Beginnings

I grew up in an English speaking household in a suburb of NYC. I lived in a two family home, along with my mother’s parents, who were first generation Italian-Americans of the WWII generation.  My grandparents, God rest their souls, were wonderful people .  They made sure I knew the Italian customs and recipes from the ‘old country’, but this didn’t include a knowledge of the Italian language.  My nan and gramp were taught to speak Italian in their homes as children, but they grew up to be part of a community of people in the United States that was strongly patriotic.  They had great faith in the American constitution and way of life.  They decorated their colonial American home with the figures of colonial America: a plaque of George Washington on the wall, statues (whiskey-filled, mind you) of Thomas Jefferson and Paul Revere, a Betsy Ross flag.  Despite their love of their Italian ethnicity, they believed America to be a melting pot, and as such, felt accepting English and leaving behind the Italian, or ‘foreign’ language, was the way to go.   

Years later and to this day, though I understand their decision, I am disappointed by it.  I will never know what it is like to have another language written on my heart having no exposure to anything beyond English in the formative years.  Studies of human brain development have shown that children in the preschool years, ie. 3-5 years of age, have twice as many synapses in their brains as adults—synapses that are either kept or lost as the growing brain ‘prunes’ away ‘branches’ not being used.   Therefore, exposure to multiple languages early on encourages neuronal synaptic growth.  Further, Dr. Paul Iverson, professor of linguistics at the University College London stated during his 2005 workshop on Plasticity in Speech Perception that as we become adults it is more difficult to pick up a new language because our brains are ‘trained’ to ignore sounds unrelated to those of our native language.   Without even reviewing with you here the wealth of research done on linguistics and human communication—which goes beyond the scope of this blog—I can easily understand these conclusions based on my personal experience alone.   Growing up as an English speaker and starting my second language learning at 11 years of age, I found myself devouring new written Spanish vocabulary words, but despite my memorization and understanding of the words, had great trouble hearing and recognizing the words in a spoken conversation.  I also discovered quite quickly how easily I could forget the words without regular review.

In the 1980s, the opportunity to study a second language was not common in elementary schools.  I consider myself lucky that my school offered Spanish to seventh graders. After acquiring a basic vocabulary (televisión, gato, libro, escuela) and rudimentary understanding of pronunciation (it’s not “Ramon”, it’s “R-r-r-r-r-ramón”!), I continued my studies in high school which focused more on grammar and speaking/listening skills.  By the time I got to college, I took literature classes and was reading (or at best, attempting to read, struggling to understand) authors like Carmen LaForet, Carme Riera and Rosa Montero.  Still, I was light-years ahead in reading and writing Spanish than in speaking and understanding it spoken.  I tried to listen to it when I could—on the radio, or on T.V.  There was a Spanish-speaking ‘telenovela’ I liked called “Vivo por Elena”.  The storyline was essentially about a good-hearted rags to riches woman (Elena, of course) who conquers adversity, rises up against human pettiness and just so happens to win the heart of a desirable eligible bachelor judge (Saúl Lisazo—need I say more?)  My philosophy was, let me listen to things in Spanish that I would in English—things that interest me—in the hopes that the interest and desire to hear what the speaker had to say would help me overcome the struggle to understand what was being said.  My philosophy only partly worked. And only partly, because Spanish just wasn’t an “everyday” thing for me. It was what I read in school. It was what I studied to pass a test. It was something I clicked on the TV and could quickly click off when my head started to ache from sharp accents and rolled r’s that I just couldn’t translate fast enough. 

One of the many things my gramp did teach me was that a tool that’s not used gets rusty, and in many ways the mind can experience a similar thing. I needed to find a way to make Spanish a more integral part of my life, if I wanted to progress in the language AND simultaneously prevent myself from forgetting the words I already learned.   As an interesting side note, my grandfather who I previously told you was raised speaking only Italian and lived his adult life speaking only English, well, he was stationed in Agra, India for two years during WWII.  He returned to the US in 1945 speaking Hindi!  It’s amazing how life will take you places and teach you things you never thought you’d learn!  I eventually picked up a few phrases from him, but that’s a story for another time….

The Why--- the When & the How to follow

I decided to create this language blog because 1) I love words, no matter the language (yes, I am a geek) & 2) I want to share my experience as a native English speaker learning Spanish as a second language and how that has impacted my professional life working in the medical field—specifically ophthalmology.  I hope to impart to you ( 'you' meaning, another eye care professional, or someone learning Spanish, or someone simply interested in how the adult mind acquires a non-native language, or someone who accidentally stumbles across this blog and has nothing better to do but to read it) some of the tips I’ve learned along the way in my language learning and how I’ve improved my skills over the years.

A recent patient encounter comes to mind:

Patient: Doctora, una pregunta más-

Me: Claro, ¿sí?

P: No puedo leer con mis lentes. Compre ciento cincuenta, y con ellos, las palabras en la página son empañadas.

Me: Sí.  Desafortunadamente, ciento cincuenta es tan débil para Ud. Necesita DOSciento cincuenta. A ver…  (putting a trial frame of  +2.50 readers on the patient)

P:  Ahh sí, todo es claro ahora.

Me: Y recuerda Ud, puede comprarlos sin receta en, por ejemplo, Rite Aid o CVS—en la area que vende lentes.

P: Sí, gracias doctora—he visitado otros médicos, pero me gustan esta oficina y Ud, porque puede comprenderme—puedo decirle como me siento, y me entiende.

Me: Gracias—bueno, es un placer como es usual. Regrese Ud. por otro examen en más o menos un año.

P: Gracias, muy agradecida.

This is a pretty typical conversation that I’ll have with my patients and though such an interaction is easy and ordinary for me now, it took a long time to get where I am today in the Spanish language.  A quick summary of the discussion is as follows:

A patient tells me at the end of the encounter that they have one more question to ask.  The readers that they have at home, +1.50 magnifiers they bought, are not strong enough to read fine print. I tell the patient (without getting into too much detail, but based on her age) her current readers are not appropriate for her—she needs +2.50 and I give her a pair to try out. She is pleased, she can see with them. I tell her she doesn’t need a prescription, she can pick them up in the eyeglass section of a local pharmacy. In the end, she tells me (and this is something I hear often from patients I speak with in Spanish) that she has been to other doctors, but appreciates seeing me because I understand her and she feels more comfortable communicating with a doctor who can do that.

Ever since I was a little kid, I would look at the written print of other languages in extreme fascination.  Like the Cyrillic of Russian—gorgeous writing, and I’d think, how the heck do people read that?? It’s nothing like the English alphabet! I was entranced by the beauty of the accent marks in French or Spanish or Italian. I was shocked at the string of consonants in Polish and mesmerized by the characters in Chinese.   Even at a young age, we’re talking 7, 8, 9 years of age, I felt like knowing another language must be like knowing a secret code. Something you could use to communicate with other people—only certain other people who could understand it—and no one on the ‘outside’ would know what was going on. That to me was cool! (Again, insert geek)  My initial attempt at such coolness was creating a legend of the English alphabet and replacing the letters with little hieroglyphic symbols (triangles, squares, lines, dots)  that I would reveal only to my closest friends. This way, we could pass notes to each other written in “hieroglyphics” that we then had to decode, and this ensured that no one else could pick up the passed note and understand it!  It was my first foray into code, language, espionage—whatever, but it was just so darned cool!  Only a few years later would I start formal secondary language learning in elementary school.  How that translates into what I know today is a story yet to come…..

Courtesy: D. Hromin