ready.

Sometimes members of the lunatic fringe will not engage play by copy-catting or being angels, but instead will want translations (risking killing fairies) or ask distracting questions. For the most part, discourage distractions and non-player questions through limit (“limit – that’s a great question – but for later”) and offering up the Meadow (“if you’re in the lunatic fringe, but don’t have enough energy to angel, consider resting in the Meadow“).

For any players that you think “should” be playing or participating, we can’t say this enough: the most accelerated learning is contingent on sincere, complete consent. You can’t force players to learn quickly over the short-term without building long-term resentment that will eventually undermine all your work to build a learning community.

This is why the lunatic fringe is so important, and why we acknowledge so many manifestations of the fringe. We truly want players to call full right when they need to, and we truly want them to rest in the Meadow as long as they  need, until they are ready to rejoin play. We can’t stress this enough. Accelerated learning is founded on consenting, happy players.

Some players are predisposed to being in the lunatic fringe. Young children are a good example of this. Sometime inner circle players will have children in their laps as they play, but for the most part, children learn best by orbiting around play in the lunatic fringe, combining it with their own play that may have nothing to do with the language you’re playing in.

Now you know where the name came from!

When fluency hunting, you use limit to move through ascending levels of complex performance, leaving a Travels with Charlie roadmap behind you, and calling sorry, charlie on yourself or others anytime bite-sized pieces come up out of order.

One quick look at the Big Picture can make all the details fall into place.

We call Travels with Charlie a roadmap, because it can be very similar. When you drive somewhere new, it always feels faster on the way back, than the way out. This is because you know what to expect. You also have learned short-cuts and other ways to save time and resources (the best gas station, a good grocery store, etc.).

The good folks at ACTFL, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, have done this work for all us language learners by developing several decades ago a language proficiency scale outlining the big picture of language acquisition. They run workshops and classes on using the scale.

The scale runs:

Novice: Memorized words and phrases, listing.
Intermediate: Full sentence questions and answers.
Advanced: Paragraphs about a specific moment in time, in the past, present and future.
Superior: Speeches and discussions about economic, social, and political issues.

For WAYK, we needed something memorable and succinct, so we developed this “iconic” version:

Novice: Tarzan at a party. Me Tarzan. Like food! “Sesame Street”
Intermediate: Getting to the party. “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”
Advanced: What happened at the party last night? “Larry King Live”
Superior: What if parties were illegal? “Charlie Rose”

We love this scale so much, we use it as an over-arching concept for every skill we want to hunt, including the craft of language hunting itself. This scale is essentially an appreciative (it’s about what you can do, not what you can’t), organic scale for ever-increasing complex performance. If you think of a seed moving from a seedling to a full grown plant, at each level important activity is happening, it’s just not as complex as the next. A seed isn’t worse than a tree; without the seed there is no tree! The seed is actually the ingenious starting point for making a tree, and is quite an accomplishment in itself. This is exactly how we think of WAYK.

This is a vital paradigm shift, and can really require screwing on your head in a completely different way. In this way of seeing “learning”, there are no remedial classes, there are no classes for the talented and gifted, there is only organic growth up the scale, to higher and higher levels of performance.

Here’s the scale for WAYK language hunting:

Novice: Plays the game.
Intermediate: Leads games and hunts languages.
Advanced: Hosts language nights, and leads teams of language hunters.
Superior: Hosts language weekends, and leads communities of language hunters.

There’s a very natural progression there. Though it may seem obvious, it can often take a lot of work to suss out the scale for new skills. What is Novice for bicycle mechanics? Boxing? Web development? Algebra? Piano? How about Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior?

Though a separate technique, you can’t talk about travels with charlie without sorry, Charlie. This is the technique you call when someone is trying to add bite-sized pieces out of order, or even try to jump a level of proficiency in play (for example, jumping to telling stories, rather than staying with full sentence Q&A). This someone may in fact be you! You’ll know this is happening when the game grinds to a halt, you fall out of the flow of play, and players start “explaining” the language, rather than conversing in it.

It’s common for players to rename travels with charlie to be more appropriate for their home culture. Not everyone has heard of the PBS interviewer “Charlie Rose”,  after which this technique was named (the other being the book Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck)! This is a great idea, especially if you do it well. You can also come up with your own iconic TV shows or people for each level of proficiency on the scale.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
There is no short version of this technique, really. We tend to introduce it later on, after play has been going for a while, as an opportunity for a short break and a look at the “big picture”. A quick run through of the scale, as shown above, takes about 5-10 minutes, depending on how succinct you are.

Applying the technique in language acquisition
When you mark this technique, it’s like a tiny little game unto itself. Throw my turn/your turn and in threes to make sure players can explain it to you and others.

But what about…?
You will use the heck out of sorry, charlie. It is a work-horse, and one of the main techniques that will keep old language class habits from slowing the game down. Use it early and often! Players get excited and want to increase complexity all the time, before they really understand how the ACTFL scale works. It’s up to you to throw this technique again, and again, combining it with others if necessary (How Fascinating!, in threes, my turn/your turn, etc.).

Look at all those lists!

While language hunting, when you periodically discover single words and concepts in your target language, you ask for them to be included in a Craig’s List (CL) of like concepts/words, accelerating your movement through the language and raising the chances of remembering the single word you discovered.

Lists are an ancient mnemonic.

There are many examples of listing in oral tradition – human memory loves groups, lists, and categories, bringing like things together.

Craig’s Listing (CL) is the act of creating, sharing, and improving these lists. We use the name because it often gets a laugh, referring to the well-known online classified ads, in which you can find long lists of ads grouped together under categories like housing, work, and personals.

It’s also worth noting that “listing” is one of the main symptoms of the perennial Novice – the language student struggling to get out of the hole of lists of nouns and memorized phrases that is holding them back from real conversation.

It’s therefore important to remember that CL are for grouping words together that you plan to throw into a conversation as soon as the opportunity opens, not a way to hoard nouns or other pieces of language structure. It’s like the difference between a deck of flash cards, and a deck of playing cards. The flash cards are stuck in a list that you repeat over and over; the playing cards get thrown on the table as you jockey to win the game.

One particularly fun and effective way to wield a CL is to put it all into a sentence or paragraph, wielding tq two (or more) words same sentence, such as with the CL Want/Have/Give/Take:

“I want to have your pen, if you don’t give it to me I’ll take it from you!”

You’ll notice the words are in order too, demonstrating your full knowledge of the order and length of the list.

CL can grow as you learn more words that belong together – in theory there is no limit on the length of a Craig’s list. CL can also be improved, split apart, the order changed, and so on, all in the spirit of what works the best – what accelerates most the language hunt and race to Superior proficiency.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
Short: “Technique: Craig’s List. Information presented in lists, according to like genre. Rather than single words here and there, we’ll always give you them in lists of connected words.”

Applying the technique in language acquisition
•    Every time a player forgets a single word from the CL, run through the whole CL.
•    Every time you run through a CL, do it tq In Threes.
•    Start CL as short as possible, just 2, 3, or 4 words, and add to them as you hunt deeper into the language.
•    You can also combine CL with tq Slow/Fast, starting slow and slowly speeding up, going so fast at the end that the whole group is forced to call “How Fascinating!”.

But what about…?
You can’t separate a CL from the conversation it belongs to – they are connected. Practice each in concert, rather than separately. In the end, Craig’s list is not a set of already developed perfect lists that you are required to duplicate for every language, but a skill for developing them on the fly while hunting a target language.

Use what you know to make ‘sticky’ new CL’s quickly and effortlessly.

Who's teaching who?

We often say, “WAYK is a copy-cat game, not a learning game. No learning allowed!”.

This can seem rather tongue-in-cheek, as if we secretly mean, no really, we want you to learn, this is just a way to make it fun.

But no – though seemingly paradoxical, we actually mean it. WAYK really is a copy-cat game, not a learning game.

As you may imagine, this is an advanced and subtle understanding. It’s not good press to claim that you offer a way for people to not learn something.

The point is, what we call “accelerated learning” out of convenience really is something radically different than what we normally associate with the word “learning”.  Think of your conventional school experiences with learning mathematics, writing, foreign languages, civics, and so on. If you got an “A” in these courses, you must have “learned” something. Afterwards, could you fluently use your Algebra to successfully manage a spreadsheet? Could you fluently write your memoir? Survive in another country, immersed in the language? Use your civics to come up with good governance for a neighborhood association?

If you had anything like a mainstream experience, the answer is of course “no”. We’ve so effortlessly absorbed this notion of “learning”, this idea that “knowledge of or about something” means you’ve been successful.

What if, however, your primary value, rather than surviving in an institutional setting, or adding to your encyclopedic knowledge of trivia, was fluent competency, the ability to move effectively and gracefully through the world? In a do or die situation, this value is mandatory. In any such “do or die” field, like firefighting, the military, police, EMT, the training must deliver competency.

This means, the training must involve doing. It must involve application to a real (or nearly real) situation. Which is not a requirement of conventional “learning”.

To acquire real competency, your training must involve seeing effective performance, and duplicating it until you have it down.

Which is why WAYK is nothing more than a highly orchestrated experience of copy-catting.

You observe a fluent fool with a language or skill, and you want to have that skill in your body. You want to fluently do, think, or otherwise express your target skill. The proof that you can do something, is that you actually do it. And the road to getting to where you can fluently “do it” involves doing it, over and over.

This may seem obvious (obviously!), but then that begs the question of why we so rarely see training that focuses on doing, in the real or nearly-real situation. It may indeed be obvious, but it doesn’t seem to be common sense.

There is a story of captive wolves, so intelligent and observant, that they only need to see a keeper operate a complex, involved latch at a gate in their containment fencing once, before effortlessly duplicating the action, nosing it open and escaping. These wolves are WAYK masters.

There are many martial-arts traditions where the students’ job was to “steal” techniques from their masters. How did they do this? The only way they could – not from a secret book, or sacred mantra, but by deeply observing the master performing the skill and duplicating it in their own body.

Once you’ve sufficiently internalized WAYK techniques into your everyday thinking and behavior, you’ll begin moving closer and closer to this goal of rapidly absorbed competency, where the time between you and any new competency continually shrinks, no matter what the skill. Perhaps you see someone do a cartwheel, make a wooden table with hand-tools, repair a flat, fly a plane. How quickly can you absorb that ability and express it on your own?

Are we (Evan and Willem) WAYK super-spies, capable of instantly learning any complex skill? Well, no (not yet!). The point is, this is the way human beings are built to learn – rapid competency is built-in to ancient ways of learning. It’s only recently we’ve begun to swap this for more institutional modes.What we’re all working on together is a way to reclaim and further accelerate what comes naturally to us.

So we must change our goal – competency, not knowledge. Copy-catting, not learning. And this revolution in learning takes a whole community of play. As you know, we’ll only all get there together.

Here’s player David Edwards, at Stanford University, sharing Mandarin with a friend for the first time. It’s a lot of fun to watch, and with subtitles too! Keep in mind we’ve never played with David, which makes it all the more fun to follow the game. We’re always really excited when we see video of folks who’ve picked up WAYK over the internet!

A contract, at the Sawtooth Huckleberry Fields, still honored to this day. (photo ©2007 Eugene Johnson)

In the midst of play, you or another fluency hunter spots a way to accelerate the learning environment. You enshrine it as a technique by giving it a catchy name, and contract it as part of play from now on.

Culture is an agreement between two or more people.

One of the major goals of WAYK is to empower and accelerate a culture of collaboration. Whatever road-blocks stand in the way, the techniques provide tested ways to remove them. It’s important for new players to feel part of the thriving community of collaboration as soon as possible – what are they observing about their experience of play that might improve the game?

Game leaders constantly look for the opportunity to maintain this culture of peer-mentoring, bringing new players into it. They are watching the newbies both to affirm that the game still works, and to discover ways to make it even faster by contracting new techniques.

You can judge whether or not it’s worth contracting a new technique, by whether or not the acceleration it creates is greater than the time spent marking it and explaining it in play. Another good sign that you’ve found a worthwhile technique to contract, is if it feels like a recognizable child of other fundamental techniques, such as obviously!, set-up, limit, and so on.

When players discover an opportunity to speed the game up, their first job is to agree on a catchy name. The best indicator of a good name is that it makes the players spontaneously chuckle or laugh out loud. If inventing a name takes more than a few moments, mumble a good-enough name for now – someone will improve on it later.

It’s also worth re-contracting more relevant names and technique variations for one’s own community. Sometimes, funny references that are memorable for one group, are completely lost on another. Part of the art of contract is discovering community in-jokes and cultural references that are just too funny or sticky to forget. Keep in mind too, that the more you make WAYK applicable to your community, the less it will apply to everyone else. As long as you maintain a knowledge of multiple dialects of play, this can work just fine.

Fluency hunters intrinsically only have enough information to contract new techniques for their WAYK proficiency level and below. A good rule of thumb for a self-check before contracting new techniques, or changing/re-contracting old ones, is: have you mastered the techniques that already apply to the present situation first? If you contract new techniques for situations that have already been “fixed” with previous ones, then you’re decelerating play by re-inventing the wheel.

So the most proficient fluency hunter present in a game is usually watching out for communicating techniques that already exist. Yet, inevitably, as communities of WAYK play emerge, isolated from others, different dialects will emerge, and in the end this works too. The more experimentation and play, the better.

It’s a matter of balance – through contract players have the power to improve the game, and yet the goal is to build on the work that has already been done, rather than reinventing the wheel. This tension between new techniques and old traditional ones will always exist, and it’s a dance that will always be part of WAYK.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
Short: “Technique: Contract. Any time a player comes up with a good idea for accelerating play, we give it a name, and contract it as a new technique.“
Long: “The best names are funny and catchy, and make people laugh. But any name will do for now.“

Applying the technique in language acquisition
You’ll introduce this technique just in time for a new observation that emerges in play, that you judge will accelerate play. If relevant, it’s very important to give a new player credit for any technique based on observations (or complaints) that they’ve made – this brings them into the community of peer-mentoring.

But what about…?
It’s easy for new players to get excited and begin contracting techniques above their proficiency level, or perhaps contracting techniques for situations that are already covered by other techniques.

• tq Sorry, Charlie encourages players to stay within their fluency, and work on improving play at their level.
• But you can always tq Let it go, and try a new player’s technique, if you think that including their input will accelerate game play more than strictly avoiding unnecessary new techniques.

Bite-sized pieces may vary from person to person. It's better for your digestion to err on the side of smaller.

In order to keep players fluently participating in the game, you ensure all new information emerges in bite-sized pieces.

Q: “How do you eat an elephant?” A: “One bite at a time.”

Massively complex skills or projects are almost effortless when tackled one bite at a time. Once you’ve learned this technique, you’ll begin to see it everywhere you see fluent skills and successful behaviors. It’s an eminently obvious technique – yet it can be fiendishly difficult to apply. Aside from early childhood, a typically schooled person has almost no experience applying this to their own learning. We’re used to swallowing oceans of information, and regurgitating it, without actually digesting it. We have chronic learning bulimia.

The art (and science) of slowing down, and honestly earning each new piece of fluent skill, each new piece of information, seems to take quite a bit of discipline – and yet it delivers such startling progress.

Bite-sized pieces may vary in size according to the players in front of you – although you’ll gain skill in WAYK faster if you use the smallest functional bite-sized piece, in order to get used to what most players will need. Having said that, it is important to recognize that a mouse has smaller bite-sized pieces than a wolf that bolts down parts of its meal whole, smaller than snake that can unhinge its jaw. As you gain experience, you’ll know when you can increase the size of the pieces you feed yourself and other players.

Introducing the technique to language acquisition
Short: “Technique: Bite-sized Pieces. We’ll add new language one piece at a time.“

Applying the technique to language acquisition
The first time you add a second bite-sized piece to play, introduce this technique. Then mark each new piece until the players become familiar with the rhythm of play – one bite-sized piece at a time, played until ready to add another.

• Each introduced Craig’s List is a bite-sized piece unto itself. Each word in a Craig’s List is a conversational bite-sized piece, often requiring a trip around the table in threes.
• Bite-sized pieces usually are measured by the ability of players to gain a minimum of confidence in them after going around the table in threes alternating my turn/your turn at least once.
• You’ll know you may need a smaller bite-sized piece if the players display any signs of sorry, charlie or full – blank stares, widened eyes, gaping mouths, or hands on laps.
• As always, add each new bite-sized piece by first starting at the beginning.

But what about…?
New players may wish to increase the size of new pieces of information to what they may be more familiar with from classroom language learning – long lists of words, and several different conversation topics.

If you don’t call limit on these requests, you’ll have a front row seat to the amount of deceleration this causes your game. Games often stop in mid-play when the added piece is no longer bite-sized. Limit is the over-arching game rule, and the size of that limit for new language is bite-sized pieces.

Taking turns is an essential part of most games. photo: Irina Slutsky (Creative Commons)

While fluency hunting, you constantly double check your sense of the accent in play through my turn/your turn, maintaining a back and forth rhythm between yourself, your fellow players, and your fluent fool.

Everything honest is a conversation.

There are countless examples of alternating flows in the natural world. Back and forth exchanges are a circulatory pump – the action of the heart, migrations, tides, seasons, days and nights. This is no less true in the exchange between two human beings. A one way lecture often generates stagnation and lethargy, yet a two way conversation can build upon itself and create more life than was there to begin with.

