Yesterday I shared a 60 year professional vision with you.
Read about it here. I’ll include a summarized version below:
Create a curriculum at the Calgary Language Nerds that guarantees conversational fluency in any language we offer
Start a language revitalization business
Start an entertainment company
Start a soft-skills training agency
I would like to add two more ventures to that list.
I realized this after a conversation I had with someone at a networking event:
Start a company that offers an essential product or service
Start a non-profit
As I said yesterday, I feel uncomfortable writing such a vision down. It seems unrealistic and too ambitious. However, in the past I’ve limited my goals out of fear. I’m at a point in my life where I don’t think I should do that anymore.
So…what’s step 1?
Step 1 is to create a new course with a new curriculum at the Calgary Language Nerds. I want to make a course where I can guarantee a conversational in another language:
Quickly
Easily
Flexibly (i.e., on your schedule)
At a competitive rate
I wonder if I can accomplish this. As a starting point, I’ve put together this program here.
The goal of this course is to teach absolute beginners to hold a 1-2 minute conversation in Spanish within 5-weeks.
The topics are:
Basic phrases and greetings
Talking about your work/studies
Talking about your interests
Talking about where you live
Talking about your family
Once I iron out any wrinkles in the 5-week course, I plan to run a second program that guarantees conversational fluency in Spanish within 6 months.
I think the next step after that will be to create more classes for graduates of the 6-month course…but I’m not sure about that yet.
I think would want to create additional courses that lead to an advanced level of proficiency in terms of speaking and listening within 2 years. Maybe it would be something like:
6 months into your studies: low-intermediate conversation level
12 months into your studies: mid-intermediate conversation
18 months into your studies: upper-intermediate conversation level
24 months into your studies: low-advanced conversation level
The final step would be to replicate this entire curriculum for other languages (e.g., French, Mandarin, German, etc.)
If you want to help, here are two things you can do.
Give me feedback on this webpage - what do you think would make it better?
If you don’t speak Spanish, book a trial class for my Free 5-week Spanish Conversation Course for Absolute Beginners.
This is just phase 1 of a long, long journey.
I’m self-conscious to have shared my goals publicly. What if I fail? What if I give up on this goal? What if my vision is way off and I change my mind? What if I decide I don’t want to document my journey anymore and I just leave you hanging?
Eek.
Thank you for reading this. Contact me if you have any comments or questions.