I submit underestimating the language barrier for entry in the Book of Errors.
Three months after landing in Matera, the language skills of most unMonasterians have not made much progress. Euro English is overwhelmingly spoken in the House, and few bilinguals are saddled with most of the burden of the language interface.
Maybe we should consider baking a language course in subsequent unMonastery iterations.
Discussion on that
We had a discussion on that yesterday at the unMonastery, with @mariabyck, @Marc, @elf Pavlik and Lauren. Later I asked the same question to @fortyfoxes.
People seemed to think that having “official translators” (a role performed by @Cristiano Siri in the early days of unMonastery Matera), while obviously facilitating things, takes away some of the incentives to go out and try to interact anyway with non-English speakers. In the long run, the way to go is probably to support language skills development of unMonasterians, rather than flanking non-native speakers with native speakers as interface.
Lauren reported that at least 10 people asked to be given English lessons in Matera. A possibility would be to host a weekly evening at the unMonastery in which doing conversation in English for, say, one hour, and in Italian (or whatever the native language) for the other hour. In this way, locals and unMonasterians would socialize on the exchange of language skills. Maybe an hour a day of more formal language tutorship in the unMonastery might be considered too.
Another suggested possibility is to have, say 3 out of 10 native speaker unMonasterians, who would be encouraged to speak in the local language to each other. This means that the local language gets spoken in the house on a regular basis, giving nonlocal unMonasterians more exposure to it.
Collaboration with Spaghetti Language
Hi,
I totally agree but I think this should be done in collaboration with @Mariateresa Spaghetti Language initiative.