Technique My Turn/Your Turn comes closest, of all the techniques, to being a near-universal rule of game play. By applying my turn/your turn,  you can change any activity into a game – and what games do not have “turns”, in some form or another? Very few. Even apparently rule-less games like “the Human Knot” seem to require players to take turns in order to resolve the game (a good example of applying technique to a problem).

Any human environment benefits from a thoughtful application of my turn/your turn. From politics, to work, to family life. An artist, such as a sculptor, applies this technique through action, and then reflection. Rather than forcing a shape onto a chunk of marble, the sculptor chips, then looks at the marble, letting it speak, then chips again, then looks again. This is the artist’s conversation.

Vital to WAYK, this technique drives new players to begin “leading” the game themselves, as soon as possible – a critical factor in skill diffusion. Even if the game ends after 5 minutes, a new player has at least one bite-sized piece they can teach.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
This technique is applied quite early, as soon as possible.
Short: “Technique: My Turn/Your Turn. It was my turn first. Now it’s your turn. You lead us. But we will pull you through it…“

Applying the technique in language acquisition
As soon as the player has the absolute minimal ability to be pulled through leading a round, that is a good time to hand off leadership to them.

• tq Bite-sized Pieces means the new player, now leading, only has a tiny new piece to focus on, so they don’t become overwhelmed.
• tq Pull them through it means that the new player is only psychologically the leader; in fact, the original game leader is still going first.
• tq Copy-cat directs the new player who is “leading” the round to follow the lead of the most confident player in the game.

But what about…?
If a new player balks at leading a round of the game, there are several possible explanations.

• Are you sure you gave them a small enough Bite-sized Piece?
• Do they understand, even though they’re “leading”, they still only have to copy-cat the most confident player (who will pull them through it)?
• Did you apply newbie in the lunatic fringe before having them in the inner circle?

Lead from the front. (Audie Murphy)

It’s difficult to find a more bewildering and learning-decelerating philosophy than “do as I say, not as I do.” All the primary modes of human learning are set up for just the opposite, from mirror neurons to the need for total-physical response.

As Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message”. Going first by modeling the successful behavior you want your fellow players/students/teachers to absorb is a fundamental technique. It’s almost an ethical imperative, and it’s reversible – what successful behaviors, techniques, or skills do you see others going first with, that you want to acquire?

In this way, this technique is a two-way street, and as such opens the world to the fluency hunter. What do you want to learn? What do you want to teach? You go first – set-up the environment and model the relationship.

Be the change you want to see in the world. (Gandhi)

Introducing the technique
This technique is usually introduced a bit later, for players working on leading games.
Short: “Technique: You Go First. Whatever you want your players to do, whatever technique you want them to use, whatever opportunity for improving their accent you see, model it by going first.”

Applying the technique

• Start at the beginning by having players copy-cat you, for any new bite-sized pieces.
• Build player ability to cue off of your modeling by often applying tq’s Slow, Copy-cat, and Pull-them Through It in the beginning

But what about…?
It’s easy to forget that we’re constantly modeling behavior for the people around us. If in any moment you’re not going first on purpose, you’re unconsciously going first in some other behavior.

If you become frustrated with your players or fluent fools, are you modeling the behavior you want to see from them in the same situation? How would you like them to deal with such situation, what will accelerate their learning/teaching the most? That will tell you how to deal with it yourself.

• tq Teach a teacher directs you to treat all your players as future game leaders – and model the games you want them to run.

Here you can see Willem hunting Yiddish language for the first time, with the help of fluent speaker Selma Zack, in February 2011.

Just moments before the video starts, Willem has begun by asking Selma, “How do you say ‘What is that?’”. Almost all of the rest of the language hunt is spent immersed in Yiddish. This is a good example of a typical language hunt with an elderly fluent speaker – just fun conversation, sitting at her kitchen table.

Yiddish is an endangered Jewish language with a vast body of literature.

This baby, like most, finished developing "just in time" to be born. A great application of the technique. Image © Christopher Chan / Creative Commons.

You are fluency hunting a skill comprised of uncountable bite-sized pieces, with the option of using and sharing hundreds of accelerating techniques. Yet this doesn’t overwhelm you, because you always bring up new information just in time.

Information and ability is acquired most deeply and rapidly at the moment of its greatest relevance.

If you were a typical American teenager, you’ll remember one of the great unanswerable questions of your high-school algebra class: “when will we ever use this?”.

Imagine this question applied unconsciously to everything you’ve ever learned. For every skill you’ve wanted to learn, for every attempt to speak a foreign language, that same part of your brain that bedeviled your high-school algebra teacher also bedevils you. It’s just part of being human. Your body and mind only want to learn deeply and rapidly when it becomes very important – when you can directly see the relevance. When you use your learning right away, in context, and see results.

Some call this experience “the teachable moment”.

This is the understanding behind the technique “Just in Time”. Every game of WAYK looks different, because every context is different, and thus the just in time environment is different. That which is vital in order to proceed in one context, may be irrelevant in another. Some techniques just don’t ever come up for some folks in some places.

Just in time means you have waited until the moment where either you can’t proceed without the needed information (or fluency), or it is directly relevant to play, and that is the moment at which you bring it up. This is not something you can predict, but it is something you can be ready for, knowing the general flow and pattern of how learning works.

For example, WAYK offers a fairly universal roadmap for getting to adult fluency, with an ordered series of conversations, grammar and vocabulary. Yet this is just a roadmap – it’s not the plan that is important, but the planning itself, always keeping in mind a general sense of how things will occur most often.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
Short: “Technique: Just in Time. There’s a lot of techniques, and a lot of language to learn – but no worries, we’ll avoid overwhelming you by always bringing up each bite-sized piece just in time for when you need it.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition
Avoid lengthy introductions, or long lists of techniques that you think the players will need. Cue off of how you yourself learned WAYK – one bite-sized piece at a time, and each just in time for when you needed it. The techniques are great, sure, and fascinating to learn about, but the only way the players will understand them is to use them – just in time. And “learning about” WAYK isn’t the goal: fluency in WAYK game play (and the target language) is.

But what about…?
To this day, many new players want to read about WAYK; they want lists of techniques and background information. If they are already building their fluency in WAYK game-play, this can be an asset, enriching their understanding of the mentoring language. However, it’s easy to prioritize “knowledge about” over ability to do. There is a constant tension between the two – and neither are bad or good. Both have their roles.

• tq Fluency reminds us that our understanding of something is measured not by what we know, but what we can fluently do. It also encourages us to take our knowledge and turn it into ability.
• tq Killing Faeries reminds us that explanations can easily make us full, and take up the space in our brains that fluency is hoping to occupy.
• tq No-grief Debrief provides a space for explanations and discussions after-wards, once we have acquired experience enough to have something useful to say.

"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.

Here’s the third video in the Irish language series. Remember, you’ll need to start with the first video, and for most folks, completing the WAYK tutorial beforehand is a must.

In this video we play through Craig’s Lists Give/Take and For/if/and.

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.

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.

Here’s the second video in our Irish Language series. Start with the first one.

In order to take advantage of videos like this, you’ll need to have mastered the WAYK tutorial or played a WAYK game before.

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.

For anyone who has either been to a WAYK workshop, language night, or mastered the WAYK tutorial, you can copy-cat along with this video and learn some Irish language, known in America as Irish Gaelic, and in Ireland as Irish or Gaeilge.

You may note that we haven’t completely made up our mind which hand signs go with which parts of the language – just tq mumble your way through it, and you’ll do fine. We sure are!

Use all your WAYK game leading skills to run an even more accelerated, effective game than us! How tq OCD can you be? This video is just one example of how to move through this same conversation – you know your players, and your situation better than us. Feel free to modify the game as needed.

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.

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.

In this video Willem and Holia explore doing a language trade, where Willem will learn Farsi, and Holia will improve his English, and also will be trained to rapidly teach and learn language through language hunting.

Please keep in mind, that if you find this video confusing, then you probably need to start with the WAYK fluency tutorial.

Holia actually has a fascinating story – he is a newcomer to Portland, OR, and a refugee from Iran. He escaped oppressive Iranian goverment anti-LGBTQ policies via the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees (irqr.net/ ).

We hope that WAYK and language hunting gets in the hands of as many marginalized communities and peoples as possible, including refugees, immigrants, LGBTQ, and others, so we can all take back the ability to teach ourselves and others the languages we need not just to survive, but to thrive!

We see WAYK as a way to maintain one’s heritage and traditional culture in the face of the need to adapt to changing economic pressures. This includes refugees coming to the United States needing to learn English, while retaining their identity.

How many of us descend from immigrant families in which our ancestral languages were not passed on? This is a tiny language death – this is how languages die.

Each day is really skilled at "starting at the beginning" (image by James Jordan via Flickr Creative Commons).

You’ve found a fluent fool, and you want to fluency hunt their ability. So you start at the beginning, and during your hunt, whenever you get lost or confused, you simply start over – at the beginning.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Where to begin? A key element of fluency hunting is choosing the current best place to start, choosing the best beginning. And you can constantly improve on this starting point, as you begin to have a deeper understanding of all the “prerequisites” for fluent ability in your target skill.

This “starting point” is often the obvious, organic place where you must begin. In Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order books, he describes an array of natural processes (organic and inorganic) that are only possible because nature “starts at the beginning”, at every scale between the cosmic and atomic. An embryo begins with a fertilized egg, and a single cell. A spider begins with a single line of web between two anchor points. A solar system requires a central anchoring body, like a sun, around which to form.

Every point in a process has its own “beginning”. To fertilize an egg you require mature adults, a spider web requires first a spider and a suitable habitat.

In language acquisition, in the process of practicing fluent speech, the starting point is that most common child’s question, “what is that?”.

But of course before you can ask “what is that?”, you must first find a “fluent fool” whom you will hunt.

There too, is an element of “beginner’s mind” that fluency hunting requires, much like the Zen attitude called “shoshin”, a state of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions in the face of what you’re hunting, even at an advanced level. All of the WAYK family of techniques are designed to support and cultivate this attitude.

When fluency hunting a target skill, you are always searching for the best “beginning” possible. For example, in old-time fiddle playing, you want to start with bow rhythm before melody. In parkour (street gymnastics, like skateboarding-without-the-skateboard), you’ll discover quickly that to advance you need to already be skilled at soft landings and safety rolls.

A great question to ask your “fluent fool”, to find the starting point, and the general order/flow of proficiency, is “have you ever had a time when learning this skill, when you had to start over, and relearn a piece of this skill all over again, because you found you skipped an element that you needed in order to keep progressing?”.

Sometimes two elements of a skill work in parallel, and neither one truly comes first. Nevertheless, this question is always on the mind of a fluency hunter, they are always experimenting with the best beginning, and the best order of progression.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition

Short: “The first thing we do is technique: start at the beginning, in ASL hand-sign, ‘start [at the] start’. And the start is always ‘what is that?’.

Long: “Whenever we get lost, or return from some conversational tangent back to the game, we will always start over, at the beginning, with ‘what is that?’.”

Applying the technique in language acquistion

This is one technique you’ll return to over and over (as you may have guessed). It’s important to really drill this, and in the beginning, to not skip right into full fluent conversation. Give everyone a chance to find their footing again by always “starting at the beginning”.

• Start play with “what is that?”, after introducing a couple of primary techniques, like TQ Copycat and TQ Full.
• Anytime you feel lost as a game leader, “start at the beginning” with the object that is right in front of you (“your” object), with “what is that?”
• Over time you’ll get a sense for when you can skip starting with “what is that?”, but this will take a lot of play.
• TQ Newbie in the Lunatic Fringe is the ideal “beginning” for a new player, or a struggling player who needs to warm up a lot before games, where they can simply watch and copycat with no pressure. You may not always have enough players for this, but do it when you can.

But what about…?

Players at first may be reluctant to truly “start at the beginning” and “start over” when you feel the game calls for it. They’ll get used to it as you keep calling up this “rule of the game”, and then they’ll begin to rely on it as the game speeds up faster and faster.

The beginning of the game is also the most delicate time, when the game rules need to really be constantly called up and modeled.

• TQ Technique! means these are the “rules of the game”, and it’s just how the game works. In order to play, we play by the rules.

This polar bear waited too long to call "Full".

You’ve set-up a series of same conversations with a fluent fool, for fluency hunting their language. You know you’re at your best if you’re Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing, and after playing for a while you begin to feel yourself becoming Full.

No one knows you better than yourself.

Many people trained in mainstream public schools have had their ability to manage their own learning blunted or even completely taken away. Institutional life has it’s own systemic needs, often in conflict with individual needs. Institutions behave as if it’s much safer and easier to train students to be an homogenous group, rather than a diverse team of individuals.

Adapting to modern institutional life has its obvious advantages; but there are also disadvantages. By focusing your attention on the needs of the system, you take your awareness away from yourself. And being aware of your state (meaning your emotions, energy, and so on) is critical for managing your own learning.

We often notice that new players to WAYK don’t understand how or why they become overwhelmed or exhausted. They may preemptively opt out of situations where they may be challenged, such as a WAYK game, instinctually avoiding a situation where they feel they can’t escape.

This is why we created technique Full; it means that a player has become temporarily “full” of language, and needs to let it digest before continuing. If they didn’t, it would be like pouring more tea into an overflowing tea-cup. Continuing would damage both their ability to retain what they’ve already acquired, and their future ability to hunt fluency playfully and enjoyably. They would begin to associate what started out as a game, with drudgery, overwhelm, and exhaustion.

Many interesting things happen when players begin to monitor their own learning state.

First, players will play longer with more commitment and attention, because they’re not worried about being trapped.

Second, players who otherwise would bog the game down because of their low energy, go to the Meadow and observe the game from a distance. They become familiar with the game just by watching.

Third, Full also becomes an effective way to double-check if techniques are being applied thoroughly enough, such as Limit, Obviously, Set-up, and Start at the Beginning. Players will often call Full, knowing that something just overwhelmed them. By applying a technique like limit more rigorously, they may then continue playing. Sometimes they can’t continue; this underscores in the moment for players and game leaders how much more they need to apply the techniques.

Introducing the technique

Short: “Technique Full: call Full whenever you’re feeling “full” of language, and you need to take a break. When you call Full you can step out of the inner circle, and go out to the Lunatic Fringe, or the Meadow, returning whenever you’re ready again.”
Long: “There are degrees of Full – try to call Full before you are drowning, when the waters are just lapping at your chin. When you do this you’ll be able to play longer and faster, circulating in and out of the game as often as you need to keep participating.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition

Share Full early, and encourage players to use it as often as they need. Full is one of the main tools players will use to accelerate the game, and yet new players usually feel reluctant to use it due to embarrassment or worrying about being rude by leaving.

•    Start out a game with experienced players by asking “how Full are you?”, and demonstrating that they can show degrees with the hand-sign, by putting it somewhere between their belly-button and the top of their head.
•    Call “How Fascinating!” when your first player calls Full. Encourage and celebrate the use of i whenever you see it.
•    Share Full early in the game, within the first few minutes.
•    Anytime you see a player that seems a little dazed, make the hand-sign and point at them asking, “are you Full? You look full…”.

But what about…?

Some game leaders and players worry; what if everyone calls “Full”? Doesn’t somebody have to stay? What if you’re in a classroom, don’t the students have to keep playing whether they want to or not? What if it is a staff training and they’re paid to be there? Shouldn’t they have to keep playing?

WAYK, and therefore accelerated learning, works most effectively in the presence of participants’ free choice. The greater degree to which they freely consent to play, the greater the acceleration. This is why we provide so many levels of participation.

• TQ “the Lunatic Fringe” is for players not quite ready to jump into a hot seat in the TQ “Inner Circle”, or for players recuperating from play in the TQ “Inner Circle”.
• TQ “the Meadow” is for players with the lowest commitment level, or for those needing maximum recuperation. It’s an ideal technique for institutional environments, such as classrooms, where you’d like to allow players truly free choice to come and go, but you don’t have the realistic option to do so.
• Reminding players that by calling “Full” in the “Inner Circle”, they give other players an opportunity to jump in, is an effective way of keeping the game circulating amongst all participants.

Download this flyer to help spread the word!

Finally, WAYK is planning to host an East Coast workshop, in Boston, MA this April 22nd-24th. Come experience 3 days of high-energy fun and accelerated learning!

This is far from the WAYK home base of Portland, so this is a grassroots effort; please help spread the word by encouraging your friends and family to register. Here’s a flyer you can download to pass the word around.

Register early (before March 1st) and get a substantial discount. Returning WAYK players are welcome, and also get a special discount only for those who’ve previously attended a 2 or 3 day workshop.

Register Now to help make this workshop happen!

Dustin Rivers leads a Lotus circle game at a weekend workshop.

About a year ago we partnered with Dustin Rivers, to train him and his community in WAYK and support the revitalization of the Squamish Language. Squamish Nation is located in British Columbia, Canada. A few months ago Dustin began spear-heading weekly WAYK Squamish language classes.

Dustin adapted the Zero to Intermediate scale to the Squamish language. Check it out. Also, give his website a visit, http://www.squamishlanguage.com.

This polar bear is ready to play WAYK because he is already well-fed.

You are considering “setting-up” a game to pull or push language. To do this, you need players and/or “fluent fools”. For the most satisfying game, you ensure potential players are “Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing”.

One way of seeing how "Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing" connects to other techniques.

Humans are animals with bodies, and are therefore subject to biological constraints.

