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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October 2023

68. Amy Chua, the Original Tiger Mom, Has Bilingual Stripes

2023-12-12T09:35:27-05:00By |Episodes|

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 [...]

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September 2023

67. Meet a Spanish Teacher in Maine Named Mohamed

2023-09-21T13:11:16-04:00By |Episodes|

67. Meet a Spanish Teacher in Maine Named Mohamed Mohamed with a fellow alum of Bowdoin College (different years), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Call him señor Mo. That’s what Mohamed Kilani’s third- to fifth-grade students in Falmouth, Maine, call him. Mohamed is an Iraqi by birth, a Jordanian by virtue of war, and now in America by virtue of a selfless and brave mother. Listen to this Arab refugee’s odyssey of finding home, and the many languages he speaks that have played a role. Among them: Spanish, which has a [...]

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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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63. Chef Pati Jinich’s Recipe for Reaching Across Cultures

2023-03-15T10:10:58-04:00By |Episodes|

EPISODE 63. Chef Pati Jinich’s Recipe for Reaching Across Cultures Photo by Pati Jinich “Here's the thing that we all need to know. And it's life lessons. It's just like making pancakes or rice or so many things in life. “You’re not going to get it the first time around. “You’re going to have the tools, you're going to have the correct ingredients, I'm giving you the right instructions with so many tips. But regardless of all that, you need to repeat and to try it many times, and [...]

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62. Writing in Two Worlds: How a Peruvian American Novelist Embraces Her Bilingualism

2023-03-01T09:06:06-05:00By |Episodes|

EPISODE 62. Writing in Two Worlds: How a Peruvian American Novelist Embraces Her Bilingualism Natalia Sylvester’s newest novel for teens, Breathe and Count Back from Ten, was a 2022 Today Show Pick, and just recently won two awards from the American Library Association. Her newest novel for adults, Everyone Knows You Go Home, won an International Latino Book Award. The audio version of Breathe…, narrated by Frankie Corzo, won an award from AudioFile magazine. “I just love her work,” Natalia says of Frankie. “It’s such an incredible process when I listen to [...]

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February 2023

61. Where Children’s Books Become Bilingual

2023-02-15T07:21:36-05:00By |Episodes|

EPISODE 61. Where Children’s Books Become Bilingual Arthur Levine (L) and Antonio Gonzalez Cerna of Levine Querido Publishing recorded our conversation in Guadalajara, Mexico, when they were in town for the Guadalajara Book Fair. When Arthur Levine, a longtime American book publisher, bought the rights to publish, as he called it, a “very British” new children’s book on this side of the pond, it was not because he thought it would become as popular as, say, Harry Potter. It was because “if you limit yourself to writers from your own [...]

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