Learn with other people
Circles
A circle is a small group organised around a place, a language, a theme, or a quest people are reading together.
Every circle below is a prepared plan, not a group that already meets.
None of them has a host, a member or a scheduled session yet. What each one has is the work a host would otherwise do from nothing: a description, honest participation expectations, a host guide, discussion prompts drawn from quests we publish, and a session plan that runs to about an hour. When somebody takes one on, the page starts showing real members and real sessions — and nothing before that, because inventing them would mean lying to whoever arrives first.
Which means the thing these need is a person, not more material. Hosting is about two hours a month and you can stop with a button.
What hosting involvesOnline circles
Open to anyone, anywhere. A session is an hour on a call.
- A journeyRivers and the cities they madeRead the rivers journey together, one stop at a time, and compare it with the river nearest each of us. The through-line is that a river gives a city its reason, the city then engineers the river, and the engineering creates the next problem.Draft plan · 4-part session, about 60 min · no host yet
- A journeyRoutes and the towns that taxed themFollow the trade journey across Samarkand, Chang'an, Timbuktu, Venice and Singapore, and work out what a place actually needs to profit from trade it does not produce — and why that advantage always expires.Draft plan · 4-part session, about 60 min · no host yet
- Empires & independenceHow to read a contested historyA circle about method rather than about any one place: how to tell an observation from an inference from an interpretation from a political claim, using cases where getting it wrong has had real consequences — Great Zimbabwe, Hagia Sophia, the Treaty of Waitangi, terra nullius.Draft plan · 4-part session, about 60 min · no host yet
- A journeyWho controls the waterPetra, Angkor, Mexico City and Venice: four states whose authority rested on moving water, storing it or removing it, and four different ways that came apart. A circle for anyone who has ever wondered why infrastructure decisions outlive the people who made them.Draft plan · 4-part session, about 60 min · no host yet
- Languages & contactLanguages in contactWhy almost nowhere speaks one language, what happens where several meet, and how states decide which one counts. Samarkand, Singapore, Montreal, Aotearoa — and wherever everyone in the circle happens to be.Draft plan · 4-part session, about 60 min · no host yet
In-person circles
Only in Doha, Dubai and Ho Chi Minh City. A meet-up implies somebody is there to run it, and those are the three cities where Globe Quest is actually operating.
- Arabic · Doha · beginnerArabic practice · DohaPractise everyday Gulf Arabic out loud with other learners and with speakers who are willing to be patient. Built around the phrases in the Doha guide, plus whatever came up that week.Draft plan · 4-part session, about 60 min · no host yet
- Vietnamese · Ho Chi Minh City · mixedVietnamese practice · Ho Chi Minh CitySouthern Vietnamese practice for newcomers and returners, mixing everyday phrases with the tones people find hardest. Anchored to the Ho Chi Minh City guide and to whatever the week threw at everyone.Draft plan · 4-part session, about 60 min · no host yet
- A place · DubaiNewcomers and long-timers · DubaiA monthly meet for people who arrived recently and people who have been here long enough to answer their questions. Practical rather than social: the visa, the bank, the landlord, the school, the bits nobody explains.Draft plan · 4-part session, about 60 min · no host yet
Want a circle that is not here?
The honest answer is that the eight above need hosts more than the list needs a ninth entry. Drafting a plan is the cheap half.
Circles are added as drafts in the repository so that their expectations, host guide and session plan are reviewed before anyone joins. In-person circles stay limited to the founding cities until a named local host and a real founding group exist somewhere else — that gate is in the roadmap, and it is not moved by demand alone.