It may seem laughably obvious to make the above statement. But for some reason, in the modern world, it’s easy to forget that humans have the same needs as all other living beings. There are many expressions of this principle, such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Max-Neef’s Fundamental Human Needs, Nonviolent Communication/NVC, and so on. Whatever model you favor, it is clear that observing players’ energy levels will improve their performance.

Hospitality rules in many cultures obligate hosts to make sure any guest has food, water and rest, before plying them with questions or conversation.
Regardless of these very real needs, many students and teachers will proceed in spite of lack of sleep, nourishing food, or sufficient trust and comfort. Teachers usually evaluate students without adjusting expectations according to these criteria. Students may not even see these needs as an issue.

Our modern cultural blind-spot surrounding these basic human needs easily make this technique one of the easiest to improve upon. Think of your players as farm animals, having biological and psychological needs; are they rested? Are they comfortable? Is there sufficient trust between you? Do they feel physically and emotionally safe? Have they agreed to play without coercion? Have they eaten?

Any one of these elements can be expanded upon. For example, a very common issue is that certain foods create the infamous “food coma”, marked by physical and mental slugglishness. By choosing energizing foods over those that slow players down you will markedly accelerate play, especially during larger scale game events.

If by your observation, or through questioning players, you discover there are unmeet needs, then you must consider how much is missing; how hungry are they? How tired? Your game will take more out of you as a game leader, to the degree that players don’t have these needs met. It’s your choice how much energy you are willing to expend to make up for the energy missing from your players.

Introducing the technique

Short: “Technique ‘Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing’ encourages you to filter the players you choose according to the energy and skill you have to run a game. The more exhausted your players, the more skill you’ll need, the more energy it will take.”
Long: “Many games that don’t work or that are a struggle can be explained because of the players chosen ‘sorry, charlied’ the ability of the game leader.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition

This technique is usually shared with experienced WAYK players, not with newbies in basic games. However there are many child-techniques that follow from “Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing”, commonly shared with beginners.

•    Set-up a TQ Lunatic Fringe for players who are new, and need some time to warm up to the idea of playing.
•    Set-up an TQ Inner Circle for players who are ready and willing to start playing.
•   Set-up a TQ the Meadow for players who have the least amount of energy to play, unable to focus on copy-catting. This can apply to young children, elders, and anyone else appropriate.
•    TQ Do Food, scaled to the level of the game play; for small games, snacks and drinks. For big events, set-up an all-day snack table and group meals.
•    Share TQ Full with players as soon as possible, to give them a tool to self-regulate their engagement in the game.
•    Call TQ How Fascinating early and often, to minimize players’ draining negative self-talk and release tension.
•    When TQ Everybody Plays All-the-Time participants extend the energy they have available to a remarkable extent. For this reason, make sure the game stays a game, and not a “class” or a “learning exercise”.
•    Only TQ Correct One Thing at a time – overcorrecting players will drain and overwhelm them, and cause them to call TQ Full early.

But what about…?

What if the only players you have available are tired, hungry, or reluctant to play? There is no absolute rule – as long as you know you will have to make up for the energy missing from your players, by wielding more techniques, at a higher proficiency.

TQ Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing applies to the game leader most of all.

•   Though humans are capable of ecstatic states and super-performance, seemingly irrespective of their biology, avoid relying on this for game play. TQ Limit, TQ Start at the Beginning, and proceed in TQ Bite-sized Pieces.
•    TQ Let it Go if a player doesn’t want to play – the best players are willing and excited.
•    Ask players with low energy to sit in TQ the Lunatic Fringe, or TQ the Meadow. Go with your observations and your intuition.
•    Ask if players are TQ Full early, before they get too overwhelmed.

I really like how John runs this game – it’s just like a WAYK game you’d see at one of our language nights. Thanks John for making this video!

Group learning depends on "Copy-catting".

You’ve found a “fluent fool” in your target skill; you dive right in after “fluency”, by picking a common, accessible, “same conversation”, then “start at the beginning” by “copycatting” everything they do.

One way of showing how Copy-cat connects to other techniques.

“Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation” (Mason Cooley).

According to research over the past couple decades, humans (along with some other animals) are soft-wired with mirror neurons. This means that if you see another being doing or feeling something, your brain will fire with the same activity as if you were doing or feeling it yourself.

Author Jeremy Rifkin speaks more extensively about this in the RSAnimate video “the Empathic Civilization”.

If you’re observing a skill or a new situation, having those mirror neurons fire means you are halfway there to being able to perform that skill or navigate that situation yourself. You’ve already experienced it in your brain; you can absorb it further by copy-catting it in your body.

Copy-catting is a physical boost, an accelerator to your mirror neuron activity. Imitation seems to be a fundamentally human activity.

And yet we use the phrase “copy-cat” as an insult, to goad someone to stop their imitation. Is copy-catting a primitive activity, or an insightful, intelligent, empathic one? Perhaps it all depends on context.

Language acquisition is seen as an intellectual activity. If you speak many languages, people will label you “smart”, and if you struggle learning a single second language, you may feel “stupid”.

And yet, if all you did was focus purely on copy-catting a fluent native speaker (what they said, how they said it, in what situations they said it, and their body language), without any extra effort, you would eventually acquire proficiency in their language. This is in fact how languages are learned all the time, and one of the key elements in the success of “immersion” learning: you have no choice but to copy-cat.

What is intelligence? What is imitation? For the purposes of accelerating learning, is it worth differentiating between them?

We begin WAYK language games by telling players “all you have to do is copy-cat; don’t worry about learning or remembering anything.” This usually relaxes new player, even though copy-catting accurately and quickly seems to be a skill that takes some practice!

In this way we can make the bias against imitation work for us. Everyone knows “just” copying is easy, but learning is much harder! Great. Then let’s play a copy-cat game, instead of a learning game.

Because of mirror neurons, we begin with an ability and urge to imitate. In spite of this, when hunting fluency in a new skill, we may copy-cat poorly and hesitatingly. We can choose to improve our ability to copy-cat.

The more you copy-cat with gusto and commitment, the faster you will become fluent in your skill.

Fake it till you make it.

Introducing the technique

Short: “This is a game, and we mark every rule with this hand-sign [technique]. The first rule of the game is “Copy-cat”. Copy my voice, and my signs.”
Long: “You don’t have to remember or learn anything in this game, just “copy-cat”. This is a “copy-cat” game, not a learning game.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition

When hunting fluency in a skill, copy-cat early and often. Copy-catting is your primary route of skill acquisition.

•    Copy-cat TQ Fluency by doing whatever your fluent fool does.
•    TQ Signing not only encourages you to add a physical, mnemonic element with ASL, but also copying your fluent fool’s body language.
•    TQ Overdo It through over-the-top imitation of the fluent speaker, like a celebrity impression.
•    TQ Pull-me-through-it by anticipating my need to copy something; TQ Parrot by going first and letting me go second, TQ Sing-a-long Song by performing the skill simultaneously with me, and go TQ Just Behind me to affirm that I spoke correctly.
•    TQ Mumble at first; close enough is good enough. Fake it till you make it!
•    Remember you are always copycatting a specific TQ Accent; hunt the language of your fluent fool, not an abstract or theoretical standard of perfection. The fluent fool is always right.

But what about…?

“I learn better by just watching.” We hear this sometimes from new players. Of course, the first and best response is: “this is a copy-cat game, not a learning game’”! In our opinion, as game leaders, all human beings will boost their fluency through participatory copy-catting.

However, there can be some good reasons for making space for a player uncomfortable with copy-catting right away, due to fatigue or mistrust.
Also, depending on the culture, some players may actually be offended by the idea of copy-catting along with a game leader in a child-like way. They may associate it with punishment, compulsion, or judgement of their intellectual ability.

•    If you have time and space, TQ Set-up TQ The Meadow for players who aren’t TQ Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing, or who are very TQ Full and need a deep rest from the game.
•    Set-up a TQ Lunatic Fringe for players who feel comfortable copy-catting as long as they don’t have to be in the TQ Inner Circle.
•    Filter the players you start with; copy-catting is a core driver for acceleration, so focus on playing with people who are TQ Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing.
•    Just TQ You Go First, and don’t worry about whether or not copy-catting will work; because of mirror neurons, new players will quickly pick up the game. They usually can’t help it.

The white room in the Matrix - totally shapeable to the needs of the learner, and able to eliminate all variables and distraction.

To maximize the players’ experience of “Obviously!”, we intentionally “Set-up!” as much of the environment as possible, removing variables and distraction, focusing their attention on play.

One way of seeing how tq "Set-up" generates other techniques.

“I don’t think we got set up, I know we got set up! I mean, really, seriously, where did all those cops come from, huh?” – the Usual Suspects (1995)

TQ “Set-up” is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea that you can be in the middle of a completely designed situation and not even know it, even after the trap is sprung.

In WAYK, we aim to create a flow experience where group success and engagement are ongoing during practice of the skill. To create and maintain this experience we must create and maintain the environment that drives this experience.

We set-up both a learning environment, and a learning laboratory. Every game is an experiment, in which we control as many variables as possible, in order to reliably innovate techniques that further accelerate learning.

This also allows experienced players to know exactly what is coming up next; the conversation is so well designed, the variables are so well controlled for, that sometimes to illustrate tq set-up we tell players “we planned every word in this conversation you just had years ago – including what you didn’t even know you were going to say.” And it’s essentially true. The more you practice set-up, the more you develop an eye for well-designed set-ups everywhere.

In classic games like Chess, Poker, Go, Backgammon and so on, you’ll notice highly controlled, high-contrast, clearly delineated, iconic play pieces and surfaces. These are great examples of time-tested set-up; players can focus all their attention on play, rather than on resolving ambiguities.

An iconic application of set-up is the white room in The Matrix, where the heroes have access to an imaginary space totally shapeable to the needs of the learner, able to eliminate all variables and distraction.

Every environment is assumed to influence or drive human behavior in some fashion; WAYK players explore and innovate what behaviors, and therefore what environments, will most accelerate learning.

Design your experiences by designing your environment.

Introducing the technique

Short: “Technique: Set-up. We always set-up our play surface so that it’s clear of any other objects or distractions. We want to create a set-up that makes everything obvious as possible.”

Applying the technique

Set-up the play environment to limit distraction, and to create a situation where players always obviously! know what to do next.

• Drive play with the Total Physical Response of actual objects in the actual environment referred to by the language.
• Create environment where players are tq Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing, to ensure that players have the psychological, emotional, and physical resources necessary for accelerated learning. Do Food for hungry players.
• Look at the play environment at a room level with a WAYK Eye to limit anything that will tax the attention – clutter, dirt, distraction, chaos.

But what about…?

New game leaders and players may express displeasure at the extreme measures we taking in setting-up a game. It can seem like over-kill – do we really need to go to such great lengths to design the play environment?

• TQ OCD – the extent to which we accelerate learning is in direct proportion to the amount of techniques we apply and the extent to which we apply them.
• But we need to also learn to wield these techniques in tq Bite-sized Pieces, one technique at a time.
• TQ Everybody Plays All-the-time with TQ Whatever Works – play with whatever you have. If you have an impromptu game in a cofee shop, there will be a cup of coffee on the table, and the noise of a crowd. On a bus, there’s no table, and everything shakes, and you’re looking for your stop. If you’re walking, you’re holding pens in my hand. Play with the resources and time available.
• One the one hand, TQ Fluency Hunters are skilled wielders of an array of OCD techniques that they employ zestfully, and without hesitation; we like to say, “You know you’re really language hunting when it feels inconvenient.”
• On the other hand, TQ Let it Go; though we spend a lot of time thinking about how to scale WAYK up, to the best possible game we can imagine, we also scale WAYK down, to do the best we can with what is available.

The strict application of technique "Limit". (photo courtesty Joe Shlabotnik, creative commons - attribution).

You’re “setting-up” a “TPR” environment, as close as possible to the real life objects and situation involved in your target skill. Yet starting with the real life, fully complex situation will overwhelm you and your players, so you “Limit” the scope of the environment and play to your current ability.

One way of seeing how TQ "Limit" gives birth to many other techniques.

The cost of information is attention.

There is a biological limit to what we can pay attention to. This is forumulated in different ways for different contexts. Whether the 7 +/-2 chunks of information we can hold in our working memory (as proposed by cognitive psychologist George Miller in 1956), the approximately ≤ 150 intimate social relationships we can maintain (aka “Dunbar’s Number”, proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar), or other such observed constraints to human performance, the fundamental point is clear: there is a finite amount of human attention in any situation.

You can overeat on food, and you can over-consume information. In both cases your body and mind begins to slow down as you approach your absolute limit. The goal is to stay some distance from your limit, remaining light, fluent, and agile, rather than becoming heavy and sluggish.

Regardless of any specific statistic or quantified constraint on human attention, the fundamental guideline in WAYK is to watch the players right here, right now, in this environment, and find the edge of their functional attention. What is slowing them down? What is too much to keep track of?

We count every coin in this constrained piggy bank of human attention and make the most of each one. None are taken for granted, most especially the pennies.

Multitasking (the simultaneous performance of activities that require conscious attention) degrades the overall performance of the multitasker – several things done poorly is usually a bad exchange for one thing done well.

There’s an underlying issue that’s easy to miss; by engaging one focus at a time until you acquire unconscious competence, you’re actually gaining the ability to do many things at once without dividing your attention. In order to give a memorized speech while juggling and tap dancing, each one of those activities must be effortless and require no conscious maintenance.

Limiting your focus in the short-term creates expanded capacity in the long-term.

Introducing the technique

Short: “This is technique “Limit”. We always Limit” whatever we’re doing to what we can currently handle.”

Long: “We “limit” the scope of the conversation, the number of objects in play, and the length of time we spend playing.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition

There are many dimensions in which to apply limit. Anything that takes attention and energy can be limited.

• Limit the number of objects in the conversational play to 5, 3, or even just one.
• Look at your set-up with tq WAYK Eye – is the table surface dirty, or does it have a distracting pattern? Clean it or limit it with a neutral colored table cloth.
• When players want to use their new-found fluency to expand the scope of conversation beyond their fluency, invoke limit to keep the game flowing.
• Limit the number of players, the environment, or the number of techniques you wield, to stay within your fluency as a game leader. Use limit to manage your own ability to transmit language too.

But what about…?

Students used to classroom language learning may worry that “Limit” will cause them to be bored by play, or even if they enjoy themselves they may worry that it will take a long time to advance in proficiency.

• TQ Fluency demonstrates that we are only fluent if we can do it, with ease and comfort. Knowledge is not a substitute for fluency.
• TQ Travels with Charlie is the fastest route through a language – and the scale in american college and universities for your language proficiency level.
• By tq Fluency Hunting, we’re not just learning a skill, we’re learning to learn and teach any skill as rapidly as possible.
• The experience of gaining fluency through play is an immersive experience – tq Everybody Plays All-the-time is an effective antidote for boredom.

About as close as you can get to TPR space-walking, on earth.

You’re looking at your “Set-up!”, working to make play as “Obviously!” as possible. You want the “Fluency” your players acquire to apply to the real world. To do so, you create a “Total Physical Response” amongst players through the actual physical objects and situation involved in using the skill.

If fluency is acquired by doing, then the most useful fluency is acquired by doing it for real.

The original formulation of “Total Physical Response” (TPR) was first innovated by Dr. James J. Asher, a professor emeritus of psychology at San José State University. He was inspired by how children actually internalize and learn their first language, by responding physically to speech, initially through commands.

In many ways, TPR was the primary inspiration for WAYK, and technique “Obviously!” was back-engineered from the success of TPR.

However, the WAYK application of TPR has drifted somewhat from Dr. Asher’s original concept. Through thousands of hours of game trials, TPR, in the context of WAYK, has come to mean the primacy of engaging in actual situations and physical experiences, and avoiding pretend or imagining whenever possible, to the extent possible (with some few exceptions, such as tq “Imaginary Friend”).

In this sense, you will see like-minded training techniques applied in fields that tend to demand “do-or-die” fluency, such as flight training, military live-fire training, emergency medical training, disaster preparedness, and so on.

TPR also encourages us to engage our entire physical selves in learning that may be thought of as abstract or technical.  To the extent we engage all of ourselves, physically, emotionally, socially, we will further accelerate learning.

In language, the ultimate “TPR” moment is when one player asks another for a specific object, immersed in the target language, and successfully receives it. This usually inspires a tq How Fascinating! group moment.

By giving each technique an ASL hand-sign, we employ TPR in acquiring the WAYK mentoring language itself.

Introducing the technique

Short: “Technique Total Physical Response, or TPR, means that we always use the real objects that we’re really talking about.”
Long: “It means that we try to have conversations about portable, trade-able objects that we can pass back and forth and handle. It also means that we avoid, especially at lower levels of proficiency, conversations not dealing with physical objects and the immediate environment.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition

Make everything as real and true-to-life as possible.

• Use objects that are Obviously! what they are.
• When setting-up a conversation, make it as real-to-life as humanly possible. Use real objects whenever possible, not toys or props. Put yourselves in the real situation referred to by the language, or as close to the real situation as possible.
• Prioritize a tq Needs-gap conversation by starting with a simple trading game in the target language, to acquire the ability to get the objects you want.
• TQ Overdo It physicalizes emotions and the inner states of the players to further push play as obviously! as possible.
• Use tq Signing to physicalize the names and uses of techniques, and as a bridge language for acquiring spoken language.
• TQ Hunt Fluency by going into the real environment where the language is used, and engaging in conversation there.

But what about…?

