Hi from Turkey

[Joel Thomas]

Hello, just a short note of introduction. 

I'm a "gone native" expat living in Fethiye, Turkey, and I'm looking into using WAYK/LH to teach Turkish to our grammar-phobic Brits out here who want to learn the language but have absolutely no idea how to do so, and are in the Catch 22 of "no language > no conversation > no practice > no language." That and I think I could use it to teach English to Turks who desperately want to learn but have also been failed by substandard applications of ineffective methods.

I hope you don't think I'm going against the spirit of the enterprise by trying to make a living out of it, and I'm conscious of the danger of cherry-picking the methods while selling out its soul, and betraying both. On the other hand, I'm convinced that this could be a revolution in mainstream language teaching and not just language revitalisation, and with the right attitude I think we can have the best of both worlds.

But I ramble. Greetings and the best of wishes from across the pond.

Joel

[Willem Larsen]

Hi Joel,

I heartily encourage you to apply LH principles and game-play to your work! Teaching English in Turkey sounds like a total blast. Thanks for your inspiring appraisal of the LH system.

We're currently play-testing a game board and cards at our Irish language events around the U.S. and having some pretty outrageous success pushing play farther and deeper. 

We hope this resource will be available soon - in the next month or so. I've been saying this every month since last summer but this time I mean it! In the meanwhile please share any questions or thoughts you have here on the google group.

Good hunting-

yrs,

Willem

--
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Language Hunters group.
 
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to language-hunte...@googlegroups.com.
 
For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/language-hunters
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Language Hunters" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to language-hunte...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--

Willem Larsen

President, Language Hunters 

a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

6307 NE 8th Ave

Portland, Oregon 97211
971-340-7163

www.languagehunters.org

@languagehunters #langhunt

[Willem Larsen]

Joel,

I wanted to respond to your notion of "selling out the soul"/"betraying" LH -

My thinking on this has evolved over time. Honestly, any element of LH can be changed - our rule is, "You can change any Rule or Move once you've mastered it in play".

It's true that language hunting play only truly shines when all its parts are interacting, and tends to fall apart when they are only partially applied (like playing Poker without shuffling, or Baseball without bases, or basketball with a softball).

And obviously at an LH hosted event I'll be playing my way - but that's still the spirit of things, community driven innovation. And as time has gone on, as the game gets stronger, I've gotten more flexible about how and when to apply certain concepts.

One of our biggest and most important innovations is our timed immersion rounds, aka "Pomodoros". They last 20-25 minutes with breaks in between, and it's target-language-only during them - no exceptions even for explaining moves or rules. We explain those and debrief between rounds.

This has tightened up play in all kinds of ways, so that moves such as "killing fairies" are much less important for sheep-dogging players.

So that's one thing. It has also allowed a way to compartmentalize the use of textbooks and translated language guides - just keep them out of the immersion rounds! We add to this that between language hunters there is also no translating at any time - you can hit google translate, you can open a dictionary, you can ask another language student who isn't participating, you can do what ever you want except translate with any other language hunter in or out of play.

It creates a pretty cool effect. Try it out!

yrs,

Willem

[Paul Nitz]

Joel,

Your plan sounds great. I hope you keep us updated as to how it's going.  It sounds like it will be great fun.  

Make a living from Language Hunting?   That's just a validation of it's power!

Paul