EPISODE 59: From Fast-Food Worker to Renowned Film Critic: Carlos Aguilar and Why DACA Is Important “My dad died in 2018 and I wasn’t able to go to his funeral. It was too much of a risk.” For the film critic Carlos Aguilar to have left his home in the US to attend his father’s funeral in Mexico would have put his re-entry into the United States in jeopardy. A native of Mexico City who has lived and worked in the US since he was young, Carlos is part of the immigration [...]

EPISODE 57: How the New York Mets Turned a Green Beret into a Polyglot A benefit of bilingualism you may not have considered: how useful it can be when dropping into countries—literally—to engage in a US Army Special Forces mission. That’s just one of the never-thought-of-that-before ways that Jack Clarke, a retired Army colonel who’s now a professor of national security studies, has used the several languages he speaks. In Steve’s conversation with him, Jack reveals how global languages have always been essential to the US military—often, in ways many of [...]

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 [...]

53. America is too big for bilingualism. Fact or fiction? Map image from Wikimedia Commons. From sea to shining sea, English is spoken throughout all 3.8 million square miles of the US. Does it make sense to speak anything else? To answer this question, in Episode 53, Steve takes you on a tour that starts in Little Rock and ends in Montreal, by way of Casablanca and Mali. Enjoy this seventh free audiobook chapter of America’s Bilingual Century by Steve Leveen. You’re listening to Chapter 37, narrated by Sean [...]

51. What they don't teach you in Harvard's Spanish classes Once upon a cold and snowy Harvard winter, when Steve went to Spanish class. A middle-aged guy named Steve walks into an intermediate-Spanish class for Harvard undergrads, and does a quick assessment of their advantages versus his. Theirs: They’re smarter. They take tests really well. They’ve had more Spanish. They can hear perfectly fine. They’re highly motivated to get good grades. They seem to relish the mental struggle. Steve’s: He shows up on time. And it [...]