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So far karla has created 27 blog entries.

April 2024

Cratering Language Enrollments Reveal America’s Linguistic Divide

2024-04-09T11:02:22-04:00By |Articles|

The Modern Language Association calls its recent survey of college language enrollments “staggering.” Enrollments in Spanish, French and especially German have cratered. In the dozen years between 2009 and 2021, language class enrollments dropped 29.3%, or by almost half a million students nationwide. It is the largest decline since the MLA began documenting language class enrollments back in the 1950s. Yet, in contrast, the number of American bilinguals has grown 260% in the last 50 years, from about 20 million in 1970 to more than 76 million today. How can both trends be true? The answer [...]

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March 2024

71. The Surprise in That Subway® Sandwich: Languages

2024-03-27T08:02:51-04:00By |Episodes|

71. The Surprise in That Subway® Sandwich: Languages Getting a peek behind the curtain to see how a company truly operates can be eye-opening. I never knew that, you may find yourself saying. You may start off in this episode, as we did, not knowing much about terms like localization and transcreation. What could they possibly have to do with a Subway Footlong? As it turns out, a lot. An American bilingual named Carrie Fischer is in charge of communicating with all of Subway’s global partners. She’s created the perfect recipe for [...]

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January 2024

70. A Whisper to God

2024-01-17T08:46:49-05:00By |Episodes|

70. A Whisper to God The American journalist, linguist, and author Michael Erard (Babel No More) has lived in South America, Asia, and now in Europe. He’s always had an ear to the native languages as much as for them. A deep researcher of language, he shares in this episode why he believes that “human beings are meant to have very complex linguistic systems in their brains.” He also explains why he likens learning a language to weaving a rope. “GOING TO THE NUNS”  Michael and his family have been living in [...]

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December 2023

69. What Is Life When You Leave the US and Become United Stateless?

2023-12-12T22:59:51-05:00By |Episodes|

69. What Is Life When You Leave the US and Become United Stateless? The 20th-century novelist Thomas Wolfe famously pronounced that “you can’t go home again.” But what if you have little choice? This is what a number of Latino immigrants, who have long made their home in the US, face when immigration laws require that they return to their country of birth. ALEXANDRA RIVERA’S UNITED STATELESS Alexandra Rivera, a Mexican American, has made it her calling to report on this group of returnees, as she calls them, whom most of us [...]

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April 2023

66. How Joe Keenan came to write a breakout book on learning Spanish

2023-05-16T17:02:41-04:00By |Episodes|

66. How Joe Keenan came to write a breakout book on learning Spanish Joe in Santa Elena Canyon near his home in Big Bend. "One wall of the canyon is in Mexico and the other is in the US, and that's the Rio Grande down the middle. A foot in each world," Joe says. Just exactly how can you master Spanish? As a native English speaker who became smitten with Spanish, the American journalist Joe Keenan decided that nobody else had written how to break out of beginner’s Spanish, [...]

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65. How Dario Wolos Turned a Taco into Tacombi The secret sauce: a love of language, culture, and family

2023-04-26T16:11:34-04:00By |Episodes|

65. How Dario Wolos Turned a Taco into Tacombi. (The secret sauce: a love of language, culture, and family) When you wrap your appetite around a Tacombi taco, here’s what you’ll taste: Tradition Culture Family Authenticity And possibly the best taco you’ve ever had. In this episode, Tacombi founder Dario Wolos shares his journey as an entrepreneur who is building a brand that honors the food, culture, and family values of the Mexico that have been part of his life from childhood. Language as lodestar As a youngster, Dario was shaped [...]

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March 2023

64. A Global Audio Storyteller: The Journey of Martina Castro

2023-03-29T07:52:32-04:00By |Episodes|

64.  A Global Audio Storyteller: The Journey of Martina Castro Maybe it was because her father was always listening to NPR. Perhaps it came from wanting to study a language she never heard in her bilingual home. Or possibly it was her lifelong love affair with opera and singing arias, “a very big part of my life,” she says. AN EAR FOR WHAT WASN’T BEING SPOKEN Whatever the reason, the Uruguayan American Martina Castro, the powerhouse behind Duolingo’s multilingual podcasts, had heard a need for something that was long missing in [...]

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March 2022

How a Dad Used Language to Up His Empathy

2023-03-07T13:13:09-05:00By |Articles|

When Robert Shaw’s daughter, Felicity, was five years old, he would occasionally reach for the Duolingo app rather than a picture book for bedtime reading. He’d do a short beginner’s lesson with Felicity and her younger brother, usually in Spanish or French. As Robert points out, “When you learn things right before you sleep, you retain them better.” So why not a few words in a different language? But it was words in the English language that Felicity often found challenging when she started reading in earnest, at age six. Both Robert and his wife, La [...]

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August 2021

55. Language learning: why tax your brain when there’s technology?

2021-08-11T10:42:35-04:00By |Episodes|

55. Language learning: why tax your brain when there's technology? This is our second of two episodes on what technology can and can’t do for language learning…and perhaps more important, what technology should and shouldn’t do. Listen as Steve shares the week he spent in Silicon Valley attending the futuristic technology incubator called Singularity University. He had a chance to ask the high priest of language technology, Ray Kurzweil (pictured above), how he sees the role of high tech in language learning. Ray’s answer might surprise you. You’ll be listening to [...]

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July 2021

54. To App or Not to App: That Is the Language Learner’s Question

2022-04-27T11:13:56-04:00By |Episodes|

54. To App or Not to App: That Is the Language Learner’s Question Everyone, it seems, has an opinion on using technology for learning a language. That includes the many bilinguals Steve interviewed for Episode 54 of the America the Bilingual podcast. It’s a brief meditation on the merits—and demerits—of language technology. How much should we depend on language technology to talk for us? What are technology’s limitations? Or is it just we humans who are limited in our thinking of what technology can do? The role that technology plays in [...]

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