68. Amy Chua, the Original Tiger Mom, Has Bilingual Stripes Amy Chua, known to many as Tiger Mom, was determined that her two American-born daughters would grow up as she had: speaking Chinese. How else could they appreciate their heritage? Amy’s parents, who immigrated to the US in the 1960s, inculcated in their children many of the values from their homeland. In some surprising ways that Amy describes in this episode, these same values led Amy to become both a participant in America’s democracy and a concerned observer of it. DISCOVERING [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]