Playing Language: Learning Languages Absurdly Fast with Games (Fall 2012, with Miguel San Pedro, Evan Gardner, and others)
Course description
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 Mandarin Chinese 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.
Whether or not you think you're "good" at languages, the only thing you need for this class is a willingness to play! For more information about the game, you can visit http://www.whereareyourkeys.org.