Adventuras De Un Organizador (Part IV)

As some of you may already know, I run two social groups in Toron­to with a com­bined mem­ber­ship of 1230+ mem­bers and host­ed a total 133 events, not too shab­by for a hob­by. How­ev­er I have been think­ing of going back to the orig­i­nal rea­son why I joined meetup.com: To learn Span­ish.

You see, I first joined meet­up a few years ago due to my slow­ly dis­ap­pear­ing Span­ish skills. I had moved to Cana­da 15 years before and was loos­ing it. Loos­ing sucha beau­ti­ful lan­guage is like loos­ing a part of your past, a part of your being. As I had no one to prac­tice with, I decid­ed to google a way to do so in Toron­to.

To make a long sto­ry short, I found myself at the front door of The Toron­to Span­ish Lan­guage Meet­up Group–or some­thing named like that– about three years ago. Soon, I was help­ing run it although in the end I sim­ply did not have the time, so I relin­quished con­trol to some­one named John and that was that.

Fast for­ward two years. The group still exist­ed how­ev­er now in a mori­bund shad­ow of its for­mer self. Even though it was one of the larg­er groups (850+ mem­bers) in Toron­to, the num­ber of events had crawled to about one every sev­en months. Can you imag­ine that? Yeah… I know, par­ty time!

The orga­niz­er at the time, the one who is sup­posed to post and host events was MIA for months. Appar­ent­ly, sav­ing the whales or what­ev­er may entail a sev­en month sab­bat­i­cal. So after find­ing his email address, I offered to take it over. He refused. Sad­ly the rea­son was not very clear to me, some­thing to to with the pre­vi­ous orga­niz­er not want­i­ng for him to give up his orga­niz­er respon­si­bil­i­ties. Okay. So two weeks lat­er, he gave up the posi­tion on his own. Go fig­ure.

I imme­di­ate­ly jumped at the chance. Annexed, revamped it and decid­ed to make it not only a tool for me to learn but to any­one and every­one else. It’s all about the good Kar­ma, right? I was a bit wor­ried the group was beyond repair, but there is noth­ing that can be achieved with­out some elbow grease. Thus so far, it seems to be work­ing, my first event had 27 mem­bers show up! Sec­ond? 38! Third? 44!

What is it that we do, you ask? Pri­mar­i­ly we chat. Some­what anti­cli­mac­tic since there is only one rule in the group: You can and must only com­mu­ni­cate in Span­ish. But our reper­toire of types of events is grow­ing, watch­ing some Span­ish movies and some danc­ing. Indeed it may seem daunt­ing to those who are learn­ing the lan­guage and are on their way in. How­ev­er I have found one the best ways to learn any lan­guage is to sim­ply immerse in such envi­ron­ment where you are forced to use it as often as pos­si­ble. Whether you like it or not! Call it con­ver­sa­tion­al sink or swim or the Span­ish moth­er of inven­tion or my per­son­al favourite: Lin­guis­tic Dar­win­ism. I bap­tize thy and copy­right thy too.

If you would like to learn and more impor­tant­ly prac­tice your Span­ish then come out. Not only you prac­tice anoth­er lan­guage, meet new friends. Events are held at least on a bi-week­ly basis if not week­ly. You can­not loose! To start, click here: Toron­to’s Span­ish Group.

A hablar Español se a dicho!