When first learning language hunting, it’s tempting to cut corners, and settle for set-ups that are just “good enough”. Many players will do this when setting up new same conversations for the first time, or when language hunting. After creating ambiguous set-ups, they may say that there is a role for imagination and pretend – and in fact, there is (see tqs Imaginary Friend, Tea with Grandma, Everybody Plays All-the-time), it’s just a very specific role, one that always supports maximum clarity.

The fact is, language hunting is inconvenient. Creating great TPR, “obviously!” set-ups for language hunting is difficult and can be time consuming. It can mean a quick run to the store, or an extended search for just the right pen (when many “good enough” ones lie right at hand).

For many reasons, most of our habits around learning are sloppy and imprecise. The learning acceleration we create is in direct proportion to how much we “inconvenience” ourselves.

•    TQ OCD reminds us to do the inconvenient thing, and to nit-pick over details.
•    TQ Fluency Hunting reminds us how chaotic situations are intrinsically, and to apply as many techniques as possible in the field.
•    TQ Same Conversation are fully fleshed-out TPR scenarios.
•    TQ Where Are Your Keys? is the primary WAYK TPR conversation, a trading game about the rock, stick, pens, and dollar.

This fluently proficient goat learned by doing.

We want to acquire a new competency, a new target skill. To do so we begin sharing and naming “Techniques” that will accelerate our acquisition of the target skill. The first principle for acceleration is to remove every barrier between us and the performance of that skill by “Obviously!” removing all ambiguity, uncertainty, and guessing – and because we are pursuing competence, we begin by actually performing the skill, prioritizing “Fluency” over knowledge.

One way of seeing how Fluency connects to other techniques.

Valuing knowledge over fluency has created an epidemic of normalized incompetency in the modern world.

This is a constant theme of accelerating the learning process; once you pursue actual competent performance of a skill, you necessarily must prioritize doing it. The sooner you start doing, and the more you do, the faster you’ll improve.

Countless students graduate institutions knowing a lot about many things. Far fewer know how to do many things.

Hand-wringing over the poor education students receive, the blaming of teachers, students, parents, or government, all belie the fact that the solution lies right at hand. Whatever skill you want a student to be competent in, you must set up an environment where they do it consistently. Everything else must take a back seat.

Any obstacle to this fundamental mission of doing is an obstacle to learning itself.

Language classes around the world are a classic example of this; students may attend 8 (or more) years of foreign language classes, and yet still fluency in the target language is out of reach. They know a lot about the language, but they don’t know how to speak it fluently.

The only way to master a skill is by doing it.

Introducing the technique

Short: “This is technique “Fluency”. In this game we are pursuing fluent speech over proficiency.”
Long: ” Meaning, we value fluent expression in the language at a low level of proficiency, over hesitant, inarticulate language use at a high proficiency. Whatever we do, we aim to do it well.”

Applying the technique in language acquisition

When in doubt, just start speaking.

• TQ Mumble encourages players to speak and sign regardless of whether or not they’re doing it “perfectly”.
• TQ Copy-Cat an excellent tq Fluent Fool to proceed confidently through the language.
• TQ Start at the Beginning by asking “What’s that?”.
• Feel your way through the language by speaking it; you know when and how to apply techniques by how it feels as you attempt to speak.
• Move forward deeper into the language only when all players seem comfortable doing so.
• Say things tq In Threes often. Tend to do things one more time than you think you need to.
• Fluency doesn’t mean perfection; you don’t need to wait for players to perform perfectly before proceeding. You’re looking for readiness and comfort.

But what about…?

When playing with students well-trained in the classroom paradigm of the language learning, we often hear questions about grammar, requests for translation, and attempts to use the language at a far higher proficiency level than the student-player is capable of sustaining.

In these situations, the students don’t know that they are still playing by old rules, the rules of the institutional classroom; these rules are invisible to them, and now just seem like the common sense of “how you learn”.

Many techniques have been innovated for exactly these kinds of players seeking to recover their original ability to rapidly learn. Again, a game leader must decide whether they have sufficient fluent proficiency to play with such players, who will struggle with playing by the “new rules” of accelerated learning; some players may be too challenging for now.

•    TQ Warm, Fed, Rested, Safe, Willing reminds us to choose players willing to play by the rules of the game.
•    TQ Killing Faeries underscores the comical tragedy of translating language during play.
•    TQ Riddle-Me-This directs players to just play, and trust that they will enjoy solving the puzzles of meaning on their own, by playing
•    TQ Sorry, Charlie! redirects player curiosity, keeping it within their current fluent proficiency.
•    TQ Limit keeps the play narrow in scope so that players continue to confidently move forward through the language.
•    TQ Start at the Beginning continually reorients the game, and keeps players experiencing confidence and success when the game wanders off on tangents.

Are you sure water levels are higher than normal today?

Once we agree to share accelerators that work through tq “Technique!”, it leads us to tq “Obviously!”: the mother of all other techniques. Every technique in the WAYK system exists to serve this primary principle.

One way of seeing the relationship of "Obviously!" to other primary techniques.

Success drives learning – failure undermines it.

Many people in our culture are very familiar with negative feelings around learning – with failure, frustration, embarrassment. With worrying over whether or not they’ll make a mistake, or say something wrong in front of peers. They’ve taken on labels, “smart”, “stupid”, “average”, without really understanding why. They’re stuck.

This is where we often start when it comes to learning something new; all these old feelings are immediately present, and must be dealt with.

To learn or teach something, your job then is to build up an immense amount of experience successfully using the target skill, and absolutely minimize the amount of failure or frustration.

Ideally, the learning experience feels like mind-reading, or like downloading a mastery of kung fu in The Matrix.

Learning something new already brings with it a large amount of confusion and uncertainty. By eliminating as much confusion and uncertainty as possible, the student can focus on one thing at a time – the chunk of skill that is the very next step.

When all the players constantly attend to mastering this very-next-step, they enter what  author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the flow state – experiencing energized focus, full involvement, and success in the ongoing activity.

This is an ideal state for learning. Through technique “obviously!” we are able to design experiences (games) that maintain this state for players.

WAYK is a design system for creating accelerated learning games that put players in a flow state.

Introducing the technique

Short: “Everyone do your best 10 year old girl impression with me – ‘Obviously!’. [do multiple times to get folks into it]. Technique ‘Obviously!’ is one of the first rules of this game; it means everything in this game should be obvious. All the questions I’ll ask are ‘obvious’ questions. This is obviously a red pen. That is obviously a rock.”

Applying the technique in language acquisition

Make sure everything is absolutely clear. Remove all opportunity for guessing. Remove all tricks or testing. Here are a few specific ways to do it; however every WAYK technique is an expression of tq “Obviously!” in some form.

• Create TQ Total Physical Response by removing all pretend and imagination to start the conversation; endeavor to use the actual objects and environment that the language is referring to.
• Make sure every conversational prop is “obviously!” what you intend it to be; red pens are clearly red pens, with no other colors or decoration, and they write red. Rocks are iconic “rocks”, that players intuitively perceive as a “rock”, rather than a pebble, boulder, shard, etc.
• The playing surface (table) and environment (room, walls, ceiling) have minimal visual noise and activity to distract or confuse. The table is free of anything that is not in the conversation (players’ food, drinks, personal items).
• TQ Lawyer-up by only asking players what they already know, or be there to tq Pull them through it. “Is that a red pen? Yes, that’s a red pen!”

But what about…?

Initially, some students and teachers may balk at the lack of intellectual challenge in the form of trickery, tests, or technical explanations. If it’s too easy, too “obvious”, will it be fun? If I’m not tested, how do I know what I am good at? If I don’t have a technical understanding, am I actually learning?

We leave it to others to do the science on why “obviously!” works. In thousands of hours of game play, over almost a decade, we’ve found it works, time and again. And the more “obviously!” they apply to the game, the more players experience acceleration.

When it comes to technical explanations, we don’t want to just know “about” a skill – we want become competent at the skill. We seem to learn best by doing. Many classroom-educated students know a lot “about” the language they studied; few learned to actually speak it fluently in the classroom.

Therefore, puzzling through the skill at hand is not the goal – fluent competency as soon as possible, via “obviously!”, is the goal.

However, there is still room for puzzle solving, intellectual challenge, and testing – there must be, because puzzle solving is fun and drives learning too. And testing tells us where to go next, what we still have to master.

•    TQ Riddle-Me-This gives our urge to solve puzzles its most useful focus – there’s still a mystery to solve, but it doesn’t slow us down.
•    TQ Fluency Hunting challenges our ability to wield techniques to their utmost.
•    TQ No-grief Debriefs provide a chance for sifting through our experiences and looking for ways to improve play and innovate new techniques.
•    TQ Travels with Charlie provides a never-ending diagnosis of where we’re at, and where we still have to go.

Every skill has its secret techniques.

“Technique!” is the fundamental structural element of the WAYK system. With it players can name and share the techniques that will accelerate learning and teaching, incorporated as “rules of the game”.

One possible way of seeing the flow of the network of primary techniques.

The line between students and teachers is the biggest obstacle in education.

The teacher is the boss. The students are the obedient workers. How well does this well-worn, institutional model serve our learning? Many of us experienced at least one or two truly excellent teachers in our years of schooling – heroic role-models who brought the best out of us as students. These teachers are honored as an inspiration – but are uncommon and in high demand. Put one student with such a teacher, and they’ll experience more success, and receive credit for it. Remove that student from that teacher, and watch their success diminish, and this too they will be given credit for (and graded more harshly because of it). Yet it was the teacher that made the difference, not the student.

What if the best teachers performed so well because of special techniques they wielded, consciously or not? Rather than personal virtues, what if these techniques were learnable skills? Do the most skillful learners already practice some of these techniques?

As a matter of fact, there are many well-known techniques for accelerating learning, such as peer mentoring, total physical response, the use of games and play.

If you as a teacher know one thing that will accelerate your students’ learning, why not share it with them, rather than hiding it behind pre-designed curriculum? Why not turn the tables and make them responsible for accelerating your teaching?

If you as a student know one thing that will accelerate your learning, why not share it with the teacher, rather than deferring to their higher authority? Why not turn the tables and make the teacher responsible for accelerating your learning?

Once everyone is aware of a common pool of “things that will make learning and teaching faster”, what if we give them names, to speed up using them? Then together we have a mentoring language, a way of quickly speaking about and collaborating on what works.

“How Fascinating! Your set-up might need to be more obviously! – what if you tried limiting the visual noise by using a table cloth? By doing this, in my last game, the group went all the way to the want/have/give/take conversation in just 30 minutes.“

Once you accept the egalitarian nature of learning, where the roles of student and teacher begin to erode, you discover a continuum of relationships along which learning gets faster and faster.

First, there is teacher/student (the slowest learning, common in institutions).
Then, there is master/apprentice (faster, because it focuses on mentoring and competency, but it still compartmentalizes responsibility).
Then, there are Fluent Fool*/Fluency Hunter* (even faster – the “student” has completely taken charge because the other knows nothing about teaching).
Then finally, there is Fluency Hunter with the skill/Fluency Hunter without the skill (blazingly fast – one hunts the skill from another, using accelerators in tandem).

* These are WAYK techniques that will be explained later; essentially, a Fluency Hunter is an assertive, skillful player of WAYK, and a Fluent Fool is competent in the target skill but has no experience teaching.

Introducing the technique

Short: “This is a game, and every time I make this sign, I’m marking a ‘rule of the game’.”
Longer: “This sign is ASL for ‘technical’ or ‘technique’; every ‘rule’ of the game is a technique for accelerated learning and teaching.

Applying the technique in language acquisition

The American “time-out” sign was originally used in WAYK play, before players innovated “technique!” . This reflects its primary purpose: to provide an opportunity to reflect on what just happened, check for questions, and improve the play of the game.

• Use the “technique!” hand sign any time there is a pause or confusion in the game.
• When a player has a concern or request, see if you can call up an already established technique; if one doesn’t exist, innovate a new one on the spot with the help of the player. Give them credit for inventing a new “rule of the game”!
• Any time you find yourself “explaining” the game, you probably need a technique. Either an already existing one, or one that needs to be invented.
• Techniques are best presented as “rules of the game”, rather than claims about reality; players won’t understand them anyway until after they’ve experienced the fun and success of rapid language acquisition for themselves.
• Be willing to change technique names, and innovate new techniques, just for the group you’re working with at that time. Techniques are designed to be personalized.
• There is a constant tension between techniques that seem almost universal, and techniques that only work for certain groups or situations. This is just part of play.
• You know marking a technique is useful if it makes the game go faster; if marking a technique doesn’t make the game go faster, then don’t bother mentioning it.
• Techniques are agreements between players on how to play the game of language acquistion, driven by tq “Obviously!”.

But what about…?

“I’m here to learn my target skill. I don’t want learn new techniques, do any teaching, or play a game.” We run into players like this from time to time – usually older, they’ve spent a lifetime in a certain role that they feel very comfortable with. Perhaps they’ve experienced success in that role, and don’t want to risk trying a new one.

You as a fluency hunter choose who to play with. The more accelerators you wield beyond your current ability, the more you may overwhelm (TQ “Sorry, Charlie!) yourself. Many ‘rules of the game’ are specifically aimed at deciding who to play with, and what roles they’ll fill.

•   TQ Warm, Rested, Fed, Safe, Willing ensures players who are ready to play.
•    TQ Teach a Teacher is one of the primary accelerators – there is no game without it.
•    TQ We’ll All Get There Together means that though a player might not be ready now, they may find a role in the game later, if given time and enough space to settle in. If they have the skill you want to hunt, then they are your TQ Fluent Fool. It’s not necessary to play the game in order to participate in the game.

The ASL hand sign for "technical", and what we use for "Technique".

When explaining WAYK, we like to say, “There are a million specific ways to accelerate learning. We know 200.”

This month we’ll be blogging 20 accelerated learning techniques, one at a time. These techniques are also known as “the rules of the game”, that we share back and forth, and through which we hunt language and play WAYK.

The best way to learn WAYK is through play of the game. We intend these technique spotlights both as an introduction for those who haven’t yet played, and for experienced players, as a means to further understand the structure of the “rules” of the WAYK game.

Will the techniques we blog this month really be the “top” 20? It’s difficult to say. Most WAYK techniques operate like a network of interdependent tools; it’s difficult to pull one out without pulling out several brother or sister tools along with it. However, most of the techniques we blog will be “parent” techniques, core principles that continue to give birth to new “rules” through play.

We’d like to thank Christopher Alexander for pioneering the concept of “pattern languages” in his book “A Pattern Language“, and we were also inspired by Amr Elssamadisy for his formatting of patterns in his book Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success.

We have not been having it.

19 minutes and 25 seconds.

[direct download]

After several months meeting, the Irish Language night has been facing a series of issues due to an unideal location and a temporary spell of absence of our fluent speaker.

TQ: Road Map
Looking for material to add to the road map without the input of the fluent speaker and the need for verification.

TQ: Set-Up
Adding additional props to the set-up and the need to limit certain objects in certain languages.

TQ; Wave
A new technique to deal with a small conversation group with individuals of different language levels. An immersion in more advanced conversation.

TQ: Lunatic Fringe
Using Lunatic Fringe as a way of being immersed in more advanced language while avoiding being “Sorry Charlied” by not being forced into a response.

TQ: Road Map
Covering new ground and figuring out the details of new grammatical structures. Keeping in mind upcoming players with less experience in the language while designing the next steps on the language road map.

TQ: We’ll All Get There Together
Community organizing and the importance of finding more people to join the game to build a community of language speakers.

TQ: Set-Up
Potential ideas for coming up with set-ups for Irish night to attract more people and/or reframe the goals.

Evan explaining technique "Último" alongside the three adult superior Latin speakers at Wyoming Catholic College (from left, Patrick, Nancy, and Scott), and one of the next generation of Latin speakers (young Anna).

As some of you know, we are having an open WAYK workshop in Redmond, WA (near Seattle) December 3-5, 2010.

We’d like to underscore how much of an opportunity this is for experienced players. We’re now entering a phase where we have enough experienced language hunters that in this workshop we can set a special focus for mentoring the improvement of the Intermediate/Advanced WAYK players, as defined by the WAYK proficiency scale.

If you have already led games or even language nights, expect your play to jump in proficiency as you acquire higher level techniques and approaches.

We heartily encourage any one with play experience to join the novice/newbie players at this upcoming workshop. Your “language hunting” will thank you for it!

Register here.

Please check out the event details at the December workshop event page.

“But don’t we play WAYK so we can learn a language?”

Most new players are surprised when we answer, “No! Don’t learn anything. Just play.” What we’ve found is that almost everyone, including academically successful students and professionals, has some amount of old, institutional (and more precisely, slower) models of what it means to become fluently proficient, and how one gets there. We all went to school, and we all share a culture of what we think learning is supposed to look like, even when it is unsuccessful. Even experienced WAYK players continually find new, unexamined assumptions about learning that have decelerated game play.

In WAYK, we question every assumption we think we know about how people learn. And our standard is even higher than in normal educational settings; I don’t just want to get there myself, I want to bring everyone with me, I want my whole community to have daily fluent conversations.

We have observed in thousands of games, over thousands of hours, that by focusing on learning to play the fluency game, and using your target language to do so, you acquire far more language, far more quickly. By doing the opposite, “playing the game so that you can learn the language“, we have watched countless new players struggle.

There’s always that moment when it clicks, when that beginning player realizes that it’s the play of the game that matters, not memorizing, remembering, or learning, and in that moment, they become language hunters.

