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

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?