Cherepaha Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6590 days ago 126 posts - 175 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Polish, Latin, French
| Message 1 of 8 26 September 2007 at 3:42am | IP Logged |
On September 16th Dr. Arguelles has suggested starting a language club in the San Francisco Bay Area similar to the one Barry Farber had founded in New York and describes in his book.
It does not look like anyone else on the forum has confirmed that they reside in the Bay Area and are interested in joining in. I am not sure whether this is due to the topic being buried too deeply in the discussion thread, or if the forum truly has no one else near San Francisco. So, I am opening a separate thread to give the topic more visibility.
Here is the initial information about the Language Club:
* Barry Farber’s How to Learn any Language, pages 141-143 of the Appendix
* The Language Club of Westchester: http://www.westchesterlanguageclub.org/index.htm
* Language Club Network at the Linguists' Federation: http://www.linguistsfederation.com/
Anyone interested in attending the initial Language Club meeting, please respond!
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administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7377 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 8 26 September 2007 at 4:48am | IP Logged |
I think Barry Farber's club meets once a week in a French restaurant and the meal is offered as part of the membership. The most popular languages, as far as I remember, are French, German and Italian.
How would you guys set it up in the Bay area?
Where would you meet up?
How often?
What membership types would be offered?
Which languages do you think will be most popular?
Anyway, good luck and I hope you can get Ardaschir on board!
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Cherepaha Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6590 days ago 126 posts - 175 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Polish, Latin, French
| Message 3 of 8 26 September 2007 at 5:15pm | IP Logged |
administrator wrote:
I think Barry Farber's club meets once a week in a French restaurant and the meal is offered as part of the membership. The most popular languages, as far as I remember, are French, German and Italian.
How would you guys set it up in the Bay area?
Where would you meet up?
How often?
What membership types would be offered?
Which languages do you think will be most popular?
Anyway, good luck and I hope you can get Ardaschir on board! |
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Thank you for the kind words, Francois!
What you are asking are all excellent questions. The goal of the first Language Club meeting would be to establish what our answers would be, and we will then post them on this forum, in case any of the non-Bay Area members will be passing by and would want to pay a visit.
Ardaschir’s participation is assumed, seeing as the Club was his idea. Dr. Arguelles?
Here is what I want to propose for the initial meeting (any suggestions/changes from the attending members are most welcome):
Meeting place: Café Roma in Berkeley (at the corner of College Ave. and Ashby)
Meeting day/time: TBD
Agenda:
1.Introductions
2.Review of Barry Farber’s concept
3.Decisions on the Bay Area Club format
4.Decisions on the day/time and venue for the regular Club meetings
5.Discuss venues for advertising the Club to attract more members (Craig’s list,
UC Berkeley campus, etc.)
6.Discuss the creation of the Language Club’s Web site (my 15 year old daughter has
volunteered to be a web developer and has already put together an outline of the
home page. According to her, we still need the name :) !)
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CaitO'Ceallaigh Triglot Senior Member United States katiekelly.wordpress Joined 6858 days ago 795 posts - 829 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: Czech, German
| Message 4 of 8 27 September 2007 at 4:36pm | IP Logged |
I'm in the Bay Area, and my company's office isn't too far from there, altho' I live/work across the bay. Sounds interesting.
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ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 5 of 8 30 September 2007 at 3:31pm | IP Logged |
Of course I will be happy to attend the initial meeting. I am pleased that someone with such evident organizational abilities is so interested in the idea. I did not have any agenda in mind when I suggested it. I simply happened to have come across that reference again, and my chain of thought led me from “if I still lived in New York, I would certainly investigate this” to “what if it existed in San Francisco…?” Now that I think more about it, I might simply enjoy meeting to talk, say in a park, than to talk and to eat in a restaurant. However, if that would draw significantly more people, then maybe we could actually contact the New Yorkers for advice.
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Cherepaha Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6590 days ago 126 posts - 175 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Polish, Latin, French
| Message 6 of 8 04 October 2007 at 11:59pm | IP Logged |
A talk in the park sounds nice. If the group is to meet on a week day after work (as the New Yorkers do), we will have to figure out how to work around the early sun-down in the winter, but until then we should be able to give the park option a try and see what comes out of it.
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iieee Groupie United States dreaminginturkish.bl Joined 6588 days ago 78 posts - 80 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, German
| Message 7 of 8 05 October 2007 at 6:08pm | IP Logged |
I am in the San Francisco Bay Area... but I am no polyglot. My second language is Turkish. I'm not sure what the club would consist of.. if it was multi-lingual conversation I would be left out for sure. But I would love to meet other people who are interested in languages.
Andrea
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ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 8 of 8 08 October 2007 at 8:34am | IP Logged |
If the club can get any more momentum at all towards formation, I would prefer to see it evolve more along the lines of a venue specifically for conversing in foreign languages (i.e., here in the USA, not in English) than simply a live version of this kind of discussion forum, however interesting that may be. It need not be for polyglots only, however, and it would hopefully eventually be large enough that one could come in the hopes of conversing in a single foreign tongue such as Turkish.
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