Mi Historia: My Language-Learning Story

As many of the students know, I am a teacher and a student: I'm taking classes full-time in order to get my Master's in Teaching. For one of my classes this semester, I was asked to write a "Foreign Language Autobiography," talking about my experiences learning other languages, my teachers, and all kinds of juicy stuff. Since students frequently ask me about how I learned Spanish, I thought I'd post what I wrote here (with extra bonus material) for those who are two pages-long curious.

¡Que tengan un buen fin de semana! (Have a good weekend!)



Foreign Language Autobiography

Reflecting on my school days, I am not surprised I became interested in other languages. I have always loved to read, to write, and to listen to and imitate other people’s accents.  My interest in speaking foreign languages, however, came mainly not from aptitude, but from the gradual discovery of their value and relevance to my life.

            The concept that knowing another language could be useful may seem less than earth-shattering, but for me it was a very real breakthrough, perhaps because of my first experience with language learning at a private school in Florida.  In French class, we watched bewildering episodes of “Muzzy,” a language immersion cartoon about a giant blue monster. I remember learning to count in French but gaining nothing else, as none of our “lessons” were followed by any sort of explanation, leaving me with the impression that foreign languages were largely confusing and uninteresting.

            I did not take any languages in middle school, perhaps due to my “Muzzy” days, but one of my friends occasionally shared with me things she was learning in Spanish. Though she taught me only silly, grammatically questionable phrases, she opened my eyes to the idea that knowing another language could be advantageous. Being able to call someone a potato, a duck, or “my little turnip” (especially without them knowing) appealed to my random sense of humor, and because of that, what she taught me stuck.

            Due to her influence, I had more positive feelings towards language learning by ninth grade, although I grumbled about taking Spanish (which my parents insisted on as more practical) instead of what I saw as the more intriguing and intellectual French.  I found, however, that I picked up Spanish easily, and generally liked it when I wasn’t feeling frustrated by what seemed like inexplicable grammar corrections on my papers and endless verb conjugations to memorize. My teachers often told us to watch TV in Spanish to practice, which I tried but soon abandoned after discovering I could only catch a few words in what seemed like rapid-fire dialogue. Otherwise, I learned by the typical classroom methods: memorizing vocabulary and doing written homework, orals, and occasional listening and writing practice. Cultural lessons were usually presented as mere footnotes, and as a result, I generally saw them as quick glimpses into worldviews that were “strange,” “foreign,” and annoying, too, because I had know about them for tests.

Learning about Japanese culture, however, was fun, because I became fascinated by anime in tenth grade.  I joined the Japanese culture club, where we occasionally had informal language lessons, and would often use phrases from that and Japanese TV shows I watched with friends.  Here again, language revealed its usefulness to me: I felt unique, even exclusive, to be able to speak a language with my friends that almost no one else around knew, while hearing it in the dramatic, emotional context of anime convinced me of its beauty and range of expression, which seemed beyond what was available to me in English. Because of my Japanese obsession, I attended a month-long Japanese Governor’s School, where I learned more about Japanese culture, basic conversation, and writing two of the three Japanese “alphabets,” hiragana and katakana. I discovered that Japanese pronunciation was similar to Spanish, which helped me acquire it faster, and my Governor’s School teachers dedicated themselves to making language learning fun: we sang songs, played games, and had funny mnemonics to remember words or characters. Doing all this work during the summer for no school credit helped cement the idea that I really did like language learning for its own sake, although as a hobby and nothing more.

Soon, however, I discovered another, much more pressing motive to communicate in a language besides English. Following my freshman year in college, I got a job with the local public schools. As no one else in the office spoke Spanish, my co-workers would simply hand me the phone whenever a non-English-speaking parent called. After four years of Spanish, my lack of communication skills stunned me.  I floundered my way through these conversations, sometimes without understanding a word the person on the other end of the phone said, feeling almost betrayed by my high school teachers.  If I had studied hard and passed their classes, why was I failing so miserably at understanding actual Spanish speakers?  About this time, the office custodian, Elsa, started chatting with me in Spanish when she did her rounds to help me practice.  As we became friends, I was shocked to discover that—though she spoke English well enough to get by—she still often could not obtain essential information, like what was happening with her son at school.  This experience opened my eyes to a whole new perspective: that of needing a second language to communicate, and that of feeling helpless, frustrated, and even despised by others for not being able to voice one’s thoughts. Later on, I would feel these emotions of linguistic isolation myself much more fully when I flew to Germany and took a seven-hour train ride to a remote convent, idiotically armed with only the phrases “hello,” “what’s your name?,” “thank you,” “train,” “airport,” and “she is very ugly.”

Post meeting Elsa, I began to seek out ways to practice speaking Spanish, and to interact with English learners. I took another Spanish class before graduating college, volunteered teaching ESL, and started going to a Latino church.  Using so much Spanish was overwhelming at first; I once had to leave a church conference because my busily translating brain had turned to mush after the first hour. Being the only “white” person in the room was also a new, awkward experience. I began to get glimpses, for the first time, of the subtle privileges I enjoyed because of my skin and native tongue, and yet at the same time, how culturally empty my heritage seemed in comparison to that of the people I was meeting.

Meanwhile, I had graduated and began looking at universities in order to get my doctorate in English literature. Surprise, surprise: language again was key, as most programs required that I be fluent in at least one, if not two, foreign languages in order to study English literature.  I signed up for a beginning French class to prepare myself, and every day hence, found myself breathing a prayer of thanks that I had taken Spanish.  Because of their common roots as Romance languages (and by “Romance,” professors mean ‘from Latin,’ not long walks on the beach), French’s grammar and vocabulary was surprisingly similar to Spanish’s.  My professor, Monsieur DiNicola, was also fantastic.  Though many of the students in the class were working adults like myself, energetic, funny M. DiNicola had us out of our seats, literally running around playing games and making ridiculous motions to learn vocabulary terms. We students found these methods not only effective, but a fantastic way to pass two hour-long classes. At the end of the course, I told him that he had changed how I thought about teaching, and I meant it.

At the same time, God was moving in my life.  I was discovering in Spanish not just an interest, but a fascination, while at the same time, a life of scholarship devoted to English literature seemed increasingly disconnected from the painfully real social problems I saw around me. Much soul-searching (read: lying on the floor asking God what in the world He was doing) finally led me to my post-college dream job: coordinating adult ESL classes at a Latino non-profit. There, I spoke Spanish daily, and badly. I accidentally wished my students a merry Christmas Eve my first night on the job in early November. And yet, this immersion experience here in the US, while taxing mentally and emotionally, ultimately was the best, most demanding of classrooms, and contributed the most to my fluency. I learned new vocabulary by hearing words in context over and over, corrected my grammar based on others’ examples, and most of all, had meaningful conversations where I was committed to communicating because of my strong emotional engagement. Somewhere along the way—and mostly because of the people I knew who spoke it—I began to truly love Spanish, intentionally thinking and praying in it for practice, taking the Instituto Cervantes’ most advanced on-line class, and reading Spanish novels.

Deciding to return to school for my Master’s in Teaching seemed almost a natural extension of this passion.  I felt that I couldn’t keep the secret from other monolingual English speakers of how it felt to express myself in a deliciously new vocabulary and accent; to get goosebumps from the profundity of an untranslatable phrase; or to begin to think and process reality in a different way, as if learning another language had enabled my mind to move in a whole new dimension.  As a teacher, it is my challenge to distill el cariño que siento, y lo que he aprendido de Spanish and Latino culture over thirteen years, into a format that fits with my students’ level and standards in a fun, engaging way that encourages them to embark upon their own language journey.