Inspiring Conversations with Casey Pierce of The Language Nook

Today we’d like to introduce you to Casey Pierce.

Casey, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
The Language Nook started at 3am. Not metaphorically — I mean I was literally sitting in my daughter’s nursery in the middle of the night, rocking her back to sleep with my phone in my hand, scrolling social media, reading research papers on second language acquisition, and looking for any parent who had figured out how to raise a bilingual child without speaking the language themselves.

I always wanted to learn Mandarin, but had convinced myself I’d waited too long to learn it. So I made a quiet promise that my daughter wouldn’t have to wait. And the research is clear: the early years are a uniquely powerful window, especially for learning a tonal language like Mandarin, where early exposure shapes how children hear and reproduce sounds that change meaning. So I looked for a local immersion program in Athens. There wasn’t one. I didn’t have much luck finding a nanny fluent in Mandarin either. So as a heavily sleep-deprived, determined first-time mom, I decided I would just build what I needed for my child.

Luckily, being in Athens meant I had direct access to the amazing students at the University of Georgia. I reached out to fluent Mandarin-speaking UGA students and invited them to play with my daughter. I designed the activities, they brought the language. A few weeks in, my daughter one morning walked up to our dogs, Denzel and Idris, and said hello to them in Mandarin. Completely unprompted. And that was the moment I knew what I was creating was working.

And it wasn’t just for her. It was for every family who didn’t know where to start teaching their own child a second language. That program became The Language Nook, a play-based Mandarin immersion program for children ages 1 to 4, built on second language acquisition research and early childhood development science. Sessions are led by native and heritage Mandarin-speaking instructors and designed around the neuroscience of early phonology and tonal perception, because that’s where language actually takes root. The Language Nook also offers take-home materials — activities, songs, parent resources — to help families create language-rich homes so that joyful exposure continues beyond just the playgroup.

Those early sessions were chaotic, but in the best way. Joyful, messy, wonderfully loud. Toddlers who seemed unsure one week would be singing Mandarin songs the next, then going home and repeating them to their parents. Those parent texts letting me know their child said a word or phrase in Mandarin at home would light up my entire day. One of my UGA instructors became our unofficial resident Mandarin pop singer. He helped me translate original lyrics in Mandarin to familiar children song melodies and recorded the songs. I think we produced some bops, and the kids love it.

Behind the scenes, I was pulling late nights of a very different kind. Once upon a time, late nights meant finishing ungraded papers or a manuscript revision. Now they meant me and my Cricut machine with Bravo playing in the background, creating sticker sheets, paper doll props and animal cutouts. I was making homemade playdough for pretend dumpling-making sessions. I was setting up sensory play for the following week. I had to laugh at myself more than once, but I have loved every single second of it.

Building it, though, didn’t happen in a vacuum. That season of my life leading up to launching The Language Nook was a lot. Prior to moving to Athens, I had stepped away from my career as a tenure-track professor at the University of Michigan — a role I had worked incredibly hard to earn. My husband’s career as a hospital executive had taken us from Michigan to Florida, and for about a year I was flying back and forth between the two states. Eventually I had to be honest with myself: that pace wasn’t sustainable, and something had to give. Resigning opened up time I didn’t expect — time I spent in California with my grandmother as she became ill, and later with my father, who was battling cancer. He passed away last year in August 2025. As devastating as those losses were, I have no regrets. I was able to be present and grieve in a way my old life simply wouldn’t have allowed.

When my husband accepted a job as President & CEO of Trinity Health Georgia, we eventually landed in Athens, which was a full-circle moment I wasn’t quite prepared for emotionally. The last time I lived in Georgia, I was fifteen years old and had just lost my mother. Now I was back in Georgia decades later, sans any Southern sensibilities I had from my youth, pregnant with my daughter, and on the threshold of becoming a mother myself. Bittersweet is the only word for it.

So there I was: new city, new chapter, new baby, and a new identity I was still figuring out. The 3am bleary-eyed research sessions in my daughter’s rocking chair weren’t just about language learning. They were a way of staying connected to the part of me that loved scholarship, ideas, the challenge of figuring out something new and complex. That researcher in me hadn’t disappeared just because I had stepped away from academia. In the words of the great scholar LL Cool J: “Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years.”

My dad loved Star Wars and called himself a Jedi, which he claimed made me the “daughter of a Jedi.” My grandmother, a feisty and strong woman, always said it was mind over matter. I kept coming back to their words as I built The Language Nook, a business I wasn’t, by any traditional definition, supposed to be able to build. I learned German and Spanish in school, and for the amount of K-dramas I watch, I should be fluent in Korean. I don’t speak Mandarin. But I knew I could leverage my research skills for business, I knew the language gap was real for families like mine, and I knew I could build something practical that was also rooted in evidence.