To this end, we’re innovating new techniques to encourage beginning players to abandon “learning” as quickly as possible, in order to dive into the culture of the game. We’ve created a new technique, called “the Technique Lottery Game”.

The Technique Lottery Game

Download the following Technique Lottery materials. Cut each of the slips out, there are 18 techniques total, repeated over several pages. You can stack the deck by including more of the techniques you’re interested in and want your players to focus on.

Before you start a game, put all the slips of paper in a hat, and have everybody pull a slip out of the hat, without revealing the technique they have. Play a 20 minute game, with each player trying to throw, as much as possible, their secret technique. After finishing, have everyone guess which technique each player secretly (or not-so-secretly) focused on.

Run multiple rounds, until you’re full and want to move on. Usually this means one to three rounds. By playing this game we think your players will be better equipped to see the craft of language hunting, and focus on the techniques to make language acquisition really fly.

A game from the Sechelt Nation WAYK workshop

There are a lot of people doing good work in language education; and you can find many talented language learners and polyglots. There are countless resources to learn a language out there, whether immersion programs, classes, software, CD sets, podcasts, online language mentoring forums, and on and on.

We respect and value all these tools and resources – any tool that works is one more tool than you had before! It is important to understand that the work we’re doing at WAYK is on a totally different level than these kinds of resources. This isn’t hyperbole; this is a painstakingly developed, intentional change from conventional language education, to address a very specific challenge.

WAYK is not any particular method (though it employs several unusual and iconic techniques); it is a comprehensive system for employing all the methods that work. Tools are great, but you need a way to to use them strategically.

WAYK is also not just for a single language learner to learn their target language. To be clear, it certainly can be used for this; we train language hunters to “parachute” into any country (or conversation) and immediately begin absorbing the language. This is an exciting, but also uncommon opportunity. More difficult, and more common, is the attempted acquisition of language without the benefit of such an immersion scenario.

Much of WAYK is based on a simple discovery we made while working with endangered languages: if you don’t have a self-sufficient speech community forming around you, you are missing the greatest opportunity for rapid language acquisition for yourself. The greatest accelerator to language acquisition is immersion in a thriving, generous community of conversation, with fluent, playful peer-teachers.

A game from Unangax Language Camp

A quote commonly (though perhaps erroneously) attributed to Albert Einstein that applies: “problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

Endangered languages emerge in the context of monolingualism, military/economic pressure, institutional oppression, community trauma, and the idea that languages are difficult to learn.

Endangered languages may be the heritage for a community that sees them as the remnants of a shameful past with little modern relevance. They may have few remaining speakers, all of whom may be elderly.

Simply teaching such a language, classroom style, to a group of students wanting to “learn” isn’t enough; what if no one in the community wants to speak with your students (or there is no one to speak to)? What if the teachers themselves have minimal fluency in the language due to lack of access to willing fluent speakers? What if you lose your best teachers, due to economic factors, social factors, or just plain bad luck?

By creating tools that will work in the context of this kind of intense challenge, we were forced to craft a radically different approach; we were forced to “raise the level of our thinking”. This new level impacts all language learning, endangered or not.

Now, we see language acquisition as inextricable from cultural revitalization, and both inextricable from community organizing. To learn a living language, you must revitalize and participate in a language community. You cannot discriminate between a “student” and a “teacher” – they must be one and the same.

Because we can see this now, because it has become “obvious”, now we can explore how far we can take this understanding. What can we do with it?

A game in Squamish language

From the very first game of WAYK, you are participating in a web of community organization. You are helping to create the strongest scenario for sufficient players to populate a regularly occurring language night. Then multiple language nights, different days of the week, all around your community, led by fellow players. Then you all go for language immersion weekends and overnight gatherings every quarter. Then…magic happens. As you keep playing, you achieve critical mass, and your community begins to use the target language as a second language, and if you keep working it, then as a first language.

With sufficient language hunting skills, this can be a fun, focused race to community-wide language play. It takes time. But it can be done, alongside friends, family, and neighbors, laughing all the way.

Even if your goals are humble, to simply become fluent in a healthy target language (modern languages like English, French, Russian, Chinese), by approaching your goal in this way you become able to learn any language, and to immerse yourself in friendships and community.  You’re not in it alone.

Because you’ve focused on helping create a speech community, rather than just on your own language acquisition, you will rapidly discover your “students” teaching you and pulling you along with them. Who is the student? Who is the teacher? In the end, everyone is just a language activist, a language hunter, a member of the language-play community.

You don’t stop with one language either; you keep going. If you stop, you may or may not lose all those language hunting skills, but the next generation will never learn them. Revitalization is a never-ending activity; every new day calls for it. We keep our languages strong by keeping our neighbors’ languages strong. The strongest scenario for endangered language revitalization is a deeply multilingual world.

We all get there together. And it all starts with your first, simple game.

The Alberta Street Pub, where players meet on Irish Night

24 minutes and 33 seconds.

[direct download here]

This is the first podcast concerning our weekly WAYK Irish Language Night, with fluent speaker and Marylhurst University instructor Bob Burke. WAYK players have come together to “hunt” Bob’s Irish language, and build a roadmap to fluency in Irish. For whatever reason, in the USA we call Irish language “Irish Gaelic”, but in Ireland they just call it “Irish”. This podcast is hosted by Ireland native Patrick Hughes, also the host of the Irish language night. He and WAYK instructor Willem Larsen discuss the progress of the night.

1. TQ: Ultimo

• Ultimo finally happens and speeds everything up.
• Willem reports back from the ultimo circle
• Night without the fluent speaker

2. TQ : Set-Up

• Dark, noise, lots of objects.
• Muddling colours when we got to trading.

3. TQ: Obviously

• Bringing new objects into play.
• Deciding on objects carefully

4. TQ: Technique!

• Trading with two people became like a drill
• Technique talk as a breather

5. TQ: Limit

• How complicated to make ‘Want, Have, Give, Take’ – stay in the present tense?
• The possibilities available if staying in the present
• Chunking it down to the level where everything is coming easy.

6. TQ: Ultimo

• Ultimo new language off so that the fluent speaker’s table is the cutting edge of the language night, to make sure the fluent speaker doesn’t get bored.

We have a WAYK google group, with a few months of discussion by experienced players and WAYK staff.

Recently, Dave, one of our distant WAYK players, set up a google map for players to drag and drop their location into, so nearby players can find each other. Check it out here. You can easily see who has already put their location on it, but to add your own, you’ll need to log in to a google account, go back to the map, and click the “edit” button. You’ll see a blue pointer in a box along the top of the map – click on it to get a pointer to move around.

If you don’t have anybody nearby, don’t despair, we have great videos online for learning the basic game, and we have workshops every month in some part of the world. We just put up our open-source roadmap for getting to Intermediate proficiency on the ACTFL language scale.

And you can always invite us to your hometown!

An example of a party you might wish to attend here in PDX - hey, everybody loves Bhangra!

So, owing to our recent work with helping revitalize Ecclesastical Latin at Wyoming Catholic College, Evan and I finally decided to put  pen to paper and make a written USC road-map from zero to “Getting to the Party”. It’s been an “oral document” (as anthropologists like to say) up till now.

We’ve noticed that even good players seem to plateau after reaching “want/have/give/take” in a language (the current end of the WAYK USC), possibly because of a lack of clear direction on where to go next. We want you to feel that “wind in your hair” feeling all the way up the scale. That feeling of a breakneck, exhilarating scramble to Superior speech, with fluent conversation every step of the way, should never stop!

To this end, we’re sharing an initial USC that we hope you can apply to one of your
target languages, and keep momentum going. Ideally, once you get to Intermediate-mid, the rest of the work in the language will be self-evident, as you plow through Advanced and into Superior. In any case, later on we can come back to to the issue of the roadmap of Advanced and Superior proficiency, and hit it again with a specific USC through that territory.

This “big picture” USC has way less detail than the “want/have/give/ take” USC, and assumes you know how to play (and know the techniques).

We’d love feedback on making it more accessible and clear. Please comment and ask questions. We’ve been discussing this roadmap on the WAYK google-group here – join in on the discussion!

From Wikipedia: "The Conlang Flag is a symbol of conlanging created by subscribers to the CONLANG mailing list. It represents the Tower of Babel against a rising sun."

WAYK has found play in some unusual corners of the linguistic internet. For a language game that was developed to maintain an unbroken lineage of conversational life, it’s especially odd that players would find it useful for languages that have never been spoken before. These languages are called “conlangs”, short for “constructed languages”. In this article I profile two such languages, “Lojban” and “Feayran”.

Loglan was an experimental language created in 1955, to “reflect the principles of logic”; Lojban, one of its children, was initially developed in 1987, as a more publicly accessible version. In wikipedia’s precise terms: “Lojban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic”. Alan Post, one of the early players and supporters of WAYK (you can see a WAYK workshop hosted by him in the Sunflower River Farm video), developed a WAYK approach for Lojban at his website that he calls “lo do ckiku ma zvati”, Lojban for (what else?) “where are your keys”.

“Having “Where are your Keys?” has given me something to focus on while I teach myself Lojban, ” says Alan. “It has provided the framework for understanding what my current fluency is, what I’m going to learn next, and how to teach other people the material I already understand.”

Another WAYK player, David Edwards, has actually been developing his own fantasy conlang called “Feayran”, and used WAYK to bring it to life.

“I’ve been working with WAYK since about March, and I’ve been really impressed by the system’s capabilities, particularly with people who claim to not be good at languages,” says David. “At a writers’ conference I attend every year in August, I got together with a bunch of friends and played several games–and they were an instant hit! We played Japanese, we played Mandarin, and then I even had some people (who knew that I conlang) ask to try a game in Feayran. Soooo much fun.”

Keep in mind that WAYK staff have never met, nor played with David. He learned WAYK purely from the online videos, podcasts, and articles. Back to David: “Friends have expressed interest before in learning my language, but nobody’s ever gotten past my second-or-so lesson. Not so with this game. Rather than being something to study or work at, it was suddenly this giant riddle that everyone was trying to figure out, and with no discussions of grammar or translation or anything like that, we were just playing, and doing our best to win! Already I have several friends who have worked out a lot of the language’s trickier concepts…and I’ve heard that they left the conference, went back home, and played Feayran with their own friends, when I was several states away! Awesome feeling. For real.”

For those interested in more, here’s the Feayran Universal Speed Curriculum.

These visionary players, though not working on endangered languages, continue to show us what is possible with the fluency game, in the spirit of pure play. The “Feayran” play style of turning a language into a giant riddle, for fun’s sake, is inspiring the rest of the WAYK community to develop even more techniques focused on making games as fun and adventurous as possible.

Remember, fun and adventure is instrumental in accelerating language acquisition – “play” is, after all, an accelerated learning state.

In this video you’ll see footage of the September 2010 Latin WAYK Weekend Workshop at Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, WY. Towards the end of the weekend at a typical WAYK workshop, the steadily improving language hunters participate in the “Tea with Grandma” scenario, where attendees hunt language from fluent elders with no bridge language to fall back on (such as English).

Why is the WAYK language revitalization team working with Latin? Well, as it turns out, Latin has an (as far as we know) unbroken tradition of conversation back to the early days of Rome, as kept alive in the church, monasteries, the Vatican, and so on. However in the mid twentieth-century, decisions made by the Vatican leadership may have adversely impacted the vitality of Latin conversational life, and the spoken language is therefore endangered. We are working to make Lander, WY (the home-town of Wyoming Catholic College) an immersion destination for Latin enthusiasts, and the Latin-speaking capital of the world.

A scene from Latin Language Night - as you can see, all ages played.

Well, Evan Gardner and I (Willem Larsen) both just returned from Lander, WY, where we’ve been helping the good people of Wyoming Catholic College revitalize Latin. Lander has several noteworthy aspects to it – it’s a lovely town to have a steak dinner in, and it’s also the location of the NOLS headquarters (National Outdoor Leadership  School).

We’ll be releasing videos in the coming days, but suffice to say that we are working on returning to Lander. We don’t want to stop until the town of Lander is a language immersion destination for Latin (and the Latin-speaking capital of the world)! The Latin faculty and students at WCC are in full agreement with us on this. So watch this space for more exciting Latin news.

In this video Iliodor Philemonof, elder speaker of Unangam Tunuu (Aleut), provides the language for some traditional items and art of the Unangax people.

This video was filmed during the 2010 “Where Are Your Keys?” Unangax Language Camp at the NW Indian College, on the Lummi Reservation, in Bellingham, WA.

We feel strongly that we’re doing work no one else is doing – work that teaches communities a particular kind of real-world, practical, all-ages, all-weather skills at learning and teaching language in any environment. “Tea with Grandma” is a prime example of this – at every workshop we do, we run this scenario that tests the “language hunters” skills to the limit.

The fantasy scenario we create, is the 100% deaf Grandma, “the last fluent speaker” of American Sign Language (ASL). We are her grandchildren, and we have one hour to pull as much language as possible from her, while keeping her comfortable and unaware of all the work we’re doing.

Now of course, in reality ASL is doing just fine, but so many languages are on the brink of extinction. This is a very real “fantasy” scenario.

In this video you’ll see attendees of all ages at the 2010 Unangax Camp using all their skills as they pull language from Grandma. This is key to us; everybody in the community must participate in keeping a language alive.

This is a video of “the Walk” Unangam Tunuu curriculum, generated by and for the campers at the 2010 WAYK Unangax Language Camp. Note that there are no translations or subtitling, as this is meant as a refresher for attendees.

This video contains the Unangam Tunuu Universal Speed Curriculum, and is a refresher for attendees of the 2010 Unangax Language Camp at the NW Indian College. It contains no subtitles or translations, and is meant to serve as a guide for improving players’ accent and pronunciation.

If you’d like to see Unangam Tunuu WAYK, played with sign and all the other techniques, check out the videos that attendees uploaded to youtube:

For more information:

http://whereareyourkeys.org

I really think we out-did ourselves this time – Evan and I finally may have brainstormed a format in which you can easily learn the core WAYK game via internet video. This video covers all the techniques needed to play a two to four person game. For larger groups, check out our supporting technique videos on “Lunatic Fringe” and “Angel on Your Shoulder“. These are part of a series of technique videos and it’s probably worth it to watch all of them if you are still confused by the end of the WAYK tutorial. Additionally, some of the short technique videos cover “game rules” not mentioned in this initial tutorial video. Here’s links to the “Fundamental Techniques of WAYK” videos:

Fundamental WAYK Techniques 1
Fundamental WAYK Techniques 2
Fundamental WAYK Techniques 3
Fundamental Techniques of WAYK 4
Fundamental Techniques of WAYK 5
Fundamental Techniques of WAYK 6

Most importantly, remember: this video method of learning WAYK will only work if you “copy-cat” the sign, playing along with Evan as you watch. Remember, WAYK is not a learning game it’s a “copy-catting” game. Don’t try to memorize or “learn” the signs, just “copy-cat” along until you feel fluent! If you don’t get it the first time, play the video again and keep copy-catting. Since we’re not sitting next to you as you play, this is the one way you could struggle. It may sound crazy, but if you “try to learn” the sign language in this video, you’ll probably not do well. If you give in and just  “copy-cat”, you’ll do great. If you wonder whether (or how) WAYK works, the only way to find out is to actually play! Give it a shot. As always, we are available for questions and would love to help you tweak your game.

By the end of this video, you’ll be able to have a simple conversation with an ASL speaker. Some of the signs used in WAYK are from SEE (Signed Exact English) or PSE (Pidgin Signed English), to make it easier to apply the game to spoken language, but no worries – an ASL speaker should be able to understand you, and with a couple tweaks, you’ll be learning their particular dialect.

You may also find it useful to use this video as a refresher if some time has passed since you played, and you feel a little rusty.

Some of the attendees of the 2010 WAYK Unangax Language Camp. Iliodor Philemonof, our fluent guest speaker, is in the leftmost rear.

In partnership with Becky Bendixen, of NW Unangax Culture, the NW Indian College on the Lummi Reservation in Bellingham, WA, and the fluent knowledge of Iliodor Philemonof, Unangax Pribilof dialect speaker, we had 7 days of language revitalization play and learning.

The age span was quite broad, from children age 9 or 10 to folks in their 70s. Already some videos of game play have gone up, with the basic Unangax “Speed Curriculum” in full use.

Soon we’ll have a video of the event, but here are some previews of the game videos players uploaded to youtube.com.

Wyoming Catholic College

Believe it or not, Latin still has a living tradition of daily conversational vitality, as carried through the centuries in the church and monasteries. Latin is the official language of the Vatican, the sovereign catholic city-state in Rome. However, like many languages today, Latin is struggling, with a handful of fluent speakers left. We have partnered with Nancy Llewellyn of Wyoming Catholic College to bring WAYK to the campus and see if we can’t create a vital Latin speech community in Lander, WY, where the WCC campus resides. Can you imagine – the two centers of fluent daily conversational life in Latin: the Vatican, and Lander, WY?

Well, we can imagine it, and over this next year we will do everything we can to make it a reality. Contact Nancy Llewellyn at WCC for more information: nancy.llewellyn@wyomingcatholiccollege.com.

Here’s a link to the WAYK Latin workshop page at Wyoming Catholic College.

Here’s a bit of long-overdue news – we promised a group photo to the attendees of Vancouver, B.C.’s June WAYK conference hosted by Squamish Nation language instructor Dustin Rivers. Click on the picture to download a large-sized version of the image. Thanks for playing everyone!

