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….