I'm K'odi Taylor, I'm Haida and Kwak'wakawakw

If you want to learn how these resources helped, my mum learn 13 new Haida words while practicing only 15 minutes a day for about a week.

My friend say Haida phrases he had never spoken before in only one sitting.

Myself learn my introduction in Mi'kmaq with only 2 hours of practice while living on the other side of the country.

Stick around because we're going to go over that in the next 10 minutes.

Just so you know I primarily work with schools, school districts, Indigenous communities, and Indigenous organizations directly.

I don't normally do direct individual sales unless you happen to be a language teacher or something like that.

I'm going to go over who these resources can help, How I overcame my
own struggles with learning languages, What the resources are and how you set them up and use them.

I grew up in single parent households and both of
my parents didn't grow up hearing our language.

As an adult wanting to learn I really struggled with finding resources to use.

A lot of the apps, programs, and resources that other languages have didn't exist in my languages.

That's when I started working on this language pen and these language cards.

I'm going to explain how they work in a bit but first I want to go over some of the learners or situations I think these can really help with.

I grew up with single parents, half of my childhood was spent out of community. Most of my adult life has been spent in urban centers.

I started trying to learn my languages back in 2019 and some of the obstacles I faced were, a lack of resources, a lot of the resources I could get were very dry
academic books, no or limited online resources or classes.

You can set these resources up and ship them out to learners and they can practice on their own even if they live away from community.

The daycares and schools in my communities have language resources all over the walls but not enough of the teachers are fluent and they don't want to steer kids in the wrong direction when it comes to pronunciation.

So the kids get to see the words written all the time but they don't get a chance to hear it often.

I think one of the stats here in BC is in our community schools, the students on average only get about 3 hours of language instruction per week.

Again set up the language pen with all of your posters and books and that way the teachers or workers can go through the resources even when they can't get a fluent speaker in.

Most Indigenous homes don't have a fluent speaker.

Even if the kids are learning in school or if someone is in a language class they go home and don't have anyone to speak or practice with.

If you set these up, and give them out to homes with young kids, parents have a fun way to get practice in every day.

There are a limited amount of speakers running classes so not everyone is able to make it.

Even when classes are happening, modern life has everyone really busy.

Two incomes is now the norm and even then people are having a hard time
getting by.

Attendance in classes can drop as the class goes on.

The absolute best option would be to have
everyone in language classes but that doesn't seem to be possible for many people.

If we can give them already setup, fun, low
commitment activities they can do at home, we're increasing the chance that they get some language practice in everyday.

Back in 2022 I had a lot of personal things happen at the same time, including my dad passing away.

6 months after he passed I had a mental health crisis.

It was pretty bad, I could barely look after myself.

I eventually got a psychiatrist and I got diagnosed with all the things I was struggling with.

I spent the next two years working on my mental health, learning how my brain works, and learning to manage my symptoms.

After I was finished working on my mental health, I took all the things I learned about how my brain worked and I turned it toward why I had such a hard time learning languages.

In some situations I could study for hours and not remember anything.

Other times I could spend way less time and remember years later.

To give you an example, from 2016-2019 I spent my winters in South Korea, trying to learn Korean.

I spent hours studying out of this book and nothing stuck.

Other times I learned words or phrases and I still remember them. One of them being.

"Chugi-yo, Hyung-neem, numo pegopa-yo, bap juseyo" - Hey older brother, I'm really hungry. Give me some food please.

When I compared those situations learning
Korean with the times where the language really stuck with me in my community classes I found some similarities.

Two of the big ones are: Activity based learning and Immediate Feedback.

The are two of the things I kept in my mind when making these.

We have the First-ory language pen and playing cards.

The pen comes with 1,000 recordable stickers.

You take the stickers and put them on your own resources.

Your books, your flashcards, your posters, whatever you might have.

You turn it on, press the record button, you touch the stickers, get a fluent speaker say a phrase in language, when they're done, you touch the sticker again to stop the recording.

After that every time you touch the sticker the audio will playback.

These pens are fully self-contained, your audio never goes to the cloud, I never have access to your audio.

The only people who have access to your audio is whoever you give the pen to.

If you already have audio recordings you can connect the pen to your computer with a usb cable and copy the files over like you would to a thumb drive.

Once one pen is setup it takes about two
minutes to copy the files to another pen.

I do however recommend that you always have a backup of your audio files saved to
your computer.

If you ever lose the pen or it get's dropped in water. It's really easy to send out another pen, but I can't help you get the files back.

For the decks of cards they come like a regular decks of playing cards.

Think ace to king.

Each deck is a specific category, things around the kitchen, articles of clothing, colours, numbers.

Each deck comes with 12-13 items or objects, and there's 4 copies of each item.

Because it's like a regular deck of cards you can play games like memory matching or go fish.

The cards come with two blank lines where you can write either two different languages or two dialects.

You write your own language on the card and record your own audio just like we did with the stickers.

Once the deck is setup you can give it to a learner and even if they have 0 exposure to a language they can be playing language games right away.

Because you have the two different lines you can have one pen setup in one
language another pen setup in a different language and two learners can be learning different languages while playing the game together.

I credit a large part of the success that I've had with this method in large part to that activity based learning and the immediate feedback of always having the correct audio on hand.

When it comes to cost the pens come with 1,000 stickers are $300 the decks of cards are $50 each.

And our products come with a 12 month limited warranty against manufacturer defects

If you run into any problems you can contact customer support by email or by booking a video call

Every year we plan on coming out with new resources that will work with your pens.

On my mum's side of the family our last of our old aunties and uncles who were fluent speakers have all passed on now.

Probably half of my family lives outside of community.

But if my mum was able to learn new Haida words practicing just 15 mins a day after work and I was able to learn how to speak some Mi'kmaq while living on the other side of the country.

I really think any of us can learn as long as we have enough resources.

If your interested in this there's a form below. You can fill that out, send it in and you'll be sent a link where you can book a call with someone from our team and we'd love to see if our resources would be a good fit for your progam.