Register now, and we look forward to seeing you there.

An ongoing issue of trying to share WAYK over the internet, is the paradox of it being so easy to learn in person, yet so difficult via video, podcast, and text.

We’re making a special offer; every Thursday, we’ll have a few hour-long slots dedicated to tutoring folks struggling to learn the game via the internet over skype.

There are some prerequisites, of course. First we’ll need a short video of your game play uploaded to youtube, so that we’ll have a sense of what techniques you know how to wield, and what issues may be coming up for you.

The second issue is that we will always give top priority to folks working with endangered languages and players supporting the WAYK events.

Otherwise, the slots will be offered on a first come, first-served basis. Just contact us at info@whereareyourkeys.org.

Thanks everyone for playing.

Scenes from a recent WAYK Chinuk Wawa Night. Note again the variety of conversation, from Novice to Advanced, and how different speaker-teachers wield (or don’t wield) sign language, depending on who’s involved, or on the lunatic fringe, of the conversation.

The beginning, highly structured, novice-level WAYK conversations are there to teach technique use (“the rules of the game”); players then use the techniques and signed bridge language depending on context, at more advanced levels seeming to just have relaxed, off-the-cuff conversations, the techniques almost entirely unmarked or discussed.

Sign language is a critical element of beginning conversations, and a more supportive element (though still very powerful!) of advanced conversations.

We place a priority on filling the workshops with Native American/First Nation attendees seeking to learn the WAYK method to support endangered language revitalization, though all are welcome. New players without an endangered heritage language focus are encouraged to attend the Seattle workshop, but will still be welcome at any of our events.

August 24th-30th, Bellingham, WA: Unangax (Aleut) Language Revival and WAYK
training. 7 days of intense game play!

September 4th-5th, Seattle, WA:  Open WAYK Workshop for all levels of
players. Recommended for new players.

September 10, 11, 12, Sechelt, B.C.: Sechelt Language Revival and WAYK
Training.

Contact us for more information about any of these events, info@whereareyourkeys.org, and keep your eyes open for updates on registration information as we have it.

From August 24th through the 30th, in Bellingham, WA, Evan Gardner and Willem Larsen will be facilitating a week-long WAYK training and Unangax language revival event.

If you are a WAYK player and would like to support Unangax language revival, along with honing your WAYK play to an unbelievable degree (7 days! Can you imagine?), contact us: whereareyourkeys@gmail.com.

This workshop is also open to other Native American/First Nation folks interested in learning the WAYK method so that they can apply it to their own language revival.

If you are a returning WAYK player, and can only come for one day, the first day is the most important day that we need help (though please come whenever you can).

The set-up for the "sharpening tools" conversation, as briefly mentioned in this podcast.

42 minutes and 56 seconds.

[direct download]

Evan, Peter, and Lisa gather for another Chinuk Night debriefing conversation.

1. Technique “Same Conversation”

• Peter and Evan collaborated on the conversation of “sharpening tools”

2. Technique “Craig’s List”

• Peter and Evan created a new CL, “How Do They Move”

3. Technique “Where Are Your Keys?”

• Lisa tells the story of learning Chinuk Wawa over the past month.

4. Technique “Killing Faeries”

• Peter stops translating new language immediately once new WAYK players have finished “want/have/give/take”.
• For example, Peter doesn’t translate “CL: Above, Below, In-Front-of…” when he brings it into play.

5. Technique “Slow/Fast”, “Parrot”, “Sing-a-long-Song”

• Peter describes how WAYK players dovetail all these techniques.
• Lisa describes the seamlessness and comfort of learning language this way.

6. Technique “We’ll All Get There Together”

• WAYK removes the spotlight.
• You’re not here to learn, you’re here to teach.

7. Technique “Language Hunting”

• Learning to teach is learning to hunt.

8. Technique “Último”

• Lisa has concerns about her experiences learning from first-time WAYK teachers.
• Evan shares these concerns

9. Techniques “Squatter’s Rights”, “Mr. Willem’s Wild Ride”

• Peter realizes he doesn’t understand the  difference between “squatter’s rights” and “Mr. Willem’s wild ride”.
• Evan describes the difference between these two techniques.
• “Mr. Willem’s Wild Ride” indicates a lack of marking and explaining techniques (and making sure newbies teach soon), in favor of a rapid rise in language proficiency.
• “Squatter’s Rights” means pushing farther into new language territory, even if players aren’t fully fluent in the old territory yet.

10. Technique “Último”

• Evan describes the rationale behind having total WAYK newbies teaching right away.

11. Technique “Roadmap”

• Peter thinks the WAYK team should put a visual roadmap on the wall at the WAYK immersion house, and introduce each brand-newbie to it right away.
• Evan and Peter discuss what elements to include on the roadmap.
• Lisa talks about her resistance to attending Chinuk Wawa night.

12. Techniques “Killing Faeries”, “Abigail’s Antidote”

• Abigail invented an antidote to the death of a faery, by clapping them back to life, per the story of Peter Pan!

The SYL 2010 attendees

1 hour, 7 minutes, 5 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “Tea with Grandma”

• Where do you start when you sit down with Grandma?

2. Technique “Start at the Beginning”
3. Technique “What is that?”
4. Technique “Hunting Party”

• Willem explains to the rest of the language hunters, not sitting with Grandma having tea, that they have a job to do too; that if they accept they not everyone can sit down with Grandma at the same time, they can then prepare themselves to receive the language hunters coming in to play and share new language structure, taking “3-D Holographic Notes”.
• Willem discussed with the table of language hunters what it would take to prepare for the arrival of language hunters coming from Tea with Grandma with new language.
• Willem encouraged them to fold new nouns into a “want/have/give/take” level conversation, not just “what is that?” to new nouns.
• Everybody found a way to be totally engaged by “Tea with Grandma” – not a single person was at the Meadow.

5. Technique “Obviously!”

• Next time, Evan will dress in a wig and dress, to both create a laugh, and immersively role-play Grandma.
• We will do anything to help endangered languages. Apparently.

6. Technique “Hunting Party”

• Language hunters weren’t quite coordinated, so that hunters leaving to sit down with Grandma didn’t yet acquire the language the “just arriving” language hunters had to share with the table, duplicating some efforts.
• Evan, as Grandma, noticed the tea was cold.
• Tiffany, a language hunter, went to make more hot water.
• Marty, just arriving from the language hunter’s circle, took the water Tiffany had begun to heat, before it was ready, bringing cold water for tea to the table.

7. Technique “Killing Faeries”

• Language hunters wanted to translate the ASL into English when they brought Grandma’s language back to the hunter’s table. Killing faeries!

8. Technique “Dictionary Addiction”
9. Technique “Total Physical Response”
10. Technique “Start at the Beginning”

• Evan discusses how “start at the beginning” and “tea with grandma” intersect. “Where to begin” is always the most difficult question.

11. Technique “Hunting Party”

• The language hunters only had one table to take “3-D Holographic Notes” at; they really needed at least two, with 7 +/-2 players per table.

12. Technique “Tea with Grandma”

• Willem describes the Tea with Grandma role-play as an almost religious experience, capable of totally rewiring, experientially, how you experience teaching and learning, in a very short time.
• Evan, doing his best to play Grandma, began to feel overwhelmed. The two language hunters having tea with him weren’t working together, so he felt like he was watching a tennis match, bouncing back between them.
• The table was getting messy and cluttered as language hunters switched out one after the other.
• Evan played a nice Grandma who limited a bit of the potentially wide-ranging conversation (he didn’t ask “why” questions).
• Even pretended not to understand David’s (one of the language hunters) finger spelling, as he thought it would be cheating.
• Willem and Evan think “Tea with Grandma” needed a break and debrief midway, before continuing, to address some of the easily fixable issues with how the language hunters were overwhelming Grandma.
• At the end of the role-play, Willem and Evan double-checked what new language the language hunters successfully hunted, looking at their hunting plan.

13. Technique “Please Return WAYK Players”
14. Technique “Tea with Grandma”

• Marty, one of the language hunters, asked what do you do when Grandma spouts off a bunch of language that sorry, charlies you? Evan’s response: copycat it, and enjoy it. No need to understand it. Redirect the conversation back to your level, and have a recorder going to catch the language that goes over your head.
• Again, video is far better than audio recording.

15. Technique “Skype”

• Skype is great, but it is always a second best for the congruent in-person language and body language that Grandma will share. Use Skype as a back-up or last resort.

16. Technique “Speed Dating”

• The final group activity, aside from the final debrief, that we ran.

17. Technique “Hunt any language, especially if you don’t want to learn it…”

• We randomize the languages in the speed dating scenario so that hunters will become used to hunting languages that they have no personal investment in, just to practice the craft of language hunting.
• The speed-dating set-up is several tables with two chairs each, and a warm-up table for players waiting for their turn to rotate through the tables with fluent fools.

18. Technique “We’ll All Get There Together”

• Michael, a workshop attendee, arrived in the last hours of the workshop, and the other attendees independently brought him up to speed.

19. Technique “Warm-up Circle”

• Ramona, a teacher of Cree, naturally started leading the warm-up table in a game of WAYK Cree, developing the “what is that?” curriculum.
• Susanna, another attendee with no experience of Cree whatsoever (except right there at the table), took over for Ramona after about 20 minutes, and began running a game of Cree, because Ramona needed to go to the paired speed-dating tables.

20. Technique “Speed Dating”

• Just like “Tea with Grandma”, players need a mid-way check-in to address some of the common challenges that crop up in speed dating.
• Evan and Willem also plan to model common flub-ups in their “goal conversation” role-play, when introducing the speed dating activity. They currently model a too-perfect language hunt, almost showing off; this doesn’t help the new language hunters at all, but might actually intimidate them.
• Common flub-ups–
• Forgetting how to say “what is that?” in target language, and not feeling that they can ask for it again.
• Bringing out too many objects (both red and black pen) too early.
• Not signing right away, along with spoken language.
• The set-up of paired tables violated “10 feet”; next time Evan will get more creative on how to adhere to this technique even in a small space.

21. Technique “Everyone Teach the Newbie”

• We brought a newbie visitor, after lunch on the last day, from zero to want/have/give/take in 20 minutes.

22. Technique “Modeling”/”You go first”

• Evan discusses with Willem how, rather than talking with Harron (a new language hunter)  how she might get to Superior speech hunting a fluent elder, he actually planned it out with her and gave her the solid next steps with deadlines and back-ups.

Planning the Language Hunt for "Tea with Grandma"

50 minutes and 43 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “the Meadow”
2. Technique “the Evaluation”

• We give attendees a blank piece of paper to (anonymously or not) give us feedback on the workshop experience.
• Because some attendees left earlier, we didn’t get feedback from them; we don’t know why they left. Next time we’ll put out the evaluation forms early, so that attendees can fill them out as they leave.

3. Technique “Exhibition Game”

• Evan and Willem can handle two lotus games of up to 50 people each.
• The lotus games have the following format, in 4 rows:
• Inner Circle: 5 central chairs (different from all other chairs, standing out).
• 10 angel chairs
• 5 angel slot chairs
• 25-30 high-backed chairs

4. Technique “WAYK Workshop”

• Evan thinks a workshop can handle no more than 30 or so people.

5. Technique “Your Weapons, You Will Not Need Them”
6. Technique “Inner Circle, FULL!”

• Evan and Willem flush out the inner circle and rotate folks through it, getting them used to calling “full”, by calling “Inner Circle, FULL!” and replacing everyone, 3 times in a row.

7. Techniques “Point to Your Angels!”, “Fringe, Point to Who You’re Helping!”

• These techniques build a support bond between the Inner Circle and  Lunatic Fringe, keeping them connected and involved.

8. Technique “the Lotus”

• The lotus is the fastest way to bring a group up to speed in the WAYK game.

9. Technique “Goal Conversation”, “Modeling”
10. Technique “Full!”

• Willem calls “Full” first, to model the behavior so that other folks will call it, on their own, as needed.

11. Technique “We’ll All Get There Together”

• While playing in the lotus, we don’t all get there together, at the same time; we all get there together, at our own individual pace. The group doesn’t wait or slow down so an individual can “catch up”, but rather the group organizes itself so that everyone is getting the attention they need, according to group needs.

12. Technique “Copycat”

• Players who feel like they’re “falling behind” in the Lotus are asked to simply “copycat” what they can, when they can, until they can get individual attention in pairings.

13. Technique “Pairing”

• We have a random collection of small tables with two chairs each, separated by 10 feet. We give folks a couple minutes in each pair to play WAYK at their level.

14. Technique “Mix and Match”

• When it’s time to switch partners, we ask everyone to get up from their tables, and both find another partner and another table, to keep energy fluid.
• We ask players to either find someone who can help them, or find someone they can help.

15. Technique “Time to Switch”

• We know it’s time to switch partners when one pair in the group starts chatting, rather than playing. It’s usually a sign of energy stagnation – they’ve played the game out, with that partner.
• If someone is having a hard time getting fluent, but has found a helpful partner, we have them keep the same partner throughout the switching so that they can get the help they need.

16. Technique “Fluency”, “Teach a Teacher”

• The goal of pairings isn’t so much to exchange any particular information, but to become comfortable and fluent in both teaching and learning roles (technique Push/Pull), rapidly changing roles over and over.

17. Technique “Bowling Night”/”Happy Birthday”

• If a community gets together for a regular event, it’s an accelerator for revitalizing their language.
• Also, if a group of people sing “happy birthday” for someone (or another culturally appropriate song for a similar occasion), it’s a great indicator of the health of the community.

18. Technique “10 Feet”
19. Technique “No Grief Debrief”
20. Technique “Technique!”
21. Technique “Tea with Grandma”

• Willem set-up the language hunters so that they could hunt grandma’s language, while Evan waited in the wings, watching from a distance.
• Evan remarks how crucial and unusual it is for someone to model/role-play gathering a team of people together to effectively interact with a last fluent elder.
• The grandma that Evan role-played was deaf, and didn’t speak English, to model the “worst-case scenario” of a monolingual last fluent elder, where you have not bridge language (such as English) to help.

22. Technique “Lift-Off”

• Lift-off is when a player, not knowing how to respond to sign language (or what to sign next), simply lifts their hands off their lap and their hands automatically start doing something.
• Willem applied “lift-off” to the Tea with Grandma scenario, by having people get up out of their chairs and just place an object on the tea table.

23. Technique “Apollo 13″

• We want to trigger the moment when people become a gaggle of language hunting geeks, totally energized about addressing this engineering problem of designing the perfect set-up for Tea with Grandma.

24. Technique “Contract”

• The team contracted a set-up for a common, imaginary grandma, that shared some characteristics of all their grandmothers.

25. Technique “Obviously!”

• One language hunter, Becky, noted that her grandma would expect a very formal tea setting, thus perfectly creating an “obviously!” environment.

26. Technique “Dirty Spoon”

• Becky also noticed a dirty spoon on the table.
• If a spoon on the tea table is dirty, grandma will notice, and will start speaking about dirtiness and cleanliness. Becky herself may already be a grandmother…so what she noticed, a grandmother will notice.
• The most subtle aspects of a set-up  will determine the course of the conversation; you cannot be too OCD!

27. Technique “the Same Props”

• Whatever is on grandma’s tea table, we must have exact duplicates for the language hunters to set-up practice away, at home, wherever they take their 3-D holographic notes.

28. Technique “Planning the Hunt”

• The language hunters wrote down all the sign language they knew, all the Craig’s Lists, all the questions (What, Who/whose, Where).
• They did this so they could agree on what to hunt next – extend craig’s lists, answer question words more fully (like “where?”), and learn the new language that will “get them to the party” (intermediate proficiency).
• Evan stresses that the language hunters are learning actual living language, in grandma’s unique dialect. Recording these kinds of conversations provide the most useful, rich data on language use and structure that you could possibly want.

39 minutes and 52 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “Full”/”Law of Two Feet”
2. Technique “the Meadow”

• A modification of technique “Pooh Corner”, developed for the SYL conference.
• A place for “full” lunatic-fringers to go to recuperate.
• Inspired by Open Space Technology gatherings.
• The Meadow is liberally sprinkled with interesting and topically relevant books and materials to look at while recuperating.
• People in the Meadow can still see the game, but have conversations quietly without disturbing the game.

3. Technique “Culture of Interaction”

• Willem put up posters around the room bearing key WAYK techniques, like “how fascinating!’, “we’ll all get there together”, “bite-sized pieces”, and more.

4. Technique “Nip it in the Bud”

• There are certain objections or concerns we want to address, before people even bring them up, at the beginning of a workshop or game experience.

5. Technique “That sounds like it would work for other people, but it would never work for me…”

• We address this objection by, as much as possible, applying WAYK as soon as possible to players’ specific language challenges.

6. Technique “Sad Clowns”

• Sometimes people have a hard time taking us, and WAYK, as a serious applied pedagogical science, because of the silly, high-energy nature of WAYK.
• The difference between effective education, and entertainment, is a fine line.
• We address this issue as soon as possible, by talking about the scientific backing of many of the techniques. The rest are waiting for Ph.D. candidates to investigate why they work!

7. Techniques “Comedy Duo”, “It’s Science!”/”Scientifically Proven!”

• Usually, at the beginning of a workshop, Evan and Willem banter back and forth to set the fun tone of the game experience.
• For the next workshop, Evan plans to preface this joking by introducing the material with a very serious, professional run down of the pedagogical science we’re applying to language.

