Reflection on Self as a Language Learner

My first exposure to a language was in junior high school when my mother insisted that I take Latin. She had taken Latin herself and believed strongly that it would help me on the verbal section of the SAT. I had a good teacher, but I couldn’t really connect with the language. It was all reading and writing, and lots of translations. I hardly remember any of the Latin I studied those two years in junior high. Like the saying goes… “amo, amas, amat,…there was some more but I forgot.”

When I started high school, I decided to take French. I just loved the way the language sounded. Plus, the Spanish teacher at my high school was notoriously bad, so that was enough to steer me away from that language. I loved French. I think it was my teacher. She was young and energetic and did everything she could to get us to speak as much as possible. While I was in high school, my family hosted an exchange student from Sweden one year and the following year an exchange student from Denmark. This made me want to become an exchange student myself. My mother refused to let me go abroad though before I finished high school, so the summer after I graduated I packed my bags and headed to a tiny village (pop. 120) in the foothills of the Alps. I remember sitting at the dinner table that first night with my French host family, feeling tongue-tied, lost and confused (despite three years of high school French), and wondering how I was ever going to be able to communicate with them, much less survive for a year in a French high school. The first two months were really hard. I nodded a lot and said “oui” to things I should have said “non” to like “Voulez-vous des cervelles de veau?” (translation: would you like some calf brain?) But it didn’t take long before my language skills improved to a level where I was able to freely converse with my host family and friends and participate in class discussions. The fact that my host family had 5 children really helped my language acquisition. They were constantly talking and badgering me with questions which forced me to talk. They also loved to correct my grammar mistakes and teach me new vocabulary.

I continued to study French in college and went back to France to study in Paris for two semesters my junior year. I had three particular professors on the program that exuded a love of the French language and had an amazing way of passing that on to their students. A few years after graduating from college, I returned to Paris to work as a teaching assistant in the English and North American Studies Department of the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. Teaching my native tongue to French speakers gave me a new understanding of language learning. I thoroughly enjoyed the interactions with my students and the challenge of trying to find ways to make fine-tuning their English skills fun and interesting.

The summer between the two years I was teaching in Paris, I spent a month studying intensive Spanish at a small language school in Malaga, Spain. The teachers were great and used lots of situational role plays to make us use the vocabulary and grammar that we were learning. I lived with a delightful Spanish lady. I have fond memories of watching Bay Watch dubbed in Spanish on television with her and attempting to answer her questions about life in the United States. In the month that I was in Spain, I was able to get to a level where I could understand quite well and speak at an intermediate level.

Upon returning to Paris, I wanted to continue to improve my Spanish so I put an advertisement up in the American Church to do a language exchange with a Spanish speaker. A young Venezuelan woman responded to my ad and we met weekly to exchange lessons. It was a lot of fun. I would teach her English for an hour and then we would switch and she would teach me Spanish. She had taught before and had good materials to support the lessons and the one-on-one interaction was great. We continued this about 6 months until she moved outside of Paris and it was no longer feasible.

Given that I had studied Latin and French, I found Spanish relatively easy to pick up and longed to try something more ‘foreign’. So I decided to try Japanese. I took individual lessons from an American who had lived in Japan for 10 years. I put a lot of effort into learning the hiragana and the katakana and some of the basic kanji. I remember carrying flashcards in the metro to study the letters/kanji during my long commute across Paris to work every day. My teacher was very focused on reading and writing and pronunciation, but not so much on really speaking. He also was very anti-Japanese and was constantly talking negatively about them. This discouraged me and I gave up after about 5 months.

While working in Paris, I met my husband who is Togolese. He was an experienced translator and teacher of French as a foreign language. He has been a big influence on my language acquisition because he is a language lover and speaks several languages fluently and has an intermediate level in several more. We speak to each other in French most of the time, so he has really helped me perfect my French. With him I’m not afraid to make mistakes because I know he isn’t judging me. This has allowed me to try out new words, expressions and structures that I would be afraid to with any other French speaker. He has tried to teach me his mother tongue, Mina, but without much success. I can understand enough to follow the gist of a conversation, but can’t say more than a few words and expressions. Mina is a tonal language and although I can reproduce the tones, I’ve had a hard time remembering which tone is used in which word, much to the amusement of my husband and in-laws.

From Paris, my husband and I moved to Washington, DC for graduate school. While in school, I worked as an English teacher at Berlitz Language Center. I decided to start working on my Spanish again, so I exchanged English lessons for Spanish lessons for about a year with one of my colleagues from Berlitz. I found the Berlitz method to be very effective at drilling vocabulary and grammar into your head. Since then I haven’t had much opportunity to use my Spanish as my husband and I tended to hang out mostly with French speakers so I lost a lot of what I learned. I’ve recently started trying to brush up on my Spanish so that I can speak with the teachers at my children’s bilingual preschool. I’ve been using the Rosetta Stone software and have found it very effective.

A couple of years ago I took an Arabic course for 6 months as I’ve been working on international education and development programs for many Middle Eastern countries for seven years. I loved learning to read and write the alphabet. I really want to perfect that before I continue because I find the transcriptions of the letters/sounds using the English alphabet to be very confusing and inexact. I haven’t worked on my Arabic in a while, as with three small children I just haven’t had the time to devote to it. I am determined to get back to it in the near future though.

I have also tried to learn Wolof (main local language spoken in Senegal) as my husband grew up in Senegal and speaks it well and his family lives there now. I really need to take a class from a native speaker though to get to a good level in the language as I’ve had a hard time finding good materials that I can use to practice Wolof as it is mainly an oral language.

I have loved learning French and the other languages I’ve studied. It has opened up so many doors and has enabled me to communicate with people I would not have been able to otherwise. It has also given me an insight into other cultures as language and culture are intertwined. By studying several languages I’ve learned what methods work best for me. I especially love all of the new advances in technology that have brought such active and exciting ways to learn a language.