This is the third year of Language Partners BC, a volunteer run language organization in Vancouver. The project started with an the influx of Syrian refugees in the winter of 2015-2016 and the idea that a partner-based language program might offer connections and solidarity between pe
An event to bring people together If you live in the Vancouver area, I invite you to the September 23 Community Languages Festival – Facebook event here – held from 2-5 PM at the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood house. The goals are to bring people together from different languages backgr
Learning a New Language… Again When I was in high school and university, I studied Spanish. During my second year, I mixed up courses and didn’t have the right credits to continue with Spanish, and didn’t need more language credits to graduate, so I stopped. One of m
What it means to dream in other languages People sometimes talk about dreaming in a new language as a marker. It marks that the language is somehow now in you, lodged in your brain or your way of being. If your unconscious can access it, well, that’s something. Arabic…nightmares? When
Why I don’t worry about “losing” additional languages A high school teacher once told me to stop studying (I had come to him terribly stressed about not fully understanding some calculus principles before a test) and instead to let the knowledge settle. The concept h
Beyond language acquisition As I embark as the coordinator of a new nine-week exchange program with Arabic and English speaking women, with some anxiety about exactly how we will introduce Arabic with seven different Arabic-speaking countries represented in the room, and how we will i
For those who know I grew up in Saudi Arabia, it may come as a surprise that I only started learning Arabic when I lived in Morocco in 2009-2010. After that huge wasted opportunity (liasaf jadid!) in Saudi Arabia, I was very eager to learn the language spoken across so much of the Mid
¿Partir o llegar? Los diferentes tipos de migrante Es interesante como en español tenemos tres variantes para una palabra que expresa el abandono de la región natal y la búsqueda de oportunidades en una diferente: emigrar, inmigrar y migrar. De la última, el Diccionario de la Real Aca
A famous folk singer in Turkey If you travel for long in Turkey as a Canadian you will inevitably be asked, “Do you know Brenna MacCrimmon?” or “Do you like Brenna MacCrimmon?” I once blogged about the most famous Canadian in China – Dashan – who achieved fame not for his
It has been a while since I profiled a multilingual person. You might remember Maria “going home” to English instead of Spanish, Jeremy describing the challenges of learning Kyrgyz, and Jordi reflecting on “foreignerisms” arising among non-native speakers. Here