8. Technique “Play First, Puzzle Later”/”Many Eyes on the Problem”

• Evan and Willem plan to add a section to the end of the workshop, dedicated to applying WAYK to specific language conundrums.
• If a participant doesn’t play, we are limited in how much we can help them later.
• At the end of the workshop, a room full of trained WAYK players can then apply their new skills to the specific participant’s language challenge.

9. Technique “WAYK Workshop”

• We use 4 fundamental group activities at the workshop.

10. Technique “the Lotus”

• The core group WAYK conversation set-up.

11. Technique “Pairing”

• We include pairing because if we don’t have people play in pairs, they likely won’t do it outside the workshop. Whatever we want folks to do later, we have them do now (“you go first”/”modeling”).

12. Technique “Tea with Grandma”

• Role playing the language hunt of grandma’s language.
• Before you can play Tea with Grandma, you must have the following WAYK skills: “What is that?”, “Is that a…?” (Make me say yes…, Make me say no…), “Mine/yours”, “want/have/give/take”, “CL: for, if, then, and, but…”
• Getting to the “CL: for, if then, and but…” usually indicates players finally understand the acceleration of adding richness to language, rather than adding topics/nouns.
• Questions CL: “What?”,”Who/whose?”, “Where?”.
• Locative CL: Above, below, in front, behind, next to…

13. Technique “Speed Dating”

• Rotating through pairing with fluent speakers of various, random languages, to practice the one-minute language hunt. This occurs in parallel to a lotus table of WAYK players in the corner, which usually results in a group language hunt there.

14. Technique “Many Eyes on the Problem”

• For the fifth group activity, that we will add to the next workshop, we will create a “what is that/make me say yes/make me say no” curriculum, as a group, for their language.

15. Technique “Último”

• If you create your WAYK play community well, you will never have to play “what is that?” with a newbie again, after teaching the first one.

The more complex you make WAYK play, the more effective it becomes.

47 minutes and 48 seconds.

[direct download]

Evan Gardner and Willem Larsen discuss (once again, while on the road to the June Vancouver, B.C. “Save Your Language” Conference”) issues of building fluency, over proficiency, by making technique use more complex, rather than language use. WARNING: this podcast contains some mildly off-color humor of possibly the third grade level, or lower. This is for a specific functional purpose, but if you are easily offended by toilet humor, you may wish to pass on this particular podcast. You have been warned. And if we at WAYK ever successfully seemed professional, this unfortunately will undo a lot of that careful image-building. Oh, well: it’s all for a good cause, folks.

1. Technique “Fluency”

• Fluency means Flow.
• Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi and Flow.
• If play is too simple, you become bored, if it’s too complex, you become overwhelmed.
• Your goal is to continually adjust the level of play into accord with your experience of flow.
• Willem tells a story of someone who wanted to increasing the complexity of their play experience (and thus reattain flow) by choosing to play with an object that was not obvious or limited. This would prevent them from achieving that flow state, in spite of their best efforts.
• Rather than increasing complexity of topics (nouns, objects, etc.), increase complexity of language structure itself, and the variety and layering of language hunting techniques.

2. Technique “Squatter’s Rights”
3. Technique “Accordion”

• How do you stay at the level of the edge of your fluent proficiency, so that you can build fluency, for as long as possible?
• You will get bored of before you’re ready to move on.

4. Technique “Can I Help You?”

• Evan: If someone, in a foreign speech environment, walks up to you and says “can I help you?”, say “yes!”. It may save your life.

5. Technique “Glad, Sad, Mad”

• Stretch out/accordion a conversation by incorporating different feelings and attitudes.

6. Technique “Overdo It”

• Peter extends his ability to stay in a target language conversation by getting really, really silly.
• This reveals new layers of “full” – once you get more experienced, you can keep playing even when initially “exhausted”, by discovering new reservoirs of energy.
• Sometimes the limited availability of a fluent fool means you have to extend your ability to delay getting “full”.

7. Technique “Potty Mouth”

• Creating off-color language will extend play for many people.

8. Technique “Dog Track”

• Anything that gets you playfully running over the same ground, over and over, is an accelerator.

9. Technique “Potty Mouth”

• Willem describes some of the poopy talk that he engages in in Chinuk.
• Taboo subjects make language easier to remember. Honest.

10. Technique “Link, Peg, Loci”

• The art of creating evocative mnemonic associations for new language structure.

[direct download]

Evan and Willem talk about the importance of returning, experienced WAYK players at workshops, while traveling to Vancouver, B.C., for the “Save Your Language” conference hosted by Dustin Rivers of Squamish Nation.

1. Technique “Please Return WAYK Players”

• Return players will help workshops and game experiences go faster.
• The more return players present in a particular workshop, the greater the acceleration.
• The more acceleration, the farther we can go in a workshop, the more new WAYK frontiers we can explore, earlier.

2. Technique “WAYK Proficiency Roadmap”

• Novice: Baby Bird. Feed me! Feed me! Fully wants to play, can wield one or two techniques.
• Intermediate: Language Hunter. Can run a lotus game.
• Advanced: Host. Can run a room full of tables, a language night. Using a 1-4 hour block of time as effectively as possible, with a full range of speech proficiencies present.
• Superior: Community Leader. Can mobilize a region by running day-long workshop experiences.

3. Technique “WAYK Workshop”

• The first level WAYK workshop gets people to Intermediate WAYK play.

4. Technique “Language Night”

• Just because you may not be proficient in a language-night level of WAYK play, you can still run a language night; just play at your level, even if it’s just a single pair of players.
• Part of fully running a language night means dealing skillfully with newbies who walk through the door – they don’t slow you down, because you have successfully delegated and trained other game leaders.

5. Technique “Teach a Teacher”

• Newbies need to run a WAYK game on their third language night. If you wait longer, newbies will become handicapped and have a much harder time getting started teaching.
• Newbies need to start teaching before they know enough about what they don’t know.

6. Technique “Último”

• Every newbie, on their third night, replaces the role of the newbie who taught them.
• Players are lined up like dominoes, each one advanced to larger roles as newbies come in the door, replacing them in the more fundamental roles.

Why did you do it? Why did you kill the faery?

32 minutes and 14 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “Killing Faeries”

• Every time you ask for a translation, and receive it, you kill a faery.
• It’s not the end of the world, but it does indicate a lost opportunity for gaining more proficiency in the craft of language hunting, rather than just acquiring language.

2. Technique “Bridge Language”

• In the beginning, we kill a lot of faeries, purposefully using English as a bridge language to help acquire the sign language.
• This is a short-term, temporary accelerator, just to get started. Technically, you’re still killing faeries.
• Words don’t directly correlate to other words in other languages; you can only approximately translate them.
• We make this sacrifice to build momentum, but then stop using the English (or other) spoken bridge language as soon as possible.
• If you continually kill faeries, you create faerie-killing addicts, who want you to kill even more faeries.
• The multiple faeries you kill every time you settle for translating: the faerie of the language and its unique meaning/spirit, the faerie of the immersive game flow, and the faerie of the emerging language hunters’ ability to learn to set-up their own game.
• Evan loves it when language hunters set-up the game to double-check with him if they understand and can employ some new language structure that he just used.

3. Technique “Superman III”

• When you translate, all those lost fractions of pennies start rolling out everywhere, on many levels.
• Evan: “It’s faerie genocide.”

4. Technique “Killing Faeries”

• Willem explains the appropriate sounds to make when faeries start dying. He encourages you, like the Lorax, to speak for the faeries, because no one else will.
• Willem: “Don’t do it man – don’t kill the faerie – they believe in you, man…”

5. Technique “Dictionary Addiction”

• People tend to get defensive when you simple ask them not to translate – their addiction tends to start speaking back at you…
• It helps to have softer, gentler, more amusing techniques to apply to these kinds of touchy situations.
• Dictionaries have a particular, perfect use: “I wonder if this is true? I wonder how this is true? I wonder in what context this is true?”.
• Dictionaries are a set of really good questions. They allow you to become a very informed questioner.
• Dictionaries are not books of answers; they are books of questions.

6. Technique “Speak to Remember, Write to Forget”
7. Techniques “It’s Science!”/”Scientific Studies Have Proven”

• The stages of language acquisition go: Understanding, Speaking, Reading, Writing.
• If this is the order, why do you want to write things down?

8. Technique “Full”

• We have an expanded set of “full” indicators; now if someone writes something down, or asks for a translation, we can tell they’re getting overwhelmed.

9. Technique “English Brain”

• Don’t encourage or feed your English brain when learning another language.

10. Technique “Bridge Language”

• Evan doesn’t feel like people are paying attention to the totality of his communication if they only listen while writing things down. He thinks his body language is important to understand too, to acquire the language.
• When someone writes something down, we’ve noticed that it tends to be a signal that people aren’t coming back.
• Use a tape recorder instead of writing things down.
• If you write things down, rather than fully participating in the game, you can’t take the 3-D holographic notes onto your friends and family.

11. Technique “Speak to Remember, Write to Forget”

• Willem relates a story about a language hunter who wrote Italian down, that she had hunted, so that she could lead a game in it later.
• Willem talks about the issues involved; the probability of finding another Italian speakers, the opportunity to push language into your “living, human, immersive, 3-d holographic database”.
• If you must document, prioritize using video recorders, audio recorder, and lastly writing.
• In spite of all of this, if you must write for your own self-care, of course, do what you need to do. Just focus part of your effort on transitioning to more effective techniques, eventually.
• If you stop taking notes, make sure your replace it with something: a full-on willingness to play, or focusing on thorough, 3-d holographic notes with friends and family, or something. Don’t just stop writing, replace writing with more effective techniques.

Which are the most "obvious" props?

45 minutes and 52 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “Tea with Grandma”
2. Technique “Same Conversation”

• Leanne Hinton’s work with the Master/Apprentice system.
• Hang out with your elder, as much as possible, to learn their language.
• It seems to be missing the apprentice’s training in rigorous language hunting to accelerate the acquisition of language from the elder.
• “Tea with Grandma” is the archetypal “same conversation” you would have with your grandma.
• You’re trying to find out some important information: what does grandma like, what does she prefer, in terms of teas, milk/cream, sugar, general likes and preferences and the stories behind them.
• What if grandma doesn’t like milk in her tea, because she is allergic to milk? This could trigger a superior conversation (what if everyone was allergic to milk, how would it change our culture?).

3. Technique “Set-up”

• You’ll use the most obvious props you can, using grandmas preferred set-up as much as possible.
• This could be “Whiskey with Grandma”, or “Diet Coke with Grandma”, it depends on her preferences.

4. Technique “Appreciative Inquiry”

• If I ask you a question about something about something that gives you energy, that you enjoy, you will have more energy to keep talking.
• If I ask you a question about something that drains you, that causes you misery, you will lose energy for conversation.

5. Technique “These are a Few of My Favorite Things”

• Stick to topics and props that give your “fluent fool”, and fellow language hunters, energy and joy.
• Skilled language-hunting looks no different than skilled interviewing.
• You enjoy yourself, grandma enjoys herself, everybody wins.

6. Technique “Start at the Beginning”

• Start by just enjoying time with grandma. Sit with her, have tea, no language hunting (per se), just enjoy the time.
• Look around the room, what does she have out, bowling trophies, tea sets, pictures?
• You’re history hunting, story hunting, before you start pulling language.
• Look for common ground – if you like bowling too, consider next time have the conversation at the bowling alley.
• Start by going to grandma’s house; don’t make her come to you.
• What time of day is she available?
• What time is she napping, or watching TV?
• Evan’s grandmother won a car from Bob Barker on TV’s “the Price is Right”. And then later, he wrecked it: “that brought out some language there..!”.

7. Technique “Craig’s List: Positives’ List”

• Always start with the positive list, before negatives list, in the spirit of appreciative inquiry. There is a list of preferences, favorite, etc.
• Evan and Willem start building the list on the spot.
• “Want, Like, Need, Love, Prefer…”
• Another list: “Prefer, Style, Taste…”
• Another: “Kind, Type, Flavor…”

8. Technique “Obviously”

• Grandma’s favorite tea set is a hippie, tie-dyed, confusing set. You want to save that for a riddle-me-this moment later.
• Bring your own cup, if necessary, your “favorite” one.
• It will be really obvious, because you are a language hunter.
• Obvious props: tiny, tiny tea cup, and a huge cappuccino cup, to hunt “big, small”. All one color, like white.
• Find the easiest color to say, and bring everything in that color.

9. Technique “Modeling”/”You Go First”

• Evan and Willem decided to make workshop attendees experience this archetypal “tea with grandma” set-up.
• Evan plays the last, fluent signer of ASL on the planet, a grandma.
• Willem helps the participants set-up the conversation, and then bring grandma in, and hunt her language.
• Players can only hunt grandma one or two at a time; once they have acquired a small piece of language, they have tea again with a table of fellow hunters, and take “3-D, Holographic Notes”.
• All the props used with grandma, must have exact duplicates to take away to re-experience the conversation.

10. Technique “3-D, Holographic Notes”

• A story of a linguist who couldn’t find a piece of language in a computer/audio database, and Evan’s reaction as a node in the “living, human, 3-D, holographic database”.
• People who hold a target language, in trust, are essentially an immersive, 3-D, holographic, living database: the best documentation that any linguist will ever get.
• The highest quality information will always come from the information held in trust by living people.
• Now, the linguist can take the information he got from Evan, and go ping other speakers (other living databases), to double check, find accent variations, and so on.
• Evan tells a story of learning the meaning of the spanish idiom, “no me da la ganas”, through language hunting.
• To teach Willem the meaning of this phrase, Evan would use the same set-up that he experienced in Mexico, almost like programming a holodeck.
• Set-up a “holodeck” in your home, using the WAYK props, even if it’s just a 12″ square space on a counter.
• You’ll never find the embodied human emotional experience of language in a dictionary.

11. Technique “Language Hunting”

• Language-hunting is a way to re-hydrate what is in a dictionary, turn it back into embodied human interaction.
• Find words in the dictionary that you need to know, and use them as “questions” (technique “make me say…”, “correction response”) to hunt grandma with.
• Teach off your language as soon as possible to someone else, then they can start having tea (“same conversation”) with grandma too, accelerating the amount, and accuracy, of the language you hunt.

For a very good reason, which they understand better than I, XP (Extreme Programming) and Agile Software Development enthusiasts see a connection between the mentoring language and play of the WAYK game system, and their work. This, I believe, has to do with the similarity of a “language of successful strategies” that the approaches share.

Diana Larsen marking "technique"!

Jeremy Lightsmith signing "Not"

Click here for more images from the XP 2010 conference’s WAYK game.

We thought we’d share another video of “the Walk”.

In this video you’ll see 7 year-old Jackson playing along with us on “the Walk”. Though for this “Walk”, you’ll only see one youngster, Evan runs this same walk with large groups of young children at other events besides Chinuk night. Keep in mind, by learning language with WAYK, young Jackson is instantly becoming trilingual – English, Chinuk Wawa, and sign language (PSE). Pretty cool, if we do say so ourselves.

Children are sponges; in the beginning, they are a rambunctious “lunatic fringe”. In a sense, they are the best, non-helping (“angel on your shoulder”/”copycat”), “lunatic fringe” you will find. They’ll suck the language up, just because of the “obvious” “set-up”, and their innate learning ability. This is fine; no need to ‘force’ them to  play along; let them “fringe” until they choose to step into the circle, like young Jackson here.

On saving traditional languages: Young activists are tackling the disappearance of traditional Aboriginal languages using a unique learning method

May 27, 2010

“If our language dies, then our identity as a nation does,” according to Squamish Nation member Dustin Rivers. Dustin recently told the Vancouver Straight that land, culture, and rights don’t have meaning in the absence of traditional language. The 20-year-old activist, artist, and writer is part of a group behind the Save Your Language Conference, to be held June 5 and 6, 2010, in Vancouver. Participants at the conference will learn the “Where Are Your Keys?” system, developed by Evan Gardner. The WAYK game system is a comprehensive method for revitalizing endangered languages and skills.

We spoke with Willem Larsen of Where Are Your Keys?, from Portland, and with Dustin Rivers, from Vancouver.

LISTEN (21:06)

RELATED  “Report on the Status of B.C. First Nations Languages 2010″ can be found here.

Joel Shempert hunts Chinuk Wawa from Mary

58 minutes and 17 seconds.

[direct download]

Willem and Joel (a veteran of a Portland WAYK workshop), with Peter and Sara listening, talk over Joel’s experiences that Chinuk Night. Then later, Evan and Willem discuss how the evening of Chinuk Wawa games went.

1. Technique “the Walk”

• Joel experienced “the Walk” for the first time, and really enjoyed the dynamism of it.

2. Technique “Language Hunters”

• Ryan (a workshop veteran) led Joel in a two-person game.

3. Technique “Limit”

• Willem limited the game environment for Joel and Ryan; rather than playing in a messy room, he had them play in an empty hallway.
• Ryan limited the game objects to just two. This surprised Joel.
• Joel’s last game, with Mary (as seen in this video), was a much less limited game.

4. Technique “Start Over, Start at the Beginning”

• Joel relearned this technique at a higher proficiency level, as an overarching principle.
• Willem relates a martial arts story, about how his proficiency kept increasing, but his fluency kept dropping in relation, making him less competent the more “experienced” he got.
• Joel wants to learn good comebacks when 7 year old Jackson teases him in Chinuk Wawa.

