You are learning Spanish and you want to use the web to teach you.  The New York Times broke it down for you on January 27, 2010.  The Web Way to Learn a Language by Eric Taub tells you there are free and expensive options.  There are social networks and black-box software available.  Do you want to hear paid actors speak textbook Spanish or do you want to interact with fellow students stutter in their strained accents.  It’s all there.

Actually not all of it is there.  Something is missing from the article.  And it’s important.

You want to learn Spanish.  How do you do it?  It’s a very easy series of difficult steps.

1. Fill your empty brain with Spanish vocabulary.

2. Speak Spanish badly.

3. Repeat #2 every day in every way for as long as it takes until you are watching Predator re-runs on Telemundo on a Wednesday night while every other idiot is tolerating CSI Miami.

Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha exist to complete step #1.  Your brain is empty and they know how to fill it with Spanish.  They offer variations of the same theme: turn a Flash application into an interactive vocabulary quiz.  The dings and buzzers tell you when you’re right and wrong.  The progress bar tells you how far you’ve come.  Eventually, your line will tell you and everyone else that you know how to ask for the bathroom in Barcelona.

The web is bigger than #1.  Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha are small enough to handle that because that’s the easy part.  Let’s try something else.  Let’s try to make #3 meaningful and engaging and interactive.  The web is waiting for an application that makes that possible.  This is what needs to happen.

There is a feeling every new language student shares.  Every student is overcome with this feeling the moment they are about to speak Spanish to a stranger.  It is a mixture of dread and shame and embarassment and frustration.  Overcoming this fear is essential to making #3 happen.  Recreating this feeling in a language website is possible and absolutley essential to building a truly innovative interactive experience.  The fear will not be overcome unless it is confronted.

A meaningful online lnaguage tool would make this promise to users: this will make you talk and it will force you to listen.  And you will most likely feel really uncomfortable while you’re doing it.  This is not the online language tool version eating your Spanish vegetables.  This is the online language tool version of your first Spanish date.  A horrible experience that left you with a lifetime worth of lessons.

All of the language websites profiled on the NYT article were fine in their own way.  They should be used along with library books, classrooms, and private tutors to support all the students in the middle of the #1 phase of their lessons.  This new tool described here would compliment any and all lesson plans with engaging practice tools.  In other words: the world wide web needs a language lab.

This is from TED.

How do I put this constructively?  I need to eat and sleep in my apartment to protect me from the rain and the cold and mosquitoes.  I need my spouse to enjoy the same comforts as me.  Collectively we have utility bills to pay and insurance premiums to account for and student loans to crush our near term dreams.  I need to prop up all of these things and yet I know I’m doing something wrong and this video puts it all to words.

We are made to be isolated by our dreams.   We move away from home in pursuit of something bigger and more rewarding than our presence, drawn in by the bright shining light at the top of a hill.  Meanwhile, our homes are cluttered and dirty and in the way and so we leave them for our new organized and optimized environment.  Our kitchens become clean and orderly.  There are no smells and we don’t sweat unless dressed for it.   Anyway…

The point is that we can’t abandon one track for the other.  We can’t find the special Sardinian wine and sit on the floor for the sake of our golden years.  How to right this boat?  I ate Chipotle for lunch yesterday – that was stupid and wrong and I knew it with every bite.  The lives that are defined in this video are lives that are not chosen and in the cold empty space of my dreams, I am free.

I was looking for a specific book but my eyes wandered. Instead of picking up the book on methodology that I needed to read urgently I found myself leafing through Urdu poems. There you go again, Ms. PhD student: so easily distracted; so fickle. But the scandal does not end there. Bright winter sunshine rushes in through the window and I can almost hear the soft snow on the ground, from last night, melting away – gently melting in the sunny embrace. In the hushed silence of a New York apartment I read aloud Azmi to myself.

I look at the bookshelf again, and see the title: Argumentative Indian. Why do I find the same book on the bookshelf of every Indian friend who lives here in the U.S.? Is it a comment on my circle of friends? What does it say?

Is it meant to be a reminder of who we are, though we live so far away from home, every time our distracted eyes fall on dusty bookshelves? Is it a validation; or a yearning to break the silence of empty apartments and shrill deadlines with some hearty rambling? The endless adda over cigarettes, cha (not chai) and the occasional samosa and jalebi as I remember life to have once been?
I remember moving into the new house; the smell of clean walls and empty floors. My father installed a fancy key chain lock on the main door. Dada and I both observed it to be a rather excellent idea: open the door just that wee bit to satisfy your curiosity about who might be standing on the other side and yet, without commitment. The door was neither closed, nor open.

The key chain broke within two days of our moving into the new house. Just for the record, Dada and I had very little to do with its collapse. Actually, if I remember correctly, the base for the chain dislodged from the wall. And the door was never closed (during the day, and sometimes on forgetful nights). People streamed in and out, through the door, all day long: and adda carried on. It was no environment for children to grow up: Ma reminded us all. We had to study for examinations after all. Such distractions will not do. Only purposeful ones: music lesson twice a week, art courses over the weekend, walk to the library and film festivals when they are on.

Twenty-five years later I am still dealing with distractions. The key chain at our New York apartment is very strong, indeed. Nobody visits during the day; and hardly ever at night. But I am filled with memories of adda and guilty pleasure of reading: Aaena.

I guess Ma won after all.

And the secret desire to rebel, to contest, to ramble and revel in angst…?

Well, it is on the bookshelf now. The Argumentative Indian: on bookshelf after bookshelf of feisty Indian girls and their American apartments.

Though I must admit that beyond questions of becoming a cliché and wondering if one exists – truly – only in distracted, stolen moments, such consensus on reading material is rather disturbing. Sincerely, an argumentative Indian.

It’s back to the methodology book now.

Winter

I am tired of the way the stale air
lies when my radiator rattles and pings and
mostespeciallythat
it is defensive about it.
go ahead and hiss

you sonofabitch radiator.

your air is used
but I breath it anyway, but
it’s not my fault. whatelseamIgonnado?

I was just out there…
andnowImbackin because
winter is what you come in from and wait
out

present company be damned.