¡Bienvenido Compañer@s de Toronto!

Welcome to the blog for the Practical Spanish and Decolonizing language at the Toronto Freeskool. I've revived this blog, which I used when I facilitated this course in Hamilton, for the new iteration of this course. I'll be recycling some of the entries in edited form, including this one. Hopefully, this blog will be a forum for sharing information about languages, language learning and decolonization.

I said "Welcome compañer@s" in the title, because we are fellow students, learning together about language, and about Spanish in particular. The word "Compañero/a" (or "@"- the gender neutral alternative!) has a broad range of meanings, including classmate, friend, romantic partner, traveling companion- but can also be translated to "comrade" in the political sense of comrades in the struggle. Welcome to this class, part of a broader effort to create a better world, where learning is not based on how much money you have, and people create their own spaces and use them as a space to organize. One of the best things you can do as an organizer is to learn another language- not only will you be able to communicate, or maybe translate, with people who speak another way, but languages carry a lot of other information with them. Through learning spanish, i've learned a ton about the history and culture of Latin America and struggles there for justice, I've tried to bring some of those lessons home. I have so much more to learn, we all do.

Hopefully this course will demystify some of the common misconceptions about languages: that they are impossible to learn, that it is natural to speak only one, and that some languages are 'better' than others. We will look at work on second languages acquisition and maintenance, at endangered languages, and the relationship between language and empire. And hopefully we will together acquire a toolkit to learn another language, specifically spanish.

The way they teach languages in school is total bullshit. You can memorize verbs all day long and you will not begin to spout complete, perfect sentences all of a sudden. Ideally, we learn like a baby learns the language. Here are some examples of how this process happens (don't worry about memorizing the spanish or anything, it's just an example:


First we listen and are not expected to speak, but are making sense of the sounds of a language and learning words, and structure, even before we say a word.

[Baby says "eeeeh" and makes grasping gesture towards glass of water.]

Then we speak single words:

¡Agua!
water

Then short phrases:
Quiero Agua!
i want water

Then ungrammatical but understandable sentences

Me quiero agua
i want myself water

and then more correct phrases:

Quiero una vaso de agua
i want a glass of water


then maybe polite/complicated phrases

Quisiero una vaso de agua pura, por favor.
Would it be possible to have a glass of plain water?


We can't skip any of these steps. It's not how our brains work. So we shouldn't feel bad if what we say is not perfect: it's never going to be. I myself make mistakes in english sometimes, I forget a word that I know perfectly well, or I'll say "i seen". It's going to happen, especially when you are learning.

The most important thing with learning another language is to feel comfortable, not to feel judged. Making mistakes is part of the process of language learning: it's impossible to open you mouth and spout grammatically perfect sentences. There is some research that suggests that older people learn language less easily than children not because of a difference in innate ability, but because people are comfortable with the lower language competence of children, where they are impatient with adults and expect too much too quickly. So hopefully we can create an nice atmosphere in the class, where people feel free to talk in their spanish, even if it is bad, or to listen to spanish and respond or ask questions in english, or just listen! My spanish is not perfect either. (feel free to correct me if you notice a mistake)

I'd like everyone who is taking the course to introduce themselves here in the comment section below, and talk a little about their exposure, or lack thereof, to spanish and to learning any language, whether formally or informally.

I'd also like you to read this article from the latest issue of "Briarpatch" Linguicide: Submersion education and the killing of languages in Canada. http://briarpatchmagazine.com/2011/02/22/linguicide/