5. Technique “Language Hunter”

• Improve your “language hunting” by running simple games, as soon as possible. Don’t let newbies fly ahead in language proficiency, but fall behind in language hunting.

6. Technique “the Walk”

• After playing with a fellow language hunter, Joel was much more rigorous on “the Walk” in applying limit and sorry, charlie to himself.
• Willem and Evan are really hoping to see this more: language hunters swapping techniques and experience with other language hunters, independently of Willem of Evan.

7. Technique “Potty Mouth”

• Evan checked in with Henry, our “fluent fool”, about creative obscenities in Chinuk Wawa.
• Evan, Willem, and Peter take special pride in their ability to construct exquisitely well-constructed profanities.
• For whatever reason, the “potty mouth” same conversation is an invigorating accelerator for increasing the volume of language play among many speakers.

8. Technique “Let’s Get This Party Started”
9. Technique “Newbie in the Lunatic Fringe”
10. Technique “Copycat”
11. Technique “Same Conversation: Craig’s List”
12. Technique “Language Hunters”

• Kirsten, Ryan’s brother, came in, and copycatted like a pro, due to her skills from the same workshop as Ryan.
• Willem mentions again how Sara learned a lot of language, but not much language hunting.

13. Technique “Teach a Teacher”

• Evan discusses his efforts to move the culture of the room deeper into WAYK territory, deputizing everyone as collaborators and teachers, no matter how inexperienced.

14. Technique “Speak to Remember, Write to Forget”

• Some players were concerned about our requests to not write things down, and to not bring notebooks.
• Every moment you spend writing things down, those are moments you’re not playing WAYK with friends or family (or imaginary friends).
• Willem offers an opinion the nature of the relationship to a piece of paper on which you’ve written language you “want to remember”. It’s a robot slave! In a bad way, not a cool way.
• Rather than taking notes on paper, take 3-dimensional, sensory immersive, holographic notes by pushing language into your friends and family, who will act as a living memory bank for your language acquisition.
• Each “technique” we offer is an experienced-based tool for accelerating language acquisition. All are open for improvement; but you can’t know if they work, or not, unless you use them, and run the experiment on whether they truly accelerate language acquisition.
• Dismissing techniques out of hand, before really using them for long enough to know whether they work, will prevent you from mastering WAYK.

15. Technique “Dictionary Addiction”

• Writing things down is a smaller, personal version of dictionary addiction. You’re essentially making your own dictionary.
• Language is a physical, embodied relationship, between speakers and the world, as experienced through all the senses of smell, taste, hearing, touch, sight, and so on. The symbolic tool of literacy comes a distant second in priority of language acquisition.

16. Technique “the Walk”

• Peter ran “the Walk” to be as basic as possible.
• Now Evan doesn’t have to lead “the Walk”, or run the room of game play.

17. Technique “Language Hunters”

• Evan needs to stop being the “expert” – he’s called over for even the most basic questions.
• Someone who even knows one thing more than you, can teach you that thing.
• Willem tells the story about Ryan, one language hunter, teaching Joel, another language hunter and workshop veteran.
• A language hunter can transmit a huge amount of technique and experience to another experienced language hunter.

18. Technique “Immersion”

• Willem thinks we need a 2 day immersion weekend, every 3 months, for everyone participating in a WAYK language revitalization program.

19. Technique “Debriefs”

• Willem believes the debriefs are technique “mumble” for 2 day immersion weekends.

27 minutes and 2 seconds.

[direct download]

Willem interviews Peter and Sara about the games they led for the most recent Chinuk Wawa (Chinook Jargon) Night. We discover that yet another newbie has zoomed through language acquisition, but not mastered basic WAYK techniques. Peter then describes “the Walk” that he led, as documented in this video.

1. Technique “Obviously!”

• Sara’s facial expressions and intonation kept (falsely) suggesting to Kirsten that Sara’s statements were actually questions. This made things less “obvious”, and slowed the game down.

2. Technique “Newbie in the Lunatic Fringe”

• We want new people to sit, watch, and warm up for a bit, before playing.

3. Technique “Let’s Get This Party Started”

• Willem and Peter started the night with an advanced game. It’s important to have a game already going when people walk in.

4. Technique “Killing Faeries”

• Willem tries to describe the language they were “hunting” in the game, without translating and therefore “killing faeries”. Every time you translate a faery dies!

5. Technique “Sorry, Charlie”

• You only “sorry, charlie” someone when you engage them in conversation, and expect a response; if newbies sit in the “lunatic fringe”, they can sit in on a more advanced conversation without necessarily getting overwhelmed/”sorry, charlied”.

6. Technique “Pull Them Through It”

• Peter was sitting in on Sara’s game, helping her to lead the game, offering up “craig’s lists” and such at the appropriate time.

7. Technique “Immersion”

• It continues to be noteworthy, the difference in skill, between someone who just attends language nights, and those who’ve attended the two-day immersive WAYK training.

8. Technique “Start at the Beginning”

• Ack! Sara didn’t know about this technique. Somehow she acquired a lot of language proficiency, without acquiring techniques too.

9. Technique “Ten Feet”
10. Technique “the Walk”

• Peter wanted to make sure Superior speakers could have superior conversations, rather than needing to run the room or manage newbie games; so he led a “Walk”.
• Peter no longer considers “the Walk” an advanced conversation; he thinks you can make it as easy as needed, as long as you apply “limit” rigorously enough.

11. Technique “Craig’s List”

• Peter is developing a CL of activities on “the Walk”; the “red light, green light” game is on the list.

12. Technique “Same Conversation”

• On “the Walk”, we do our best to stop at the same places, every time.

13. Technique “Slow, Fast”

• Peter would introduce this technique first thing, next time he leads “the Walk”.

14. Technique “Red Light, Green Light”

• Peter made sure every player got a chance to run this game.
• Do we need a technique “Mother May I”?

http://saveyourlanguage.wordpress.com

VANCOUVER, BC – Native languages are dying, but there is still hope.

A recent report from the First Peoples’ Heritage, Language and Culture Council (First Peoples’ Council) revealed that fluent speakers represent only five per cent of B.C’s total population of First Nations, despite the Province being home to 60 per cent of Canada’s First Nations. 52 per cent of fluent speakers are aged 65 years or older and 39 per cent are aged 45 to 64.

The signs are clear: First Nation languages will die in this generation if something isn’t done right now.

On June 5th-6th, 2010, three language revitalization activists will host the “Save Your Language” Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The two-day conference will host workshops on innovative language-learning methods to help create a shift in B.C.’s endangered languages.

Three individuals who have worked in recent years in language-teaching have come together to accomplish new things for Aboriginal languages. Language-instructor and community organizer Dustin Rivers, from the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) people in North Vancouver, started using language-teaching methods previously unheard of.

Dustin Rivers was introduced to Evan Gardner and Willem Larsen from Portland, Oregon, who shared their innovative language teaching & learning method called “Where Are Your Keys?”. This method has been used with native communities in Oregon, with great success in creating fluent speakers and language-teachers of dying languages. The hope is to bring more of this success to other Aboriginal communities.

Dustin, Evan, and Willem are inviting Aboriginal people, their families, and friends from British Columbia and elsewhere to learn techniques, approaches, and methods to save endangered languages. Individuals attending the conference will be introduced to new concepts on teaching and learning languages that they can immediately apply to their own endangered languages.

It only costs $50 to register before the June 1st, 2010 deadline.

For additional information, also visit our website http://saveyourlanguage.wordpress.com
For further information, please contact Conference Coordinator Dustin Rivers at dustin.rivers@gmail.com or call 604-999-2780

The upcoming “Save Your Language” conference is finally getting in the news.

Check it out:

Squamish Nation activist plans conference to save First Nations languages in B.C.

Dustin Rivers knows that the language of his people has been described as “critically endangered” and “nearly extinct”.

Unless drastic action is taken right now to save Skwxwú7mesh snichim, the 20-year-old member of the Squamish Nation told the Straight, the language could be gone within 10 years.

“My opinion is that, if our language dies, then our identity as a nation dies,” Rivers said via cellphone from a ferry in Howe Sound. “If we don’t speak our language, then we’re not Squamish anymore. Then everything else—land, culture, rights, all of it—it doesn’t mean anything.”

Go to straight.com for the article.

Go to the “Save Your Language” conference website for more info and registration.

Justin Robinson (Chinook Nation) leads Max (Lakota/Ojibwe) and Larry in a Chinuk Wawa WAYK game.

Thank you to everyone playing WAYK, and for getting the word out about the Fluency Revolution. Please keep it up – we’re making progress, but aren’t quite there yet.

We’re realizing that the greatest obstacle to our mission at this time is funding. We believe that once we’re fully funded, we can help communities turn around the worldwide crisis of endangered language within a decade.

Help us start that clock right now.

We’re looking for financial help, either in the form of grants, or angel investors. Help the WAYK team get the resources to hold workshops full-time, create and maintain a quality website with a video library of WAYK techniques, and bring the mentoring language to communities that need it.

Contact Willem Larsen: whereareyourkeys@gmail.com

Join us June 5th and 6th in Vancouver, B.C., for the Save Your Language conference.

Peter leads a "Colors and Numbers" game

1 hour, 50 minutes, and 53 seconds.

[direct download]

Evan Gardner, Willem Larsen, Peter, and Joel interview each other on Chinuk Wawa Night (Chinook Jargon). Though this episode is almost two hours long, we really encourage you to  hang in there and soak it all up; many vital issues came up that should further illuminate the play of WAYK, and the goal of running your own language game night.

1. Technique “Obviously!“

• Evan ran to the dollar store to get the most “obvious” crayon props.

2. Technique “Colors and Numbers/Sesame Street“

• Peter is the master of leading this conversation.

3. Technique “Squatter’s Rights”

• Adding more and more language complexity, almost in spite of technique “limit“.

4. Technique “Full Sentence Question and Answer“
5. Technique “Push/Pull“
6. Technique “Mentoring Language“

• Everyone is still working on changing the learning culture of the Chinuk Wawa attendees into the full-blown WAYK culture. Formerly the class was housed in a location that was highly influenced by the traditional academic environment.

7. Technique “Copycat“

• It’s a “copycat” game, not a learning game.

8. Technique “Full“

• They update the definition of “full” – it now includes when someone pulls out a notebook, or asks for a translation, that too means they’re “full“.

9. Technique “School Night/Game Night“

• They troubleshoot how to help players transition from more academic environments, back to the vitality and freedom of WAYK.

10. Technique “Colors and Numbers“

• Evan and Peter discuss technical aspects of how best to run the conversation.
• Because Peter mastered and pioneers the “colors and numbers” conversation, something magical happened that night.

11. Technique “Ten Feet“
12. Technique “Pull me through it“

• Joel talks about his first time learning Chinuk, that night, and how he “language hunted” Mary, his game leader, improving her game play through “modeling“.

13. Technique “Self-organization“

• Due to the Chinuk Wawa players reaching a tipping point of WAYK fluency, Evan was finally able to have a Superior conversation with Henry, our “Fluent Fool” – meaning he was able to “language hunt” to improve his own proficiency.
• The room self-organized, everyone peeling out into games of their appropriate proficiency levels.
• Through use of “Ten Feet“,  games impinged on each other a lot less.

14. Technique “Let’s Get This Party Started“

• Have a game already going, as players are arriving. It starts energy out very high, and saves time.
• You don’t want people walking into a silent room at the beginning of the night.
• If your language night starts at 4pm, start your first game at 3:59pm.

15. Techniques “Learning Buddy“, “Newbie in the Lunatic Fringe“, “It’s a Copycat Game“

• A new, older, native american player named Max had his first WAYK Chinuk night, so Willem adjusted game play to match exactly what he needed, as much as possible.
• At one point, Justin recommended Willem lead a game just in English and ASL for Max, no Chinuk Wawa yet.

16. Technique “Cycle Full/Inner Circle Full“
17. Technique “Full“

• Max called “Full”, retired to the “lunatic fringe“, and suddenly become much more confident in the game play, voicing and signing confidently.

18. Technique “Return to Superior“

• Willem responds to Peter, regarding why is important adults have time, during game night, to speak at a Superior conversation, whether in the target language (Chinuk Wawa), or, due to lack of proficiency in the target language, the mother tongue (in this case English) is fine too.
• Adults need to refresh themselves by having intermittent Superior conversations, to come up for air from all the “Sesame Street” conversations.
• You might balance a night through 95% immersion in target language, 5% Superior conversation in English (or whatever your mother tongue is).
• It’s like holding your “intellectual breath”, being immersed in the WAYK  play.
• It’s okay to have a Superior conversation about the target language, once you’ve finished game play – you might do some translating, but in this case, it will help the adult players refresh and recharge.
• Joel speaks how his work with special needs kids creates this same kind of feeling; immersion in a world at a child’s proficiency, making him desperate for Superior conversations after work.

19. Technique “Ten Feet“

• Evan and Willem further troubleshoot how to separate noisy WAYK games.

20. Technique “Newbie Gets the Right of Way“

• Games with newbies get priority, in terms of playing quietly around them.

21. Technique “the Walk“

• Evan talks about dealing with sketchy situations while on “the Walk“.
• Big tree and little tree, big white dog and little white dog – great coincidence, WAYK at its finest – knowing to take advantage of such situations.
• Advantages of the quick, short “Walk“.
• Willem considers “the Walk” an advanced technique, due to the inherent chaos of going outdoors. It can “sorry, charlie” and “full” players very quickly, if you don’t keep it short, sweet, and energetic.

22. Technique “Language Hunter“

• Joel has attended our 2-day WAYK workshop, and knows “language hunting“. He talks about his game with Mary, a recent regular at Chinuk night.
• Evan had coached Mary on leading the game with Joel.
• Mary had her own kit of limited objects; beads, thread, a needle. She teaches beading (and other skills) as a volunteer at Fort Vancouver.
• Joel had never yet actually language hunted a “fluent fool“; he’d seen how it might be done, but never done it. [he attended one of our first workshops where we didn't yet include field role-plays of "language hunting" "fluent fools".]
• Willem walked by Mary and Joel’s game, the table’s objects looked a bit like the contents of a junk drawer; he encouraged Joel to “limit” the objects, and use other techniques according to his own counsel of the WAYK techniques he’s trained in.
• Joel’s first instinct was to turn off his “language hunting“, and just follow Mary’s guide.
• Essentially, Joel improved Mary’s technique use (“Set-up“, “Limit“, “Sorry, Charlie“), while she taught him Chinuk. Again, who taught who? WAYK again confounds the hierarchical expert-student relationship.
• Evan asks Joel if he got to “Make me say yes…“, “Make me say no…“, “Mine/Yours“.

23. Technique “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder“

• Willem talks about the last “language hunting” sense to develop; a sense of discomfort when “set-up” isn’t “limited” and “obviously!” enough.
• Getting pickier, pickier, and pickier, due to leading games.
• Let out your inner control freak.
• Crayola needs to sponsor us. We need better Crayon props.
• We control everything we can; so the stuff we can’t control feels maximally fun, a healthy dynamic chaos.
• Mary thought Joel had played Chinuk WAYK before; Joel meant to say he had just played WAYK in ASL and English.

24. Technique “We’ll All Get There Together“

• Two of our WAYK community, one from Portland (Sara), one from Vancouver (Cheyenne, Dustin Rivers’ sister), bumped into each other at an Ethnobotany conference, not knowing they both played WAYK.
• They didn’t sit down and share language, which means we haven’t built the skills in yet for distant WAYK players to bump into each other and swap language. Sara could have learned Squamish language, and Cheyenne could have learned Sara’s German!
• Our dream is to have WAYK players accidentally bumping into each other, and swapping language, all over the world.
• Joel tells a story about how Mary kept “pulling him through it“, in spite of her reservations.
• After the game, Mary tells Evan she needs bigger (more “obviously!”) beads. Yay Mary!

25. Technique “WAYK Eye on the Straight Guy”

• Willem wants to put a tablecloth on everything now. He thinks WAYK has made him a better decorator.
• Solid, clear colors, and simple surfaces.

26. Technique “We’ll All Get There Together“

• Evan feels so good that he got to finally have a superior Chinuk conversation on Chinuk night, because other people stepped into the MC roles, as their WAYK fluency role has increased.

27. Technique “Do Food“

• Evan remarks that our food is getting shabby. There is indeed a technique for the ideal WAYK food layout, for learning and teaching.
• Evan wants to do a podcast on food and learning.

28. Techniques “Superior proficiency“, “Contract“

• Evan and the other Superior speakers got a chance to “contract” a new Chinuk word for ‘handcuffs’.

29. Technique “We’ll All Get There Together“

• 7 year old Jackson has begun really jumping into games, and helping out. Children are an integral and necessary part of Chinuk night!

30. Techniques “Most Successful Moment“, “What would you do differently next time?“
31. Technique “Technique!“

• Evan reveals game leaders and players aren’t marking techniques very often, including himself. Willem says: “well I am!”.
• There apparently is a hitch in transmitting the culture of WAYK to the Chinuk Night players.
• Willem admits he has a history of prioritizing language proficiency over teaching “language hunting“.
• They troubleshoot this issue. Making announcements? A special technique focus for each night, like letters/numbers on Sesame Street?
• Willem: “every game need to starts out with the words, “techniques are the rules of the game. If I mark a technique, it means I’m showing you a new rule.”

We think this mascot's name is a reference to the Chinook word "eat/food".

35 minutes and 54 seconds.