Wednesday:
First day of the gathering and it was just registration and free mingling mostly. Saw a lot of familar faces and met some new people, then headed back to the AirBNB for some
Thursday:
9:00 - This day started earlier than the others with a talk by our own Judith Meyer. Judith showed how she made quick progress in new languages for specific tasks. For example how she learned enough Indonesian to give a brief speech in the language. Very insightful talk about how to plan for a specific goal in a short time. So this wasn't about getting to C1 or anything, it was quick and dirty techniques to hit a specific target.
10:00 - Another very interesting talk on an endangered language by Brian Loo. This time he covered Warpirit an aboriginal language form Australia. Very interesting just to see some of the variations of languages human beings can come up with.
11:00 - Iversen (our moderator) gave a talk in French regarding the history of European languages. I really struggled with my French here, but was very intrigued by the presentation materials.
12:00 - Skipped all the talks and spent an hour speaking with others who didn't find any interesting things to watch.
15:00 - Bengali Language talk by Timothy McKeon was really interesting and we got a little history of the language and the country. I was disappointed there weren't more pictures of the tigers, but hey can't have everything.
16:00 - Tibetan, a really great talk about the Tibetan language by Franziska Oertle who has lead an amazing life, and has a real passion for the Tibetan language and people. First language I ever heard of which had gender in the alphabet (or syllables, I can't remember).
17:00 - This was a required attendance talk, at least for me since I was presenting! This was Secret Missions when you visit a TL country. Basically it was a workshop where I whizzed through my slides and then got the audience to participate and to thing of ways they could interact with locals in the TL.
19:00 - 22:00- International culinary festival and Karaoke. I left a bit early in order to get some
Friday:
10:00 - Bet you can't pronounce it with Brian Loo and Hadrian Rachwal who ran through a ton of IPA and pronounced some of the most throat wrecking sounds I've ever heard! Very cool.
11:00 - Another of those talks I was forced to attend because I was giving it. Apprenants intermédiaires, démoralisation et démotivation. It wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be since I was more or less just reading from the paper. It was my first presentation in a second language. I got a lot of support and encouragement from the audience and nobody threw tomatoes. But I'll let you all judege for yourselves when it comes out on YouTube.
12:00 - With my two talks completed I could really relax and enjoy the rest of the program. The next talk was given by Tim Keeley, talking about "the numbers game" of hyper polyglots and comparison of two imaginary hyper-polyglots who both learn a number of languages, but one learns multiple language families and hence finds it easier to rack up the numbers later because of the know families and cognates.
15:00 - Principles of accelerated language learning was a talk given by a Russian professor who showed how to design your own language course, or select a language course based on current research.
16:00 - Sat this one out and just lay back on a hammock and chilled out.
17:00 - Language of reindeer herders, Saami workshop. This was an interesting talk and competition given by Utalk about the saami language. So I did get a runner up prize of 7 topics on UTalk for any language (which I'm told will not count for my FLC, so I will have to pick something else.)
19:30+ - This was the multi-lingual concert and I wasn't really interested so we all went back to the AirBnB for some
Saturday:
10:00 - Brazilian Portuguese Phonology with Fabio Nogueria. This was really a brilliant introduction and the presenter is a teacher of Portuguese in Germany. It was truly interesting and fun. Even people that already know some Portuguese were impressed with the talk.
11:00 - Sat in the "No English" zone and spoke French for a little while. Then suddenly we went from 3 French speakers to about 7-8 and I could no longer talk but had to concentrate all my brain power on just following along with the conversation.
12:00 - The importance of effect when learning a language was Tim Keeley's second talk of the gathering and it was really very good. It was about how important it is to identify and be interested in a culture/language in order to make gains quickly.
15:00 - "I'm not dead yet" a talk about the revival of the Tunica language given by Dave Prine. Dave had some photo's of me in his presentation, and this is all with my solicitor. Dave did give a very humorous talk and it was an interesting view of how languages can be brought back to life.
16:00 - So you want to build an app was a great talk given by Zenmonkey (Eugenio Grapa) about the business of building a language app, and the things you need to think about before you start development. Don't know if it was recorded, but if it was a "must see" if you're thinking about building an app.
17:00 - A Talent for Languages was a presentation by Richard Simcott about the actual work that goes on behind the scenes to make a hyper-polyglot and the misconceptions people have about hyper-polyglots.
20:00 - International Culture Evening. I watched the first couple of acts, but was so tired that I wandered down to the bean-bag area and started to take a nap. Others joined me and we made our way back into the city for some
Sunday:
10:00 - Three part strategy for improving listening skills. I struggled with this talk mostly due to the speakers accent and I didn't really understand a lot of the examples given. However, for the most part I did know what he was talking about, but there wasn't really anything I hadn't know before. (To be fair there were very few talks given that I'd not had some previous knowledge from this forum).
11:00 - Talent Question was a talk given by Garth Popkins which had some great information and a lot of references. I would recommend you watch this when it comes out since Garth gives great speech. I'm still waiting for him to post his slides somewhere so I can dig through the reference materials he mentioned.
12:00 - I didn't go to any talks during this time, but spent most of the time speaking to Richard Simcott about the conference in Ljubljana and about his posts on the old forum. I promised to sort him out with a login here and try to pull out some of his links on the old site.
15:00 - Hands off, headphones on was a talk about using podcasts for language learning. Kristen game a good talk, but because I'm a techy a lot of it was redundant for me. Still she is entertaining and fun to watch, so still worth going.
16:00 - Lightning talks are where participants are given 5 minutes to do a quick presentation on any subject they want. There was a lot of interesting stuff, but I was mostly interested in watching Zenmonkeys daughter talk about ancient Assyria (I think?). It was interesting, and I think she should do a full 30 minutes next year.
17:00 - Closing ceremony. Lydia Machova announced she wouldn't be doing the organisation next year and was stepping down. However someone would be taking over and it would come back next year. When and where are yet to be determined.
18:00+ We all left to go get some more
General Comments:
As I've said previously a lot of the talks seemed to be targeted at beginners of which I didn't see any. There wasn't anything ground breaking or new, but there were some interesting takes on old material. I feel it was worth going, but would like to add that if you're going to the gathering to speak your target language, unless your target language is English or Slovakian (or wherever the next one is) you're going to be pretty disappointed. French & German were pretty high up the list of attendees native languages. If you're planning on doing a presentation next year, please consider your audience, I didn't see anyone with a badge without at least 4 languages, so you're not talking to beginners.
What I would like to see would be:
- More language tasters
- More talks about people personal experiences
- More "how to" sessions
Overall it is great fun, a wonderful social occasion which is exciting, exasperating, tiring, energetic, and mega geeky. One sad note, although we rolled up characters for our D&D game we had too much
