54. Speaking Japanese & Spanish

Speaking Tongues

English - April 26, 2021 11:00 - 57 minutes - 53.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 26 ratings
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Next Episode: 55. Speaking Hawaiian with Hālau ʻŌlelo

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Speaking Tongues- the podcast in conversation with multilinguals. This week, I’m chatting with my guest Errol aka Morenita Mommy about Japanese and Spanish.

I loved this conversation and Errol and I talked for hours and hours. She’s such a fantastic storyteller! We talked about her growing up in Houston Texas and how the Japanese language came into her life. She tells us about learning Japanese in school and how her mom was so supportive of her ambitions with the language

Errol talks to us about going to Japan for the first time and how that experience brought some unexpected challenges and how she was able to navigate them including getting lost in Japan, life with her host family and dealing with meeting people in Tokyo. She also tells us how she began learning and speaking Spanish with her husband and her young son back here in the US.

What I truly enjoy about talking with Errol is how she places importance on talking about race and blackness in language learning. I think that black language learners are underrepresented in the language community and we often don’t have ways to talk about the issues that we face and the parts of ourselves and our community that matter to us - in our other languages. To this end, Errol has written a fantastic book called Melanintro to Language, a guide to help those of us raising children bilingual and integrating vocabulary about race and blackness into Japanese and Spanish conversations. This book is so helpful for anyone looking to talk about race in their language learnings and her book is available for purchase through the link in the show notes.

Big thank you to Errol for this conversation and for telling your story and sharing your journey through Japanese and Spanish. I will be setting up a Patreon soon with extras that didn’t make it into the final conversations so stay tuned for that because Errol and I talked about so much more than what you will hear in this episode. If you enjoy this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the Speaking Tongues Podcast on Apple Podcasts so that other language lovers like ourselves can find the show! And, If you’ve been a long time listener of the show or a recent listener, you can now support the show on Buy Me a Coffee dot com. Links to all platforms are in the show notes!

To Find Errol

Instagram: @morenitamommy

To purchase her book, Melanintro to Languages: https://morenitamommy.com/melanin/