A clearer glimpse of fluency

Thanks to Sky Hopinka, I have been able to add subtitles to the video of Evan Gardner having a fluent conversation with him in Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa) after only a year and a half of weekly language nights. (Skip forward to 01:38 for the start of the Wawa conversation.)

This has answered a lot of my questions, and frankly it has exceeded my expectations of what WAYK is capable of.

I'm impressed firstly by just how smoothly they both communicate in Wawa, particularly Sky after only a year and a half, and with no real-world immersion as far as I know. Before I'd encountered WAYK I'd have thought that was impossible, even for languages closely related to English.

As a translator, I am acutely aware of how unnatural book-based language learning can be and how difficult it can be for a foreigner who has pegged everything to "equivalents" in his native tongue to then get his head around all the nuances. In contrast with this typical situation, here we have a year-and-a-half student of Chinuk Wawa confidently criticising a translation from English as "strange", and suggesting a more "normal" alternative, as if this was nothing (skip to 04:20). This is amazing to me, and reinforces my conviction that WAYK is a fundamentally more natural approach to language learning, relying as it does on teaching indirectly by inductive reasoning based on "analogue" input (TQ: Obviously) and not directly through imperfect "digital" explanations in another language.

But I'll let you come to your own conclusions!

Language revitalisation ad extremum

As dead and dying languages go you can't get much more stone cold than Latin.

But as it turns out, there's a group of people in the States called SALVI whose "mission is to propagate communicative approaches to Latin language acquisition, making the entire Classical tradition of Western culture more available to—and enjoyable for—students, teachers, and the general public".

This is not some clique of geeky enthusiasts, this is a serious "group of professors and students of Latin literature". Indeed, the majority of its board members are practising, institutional Latin teachers, several at university level.

Founded in 1997 and acquiring full charity status in 1998, they run a suite of annual two- to five-day immersion workshops. After a "capacity-crowd success" last year, this year they are institutionalising something new: A four-day programme based around WAYK called "Pedagogy Rusticatio", headed up by—you guessed it—Mr. WAYK himself, Evan Gardner. As its name would suggest it is aimed, not at students of Latin, but at other teachers of Latin.

This is a paid gig. I'd hazard a guess that $750 all inclusive for four days is fairly reasonable, not that I really know the price of eggs stateside. Either way, teachers and universities aren't made of money. They're not going to fork out like that for something they don't believe in.

Admittedly, this is still very grammar-oriented, more about converting latent lingustic "knowledge" into a language "skill" than building a vocabulary from scratch, so this doesn't relate directly to our project here. But it's impressive to see WAYK getting the recognition it deserves in formal, academic circles, which will hopefully prove to be a stepping stone toward the mainstream.

The journey to fluency

It turns out that I could have avoided a lot of my previous stress about how far WAYK can really take you by going over to Vimeo and digging a little deeper into the Where Are Your Keys? video archive.

Below is a series of videos charting Sky Hopinka's progress as Evan Gardner uses WAYK to teach him Chinuk Wawa (Chinook Jargon). I think that anyone interested in using the system would be best advised to go through at least some of the Top 20 WAYK Techniques and then watch these videos.

• Introduction. I think this is Evan's best introduction to the WAYK system I've seen so far, even than the vintage 2006 video featured on the main page of the official site, most probably because it's had five years of refinement.
• Part 1. Evan goes into some detail on the basic techniques and philosophy of the system.
• Part 2. They get up to "Mine/Yours". Evan explains the logic behind "How Fascinating".
• Part 3. Want/Have/Give/Take.
• Part 4. Now into a separate session, Evan explains "Travels with Charlie".
• Part 5. Want/Have/Give/Take is reviewed from the previous session.
• Part 6. Evan explains "Full". They progress into trading with money, and Evan "lets the fairies live" by teaching new words by implication instead of explaining them in English.
• Part 7. Trade/Steal/Buy.
• 18 months later... Evan and Sky have an advanced-level conversation 18 months after Evan first met Sky. 

Other videos of interest:

• Where Are Your Keys: Mandarin Chinese lets you be a fly on the wall for another lively initiation, this time led by David Edwards. The August 22, 2009 Albuquerque Workshop is also very useful to get a feel for how it's done if you're getting started
• Advanced WAYK: Mandarin Push/Pull together with Advanced WAYK: Spanish Push/Pull give a bit more detail on how hunting works at advanced stages.
• Chinuk Wawa Language Night. This is the only video I've seen subtitled so far, and gives you a fairly clear idea of how a WAYK group works in practice.

A glimpse of fluency

I just re-discovered the WAYK blog post Beyond the Script, the video on which dates all the way back to July 2012, which counts as vintage in this day and age...

So you've got Evan Gardner and Sky Hopinka having a perfectly fluid conversation about tea and coffee, after only a year and a half of using WAYK to learn Chinuk Wawa, if I have that down right. I've got no idea how "hard" Wawa is grammatically, as a pidgin/creole I'd imagine it should be fairly regular, but at any rate to be that fluent in any non-European language after a year and half is amazing.

The more I mull my own outline of a path to fluency, the more I realise that what I'm trying to do here is something very much removed from the concept of language "hunting" per se. Put all the sign language and the TPR and the "How Fascinating" exuberance to one side, I think I now realise that this is the fundamental difference between WAYK and conventional language teaching: WAYK turns everything on its head by making the student learn the method and not the teacher. WAYK is "bottom-up", students are the prime movers, getting the language out of their teachers by hook or by crook and pulling themselves up to fluency. In contrast, any language teaching method or programme you care to name is "top-down", based on the premise that the student is the blank slate and the teacher is the one who cooks and serves everything up on a plate.

I suppose what I'm trying to do here is make a square peg fit a round hole. I'm trying to use WAYK to serve everything up on a plate, when that's not what WAYK was ever about to start with.

Evan and Sky's video is a wonderful demonstration of what WAYK is capable of, but in the blue blazes how? Will WAYK only work for me if I turn my students into language hunters? Or can I just come up with a string of set-ups, have them play them without any initiative at all from them, and still make it work?

Added to which: How broad a vocabulary does Evan have? What else can he talk about besides what will fit on a kitchen table? What are the full range of set-ups he used to get to the stage he's at now (or, rather, was a year and a half back when the video was made)?

Apart from anything else, I don't speak Wawa and I've got no idea how they were implementing the techniques that were labelled on the video as the conversation whizzed by. But I am too demanding; as Evan says at the beginning, the point is proving what WAYK is capable of, and it certainly proved that.

But in the blue blazes how?

Edit: I think I've calmed down a bit now. At the moment my thinking goes like this: It's all in the set-up. If the "set-up" is "obvious" it simply doesn't matter which way the flow of information is going. Just because it's "limited" doesn't mean you can't introduce a "limited" amount of flexibility in the conversations and have more than one possible answer to any given question. The question that still bugs me though is, is my imagination up to coming up with all the set-ups I'm going to need to cover the vocabulary?...

Edit 2: I just noticed that it says on the WAYK website that Evan has been teaching Wawa since 2002 and Sky is the student! That just goes to show how convincing Sky was in the video. For some reason I had just assumed that it would be the native American teaching the native American language to the European. I don't think I need to be embarrassed about that, do I?

Edit 3: Please see The journey to fluency.

Edit 4: Please see A clearer glimpse of fluency.