LanGoings On: Conversation, Games & Trivia, Oh My!

Multilingual Lunar New Year wishes from the LanGo team!

What’s Been LanGoing On?

LanGo Institute kicked off 2021 by hosting several virtual community events, including conversation hours for different target languages and two multilingual parties. We first began to offer these virtual events last summer, but they’ve now become a regular part of what we offer for our students and community. These events not only provide much-loved opportunities for language practice and for learning cultural insights, but also give us that valuable and much-needed sense of togetherness. Read on for a recap of our recent LanGoings On!

Conversation Hours & Game Nights

Games are always a big part of the language-learning itinerary at LanGo. This session, we decided to make gamified language learning the entire theme of our conversation hour events. With all of the uncertainty in the world these days, we knew it’d be enjoyable for our students and community members to relax and have fun through game nights while also getting in some language learning practice.

For our English Conversation Hour & Game Night, we played two classic language games that always spark fun conversations: Two Truths & a Lie, and Hangman. One of the best/longest/most challenging words from our Hangman game was the adjective “sesquipedalian” (from Latin sesquipedalia ‘a foot-and-a-half long’), meaning a word that describes a word that is very long and multisyllabic or a person that overuses big words (guilty!).

During our Spanish Conversation Hour & Game Night (Noche de Juegos y Conversación), we played the Spanish version of Two Truths & a Lie (Dos Ciertos y una Mentira) and the traditional Mexican card game, La Lotería. Playing La Lotería virtually took some creativity, but we made it work with digital annotation tools and lots of team collaboration. La Lotería is similar to the game Bingo, in that each person gets a board with different pictures on it. However, each picture corresponds to a card with an iconic cultural image and the Spanish word for it. If a card is drawn that matches one on your board, you mark the space that has the same image. For example, if the card reader draws the card with “El Sol” you would mark the “El Sol” space on your board. The first person to get all spaces marked is the winner and yells “¡Buenas!” All of our game night LanGoers had a great time learning about useful vocabulary and playing a game most that most of us had never tried before.

Playing Lotería during our Spanish Conversation Hour & Game Night (Noche de Juegos y Conversación).

We also hosted a double-dose of Korean Conversation Hours (한국어 대화 시간). The first hour focused on conversation practice for more beginner topics like self-introductions, hobbies, and our favorite clothing, colors, books, and movies. The second hour featured more advanced conversation topics like our favorite Korean words and expressions and the popular Korean game Word Chain (끝말잇기). We were able to play for almost half an hour without breaking the chain — a new record for us. 아싸!

Playing the word chain (끝말잇기) game during our Korean Conversation Hour (한국어 대화 시간).

Multilingual Lunar New Year Celebration

The Lunar New Year fell on February 12th this year, welcoming the Year of the Golden Ox. Lunar New Year is a very important holiday for many cultures and is celebrated in different ways around the world. We celebrated by hosting a Multilingual Lunar New Year Celebration, where we BYON (brought our our noodles) and discussed the history, culture and traditions of this holiday with Chinese origins. We also learned about each of our Chinese Zodiac animals, their traits and characteristics, as well as what this year will bring for each sign. We concluded our celebration by doling out traditional fortunes for everyone (all in different languages!) and co-creating a “party wall”  of multilingual well wishes for the new year.

Multilingual Lunar New Year fortunes from the LanGo team.

Finally, we hosted our first-ever Multilingual Trivia Night featuring 50 delightfully difficult trivia questions about language and linguistics created by our team. Questions included trivia about the history and meaning of words in different languages, language families, and scripts of the world’s languages. Some questions also entailed listening to audio clips of different languages and identifying the what language was being spoken or matching different scripts with the correct language, with the bonus challenge of translating what was said or written. Although it was a close competition, our knowledgeable LanGophile Ryan took the ultimate title of “Language Nerd Par Excellence.”

Battling for the title of “Language Nerd Par Excellence” on Multilingual Trivia Night.

Upcoming LanGoings On

These events were so much fun for us, and you can expect to see more multilingual celebrations like these in the future (and hopefully someday soon, we can gather again in person for them!). We’ll continue to offer virtual conversation hours in different target languages every month and will host at least one other multilingual social event during each of our 9-week-long sessions. During our upcoming Spring II session (March 22nd -  May 23rd), we’ll be hosting gamified English, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and French conversation hours, as well as a multilingual party (awesome theme TBD). If you’d like to participate, join our Meetup community of language lovers and polyglots to learn more about our social events and to RSVP to one of our upcoming events.

Speak soon!  ¡Hablemos pronto!  곧 만나요! 一會兒見！またね！ À bientôt!  Bis bald! A presto! Vejo você em breve!