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…..
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| Courtesy: D. Hromin |
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