Spanish language learners gather to practice their growing conversation skills at the Moorhead Public Library’s monthly Spanish Language Exchange, held the fourth Wednesday of every month. Leader Monique Ammi is at the far left in black.

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Are you a practicing polyglot? Then the Moorhead Public Library is inviting you to join in the conversation.
Polyglots are people who know and use more than one language – people like Monique Ammi, the organizer of two new programs for those who want to polish their language skills. The fledgling events gather language lovers who are learning a second (or third, or fourth) tongue to practice it together.
In January, the library debuted the Language Exchange for those whose first language is English. Four languages are the focus, each meeting at 6:30 p.m. – French on the first Wednesday of each month, Italian on the second, Portuguese on the third, and Spanish on the fourth.
The second multilingual series, the Conversation Corner, was launched in March. Its main mission is to get people who are learning English to speak up. The new group meets at 3 p.m. on the first four Saturdays of the month.
Ammi proudly calls herself a polyglot. Raised in Colfax, North Dakota, she had her first taste of other tongues during a single year of high school French. On an International Music Camp choir tour of Europe in 1983, she met a tour guide who spoke seven languages. “That was it! That became my goal – to speak seven languages by the age of 35,” she says with a grin. “I failed miserably,” she confides. “But language learning has been my primary passion ever since.”
Monique studied French and majored in Spanish at Minnesota State University Moorhead, going on to teach French and Latin in Barnesville for two years. Later, after moving to the Twin Cities, she continued to use her facility with languages – including Italian, which she tackled at age 27 – outside the classroom. Regular conversations with Brazilian colleagues at NMDP, originally called the National Marrow Donor Program, led her to study Portuguese. Most recently, she has dived into Algerian Arabic, the language spoken by her Algerian-born husband Toufik Ammi’s overseas relatives.
Since returning to Moorhead during the pandemic, she continues work remotely with NMDP, a global registry connects potential donors of blood stem cells with 45 transplant centers around the world. The registry is based in Minneapolis. While she continued to use her facility with languages to communicate with the nonprofit’s worldwide clientele, she longed to connect with her new neighbors and practice her passion with other language lovers.
Volunteering at the library was the logical step, she says. The opportunity appeared last December. “I happened to run into Barb Davis (MPL’s adult services supervisor) at the Holiday Singalong,” Monique reports. “When Barb mentioned that she was looking for someone to facilitate an English conversation practice group.”
In her next breath, she exclaimed: “I’ll do that!”
And she does. Monique describes her groups as casual, conversational and comfortable. Whether a session is for English learners or for polishing their French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese, each week’s event starts with a theme – water, friends, sports, censorship. “I try to stay away from controversial topics,” she notes. “Censorship did get a little heated.”
With the help of artificial intelligence, she develops conversation starters for each week, maintained in five folders on the library’s website. Everyone gets the starter questions in advance, along with a list of vocabulary words.
All of the library’s conversational language sessions are open to everyone, at no charge and with no formal registration required. For more information on the sessions, contact Monique on What’s App (the social medium favored in much of the world) or call her at (612) 840-0077. Or, she suggests, “Just come to a session on Wednesday or Saturday. Everybody is welcome, no matter how far along you are in learning a language.
“Everybody makes mistakes. The key is to practice, practice, practice.”