ESP Biography

When you hear the phrase “Learning a foreign language,” what images come to mind? Do you see students huddled over their desks, scribbling in workbooks? Maybe grammar quizzes and tables of vocab? What if, instead, you saw a group of friends hanging out, laughing, shouting, and gesturing wildly in some kind of crazy charades game, only to realize later that without ever cracking a textbook or learning a grammatical rule, they had accidentally started to speak in another language? What if getting fluent took a couple of months, not years? “Where Are Your Keys?”, or WAYK, is a “language fluency game” designed for use in language revitalization movements. When an endangered language is going extinct and its community wants to save it, WAYK provides a way to learn the language at a break-neck pace without having to rely on textbooks or formally trained teachers. It is a distillation of learning techniques from many different fields, packaged into an active and addictive game that you can play with your friends. In the first half of this seminar, we will experiment with this notion of play-based language acquisition and see just how fast we can learn Japanese without actually studying it. Then we'll show you how you can use the game to learn any language you want easily and extremely fast, just by interacting with other speakers. What’s more, you can use many of the “rules of the game” to accelerate your learning in all kinds of areas outside of foreign languages. For more information about the game, you can visit http://www.whereareyourkeys.org, or contact Will at wmonroe4@stanford.edu. See you there!

When you hear the phrase “Learning a foreign language,” what images come to mind? Do you see students huddled over their desks, scribbling in workbooks? Maybe grammar quizzes and tables of vocab? What if, instead, you saw a group of friends hanging out, laughing, shouting, and gesturing wildly in some kind of crazy charades game, only to realize later that without ever cracking a textbook or learning a grammatical rule, they had accidentally started to speak in another language? What if getting fluent took a couple of months, not years? “Where Are Your Keys?”, or WAYK, is a “language fluency game” designed for use in language revitalization movements. When an endangered language is going extinct and its community wants to save it, WAYK provides a way to learn the language at a break-neck pace without having to rely on textbooks or formally trained teachers. It is a distillation of learning techniques from many different fields, packaged into an active and addictive game that you can play with your friends. In this seminar, we will experiment with this notion of play-based language acquisition and see just how fast we can learn Japanese without actually studying it. After the workshop, you will be able to use the game to learn any language you want easily and extremely fast, just by interacting with other speakers. What’s more, you’ll be able to use many of the “rules of the game” to accelerate your learning in all kinds of areas outside of foreign languages. For more information about this seminar, you can visit http://www.whereareyourkeys.org, or contact Will at wmonroe4@stanford.edu. See you there!

Have you ever... ...known someone who spoke a language so cool you wanted to learn it yourself? ...tried to learn a language on your own but ended up forgetting it later? ...wanted to teach a language but not known where to start? If your answer to any of these questions is Yes, swing by! You'll learn the basics of "Where Are Your Keys?", a game with techniques that make learning and teaching languages faster. In the first half of our class, we'll be working with Mandarin Chinese. Instead of relying on tedious wordlists and lots of translations, we'll use props, hand signs, conversations, and other fixes to get you faster to having fluent, meaningful exchanges in Mandarin. More than that, you'll learn even more quickly by teaching off Mandarin to others in new, simple ways. After a short break, in the second half of class, we'll see how quickly fluency in another foreign language can spread from one speaker to everyone in a classroom--no formal training needed! We'll learn how to wield the techniques we just learned so we can discover a new language from someone and use it on our own. Come on in and join the fun, and then try the game with your friends in other languages after you leave!