Saturday, February 2, 2013

Where are your keys?

 There is a remarkable little language game going on.
 It's called Where Are Your Keys? and it's basically an "elicitation" game meaning you learn to 'draw out' linguistic forms from a speaker and then copy them. The second part is that you teach simultaneously to the person you're eliciting from.
 It uses ASL but it uses most of the same signs for each game across different languages, whether Japanese or Finnish. So the first language you learn will probably be the hardest because you're learning the ASL for the 1st time. ASL is neat because it's i) simple, ii) iconic, and it iii)disambiguates (so you can get by mumbling). There are more benefits but you can see them for yourself when you try it.
 Here's the core game. There's brief Descriptions of some of the techniques on the WAYK wiki but it isn't kept up to date. It's been used for conlangs (e.g. Feayra, Mohuana, lojban) but also Irish and there are more videos on the way. There are courses for various endangered Native American languages e.g. Chinuk Wawa, Squamish.
 One of my ambitions is to write a WAYK curriculum for Esperanto and then film it. It would be a good bridge language too for later lessons in other languages. (I would like to do the same with another conlang with the permission of the creator.)

No comments:

Post a Comment