I had always told myself I would start a business after tenure. After kids. After whatever milestone was next. Grief has a way of quietly dissolving the “after.” The Language Nook launched in February 2026 on my dad’s birthday. I didn’t plan it that way. The venue, the instructor schedules, the timeline just all aligned on that day. I’ve decided to take that as a sign my father the Jedi approves.

It turns out grief doesn’t just take things from you. Sometimes it hands you something too. This business carries all of them with it: my mother, my grandmother, my father. And with their legacies carrying me forward, I am building it for my daughter, and for every family who has ever wanted this for their child and didn’t know where to start.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The hardest part of building The Language Nook has been learning how to wear every hat at once when time and energy are already stretched thin. CEO, curriculum director, marketing team, admin, finance. It all happens simultaneously, and at this beginning chapter of my entrepreneurial journey, it falls entirely on you.

But what has helped me navigate these challenges is the Athens community itself. This community has surprised me in the best way. As I have created my new village and connected with other entrepreneurs and professionals here, I have been able to start handing off some of those hats to people who are genuinely excellent at what they do. Having access to the amazing University of Georgia community has been instrumental for launching my business. The UGA students who work with me as Mandarin fluent playgroup instructors and curriculum specialists have been incredible to work with.

There is also the question people are often too polite to ask: how do you run a Mandarin immersion program when you don’t speak Mandarin? It is a fair question, and one I have wrestled with. Although my formal research background is in organizational science and communication studies, I have immersed myself in the literature on second language acquisition, early childhood development, and the neuroscience of language learning, and that expertise shapes every decision about how the curriculum is built and how sessions are designed.

But honestly? Not speaking Mandarin has become one of my most unexpected assets. It means I built this program from the perspective of the parent who needed it, not the expert who already had it. I can sit across from a family that feels overwhelmed and tell them from personal experience that you do not have to speak the language to give your child this foundation. As it turns out, one of the most important hats I wear isn’t founder or director. It’s the parent who needed this program and decided to build it herself.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about The Language Nook?
The Language Nook is a play-based Mandarin immersion playgroup for children ages 1 to 4, based in Athens, Georgia. We bring fluent and heritage Mandarin-speaking instructors, recruited from the University of Georgia’s Chinese language and cultural communities, into a joyful, sensory-rich setting where young children absorb language the way their brains are actually designed to: through songs, movement, play, and relationship.

Every session is grounded in second language acquisition research and early childhood development science. That grounding is how every curriculum decision gets made, from vocabulary sequencing to the songs we choose to the take-home materials families receive after each session. Because Mandarin is a tonal language, structurally different from English in ways that make early exposure especially significant, The Language Nook is built specifically for what Mandarin acquisition requires, rather than adapted from a generic bilingual template.

We are also built for the family that does not speak Mandarin at home, which is most of our families. You do not need a Mandarin background to give your child this foundation.

What I am most proud of, brand-wise, is that The Language Nook feels like something that was made with real intention. The curriculum, the take-home materials, the song recordings families can play in the car or at bedtime: every touchpoint is designed to work together, so that what happens in the playgroup extends into daily life in simple, sustainable ways. I originally designed The Language Nook for my own daughter, so the attention to detail that goes into the program design genuinely comes from a mother’s care.

We are currently expanding into a partnership model with early childhood centers and daycares, bringing Mandarin immersion directly into the childcare day so that families whose children are already enrolled can access it without coordinating a separate activity or rearranging their schedule. Digital products and parent resources are also in development, with the goal of making this accessible well beyond Athens.

At The Language Nook, we believe small children are capable of big things. Little voices. Big world.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
My favorite childhood memory is a camping trip my dad and stepmom took us on one summer in California. It was me and my siblings — four kids total — piled into a camper van, heading somewhere outdoors to fish, roast marshmallows and just enjoy all the outdoorsy fun things you do when you camp.

The way I remember it, the trip was perfect.

Years later, as an adult, I brought it up to my dad and he nearly fell over laughing. His version of the same trip included all the frantic prep it took to plan the trip, the camper van breaking down at a gas station for hours with four rambunctious kids in the summer heat, completely unaware that we were stranded. We apparently thought we were just camping at the gas station. A very long pit stop.

I love that story because it holds something true: children have a gift for experiencing the joy that adults are too stressed to see. He was managing a crisis. We were having the time of our lives.

It is one of the reasons I think so much about the experiences we create for the children who come to The Language Nook. They are absorbing everything through play as they learn something new. They do not need it to be perfect. They need to feel like something was made just for them. Those are the moments children carry with them forever. The ones that felt ordinary at the time and turned out to be everything.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thelanguagenook.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelanguagenook_
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseypiercephd

Image Credits
Sara Wooten, Evermore Photo Co