America the Bilingual

In his junior year of high school, Doug Renfield-Miller was flunking out. It didn’t help to also get ejected from school for passing out anti-war posters. To escape, Doug took his mother’s suggestion and applied for a year of study abroad. Hear the story of how a young man was changed by the full measure of a school year away, and of a kind of immersion that is fading from the American tableau. Th...

We were halfway into the production of episode 13 but then Hurricane Irma happened. However, our host Steve Leveen still was able to call and give us an overview of the situation in Delray Beach, Florida. We’ll be back with a new episode in two weeks, but in the meantime, we are re-broadcasting “Little Ketchup Girl”. Here’s the description for said episode: How hard can it be to go up to the count...

Nick Staffa was meant to become a rock star —but not the kind with a guitar on stage. This kid from Long Island of Italian heritage, would become a rock star language teacher with a reputation that would spread well beyond the United States. America the Bilingual is a storytelling podcast for people who think bilingualism is good for themselves, for their families, and for their country. The Ameri...

With millions of Latinos wanting to improve their English and millions of Anglos wanting to improve their Spanish, you’d think there would be lots of programs in America for them to help one another. There aren’t. Steve Leveen has looked. That’s why He was thrilled when his friend Caroline Doughty alerted him to a fellow in Denver who had started one. The America the Bilingual podcast is part of t...

For our tenth episode of America the Bilingual, we decided to do something different. Your favorite Recovering Monolingual (that would be Steve)has a conversation with podcast producer Fernando Air-nandez about the Joy of Spanish. Plus, a good friend of the show, Mario Bravo, adds some dicho-wisdom for your listening pleasure. The America the Bilingual Podcast is part of the Lead with Languages ca...

“Wow, it’s a good thing you’re studying Spanish,” a fellow told me the other day “because Spanish is taking over the country!” It’s easy to see why it seems so. We see Spanish signs at Walmart and Home Depot, when we fly on JetBlue, and when we dial Bank of America and hear “marque dos para espanol.” But here’s a fact you don’t hear talked about much: 25% of Latinos don’t speak Spanish--because th...

Many of us dream of living abroad but few of us actually do. Yet here’s the thing: I’ve interviewed hundreds of native English speakers who have become bilingual and nearly all of them, at some point, lived abroad. Often, it was in a study abroad program. Something that brothers Philip and Cyrus Roepers, true outliers, took advantage of. Because of the critical role of study abroad in fueling Amer...

Bettina Young had a remarkable young life--a fairy tale life by the standard of so many American girls who dream of being ballet dancers and models. But the path to living happily-ever-after took some sharp turns. The constant, through thick and thin, was Bettina’s boldness. Bettina’s story left me wondering whether living bilingually and living boldly have a natural relationship. America the Bili...

How hard can it be to go up to the counter at McDonald’s and ask for ketchup? The answer might depend on how confident you are in English. Michelle Bazargan was a little girl when bombs began exploding outside her home in Tehran. It was then that her mother decided it was too dangerous to remain. Thus begins the story of one Iranian family and their challenges of becoming American. Sometimes traum...

Does the whole world speak English? It seems so when you travel to big cities and stay in major hotels. It seems so when you visit popular tourist destinations. But what about in corporate conference rooms? Like when you’re trying to sell something? That, as you’ll hear in this episode, can be a different story. Lois Melbourne studied French in school but didn’t get all that far. In other words, s...

We hear it before we are born. Before the first air rushes into our tiny lungs, before the first light refracts into our blinking, baby eyes, our mother tongue is already resident, dreamlike in our waiting minds. In America, the mother tongue for most of us is English. But for millions of us baby Americans, those comforting vibrations our mothers pour over us have other names, like Spanish or Port...

Linguists call it “shift.” The rest of us would call it “loss.” It’s what happens to the languages spoken by immigrants, and it happens fast. By the third generation, and sometimes even the second, the German or Hindi or Greek spoken in the home is gone. That’s why America, known for so many good things, is also known as the place “where languages go to die.” But not always. A big “Bravo!” to Amer...

“Forced” to go to Oxford? Why did this young American want so badly to attend a French business school that few Americans have heard of? Why was he willing to forgo his slot at Oxford to do so? And why were a panel of French professors shooting him down in his interview? Find out in Episode 2 of the America the Bilingual podcast. We’ll follow David Wolf’s journey, with its twists and turns through...

Does the whole world speak English? Not quite, not even in France, if you really want to do business. Meet Ben Macklowe, a New York City kid, who grew up as a monolingual English speaker, until he messed up big time and then took matters into his own hands. Now he’s passing The Gift to his baby boys. This episode was written by Steve Leveen, and producer Fernando Hernández, who also does sound des...