The “Universal Speed Curriculum” is a way of transcribing the core WAYK conversation, designed to go up to “want/have/give/take” transactional conversation in the target language. We have several examples of this online; the original English version, Estonian, and Spanish.
Dustin Rivers has been hard at work, improving the Squamish language Universal Speed Curriculum (USC) with every game.
If you check the version number (Ver 5.5) on his current document, I hope you’ll get a better sense for something we say a lot about WAYK; the improvement (acceleration of language acquisition) never ends. Dustin himself won’t be the last one to improve on the Squamish language USC. “Students” (WAYK players) of his will come up with accelerators and new techniques that he could never have imagined, and certainly beyond the ken of Evan and I.
Make your first, messy, imperfect USC, in whatever language you wish. You don’t need to “get it right” the first time, in fact you can’t possibly “get it right” ever! I prefer troubleshooting new USC with an improv, oral tradition-style, right there on the spot, but if you need to work it out in writing, go ahead.
Just understand you’ve only begun the USC, and you only ever will have just begun it. If you stay at all true to the spirit of WAYK, your trained community players will have taken ownership of it before you know it, in any case.
I’ve been having trouble translating the USC into Lojban. I’m currently having trouble translating Part 2 (Mine and Yours) in a way that will be compatible with Part 4 (Have).
I won’t get into the detailed problem, but your “fluency play” description of translating the USC has helped solve a dilemma I was having. Specifically, I was unhappy with what I needed to do for Part 2.
I’ll let that unhappiness go, do the thing that I see I need to do now, and revisit Part 2 once I’ve learned enough to really be happy with it.
Thank you!
Well that’s just cool as all heck. Yay for technique “fluency”! And have fun tinkering on your USC.