Does this mean goodbye?

Emily and I had a lot of fun teaching English, teaching radio, and yakking on the podcast. But I'm leaving Seattle now. We hope to keep Radiolingual alive as a multi-city project with a little more focus.

Here's a journey through some of our students' progress. At the end, some unaired content from the Speakers' Bureau about what it feels like, emotionally, to learn English.


It's sad, but celebratory. Listen in.

Music from Jason Bianco at magnatune.com

Liza's Loss

Liza Enriquez achieved her childhood dream of becoming a nurse. She also lost her house in the economic crisis.

But this story wasn't coming out clearly. So I kept asking her to say it again, in different ways.

Eventually we got it just right. But then, more than words came out.


Listen to Liza share her story, and the way we worked together to make it come from the heart.


Liza will be reading her story in libraries and schools around Seattle as part of the Speakers Bureau, a public speaking class for ELL students. Special thanks to Rachel Leadon.

picture from respres' photostream, music from trip wamsley at magnatune.com

How is this confusing?

"Everytime they pointed to a banana and said 'yellow,' something wasn't clicking."

Marta explains one of her first memories learning English in a Californian elementary school. Ai interviews. Hammad and Emily act out.


Listen in to hear what's so slippery about bananas.

pic from foundphotoslj and music by Bacilos

Flowers? What flowers?

On Wednesday last week, I (Emily) was lucky enough to attend Talk Time, which is a free conversation group for English Language Learners at the Seattle Central Library.

I spoke with enthusiastic learners from around the world, and I got to brag about this website. While I was there, I captured a couple of questions about English that have been bugging some of the participants. Here's the first question:

Over the weekend Radiolingual readers responded, and then we mixed their answers into a short piece.

Listen to the piece here.

Send us your thoughts and comments and stay tuned for our next question--or if you have a question, send it in!


Write from Karen's flickr photostream and Tulip Trees by Rob Costlow.

How to make an intro

Ai's got mad voiceover skills.

When leading a workshop full of Japanese speakers, avoid calling it "RadioLingual."

This week Ai and Masa recorded their own version of the introduction to our podcasts, but every word was a stumbling block. As if 'RadioLingual' wasn't hard enough, they had to contend with: KUOW. Jack Straw Productions. The Association of Independents in Radio.

For Masa, there's not much difference between Association and Isolation.


Ironies abound in this podcast installment, but beauty too. Ai produced an amazing version of the introduction (or show ID), which will be our default from here on out.

_______ in the sky with _______

In class last Tuesday, we started talking about words that have multiple meanings. As one of the new Radiolingual producers explained the two meanings of a Japanese word, we had a little bit of confusion over the relationship between those two meanings.


Listen to the above piece to hear an audio exploration of the word and the process I imagined as we tried to understand the actual meaning of the word.

In any language, how do we build mental relationships between the words we know and the experiences and images that those words describe?

Multilingual Puns

In Urdu, the word for "peas" is "mattar." So, now that you know that, here's a joke that only bilingual Urdu speakers would understand.

How do peas talk? They mutter.

I got a million of them.

Puns was one of the unexpected topics that we ended up convering in our FIRST RADIO WORKSHOP on Tuesday night. Listen in to the latest podcast episode to hear some potential Japanese puns.

What other multilingual puns do you know?

Leave a message, leave a comment. Tell us the words we need to know first, and then make us laugh. If we get good ones we'll post to the podcast.