No lo olvides

I had mentioned early on in this blog that I started my Spanish studies at a relatively young age—10 or 11 or so—in school.  Over the years, from elementary to high school to college to graduate school, I experienced a slow but steady increase in my Spanish vocabulary.  I say “slow” because Spanish was something that I encountered in the educational setting and nowhere else.  I didn’t hear it or speak it at home. I didn’t listen to it on the radio. I didn’t watch it on TV. I didn’t speak it among friends.  I didn’t read it in the newspapers.   So, perhaps it’s not so surprising that, when I had to really start using it—as a tool for communication with patients—the words didn’t come out so smoothly.  And there was definitely some brain-ear-mouth disconnect which I had to fight to get past, when trying to listen to the patient speaking Spanish, trying to understand, trying to formulate a response and trying to make that response intelligible enough to be understood.

Communication eventually became easier, and once I added medical vocabulary to the mix, I achieved what I call a professional fluency in Spanish.  But I’m thinking about this now, because currently and for a temporary period, I am not working clinically. My exposure to Spanish speaking patients, at least for the time being, has stopped. I worry about this because –without taking into account the formal studies of how a person acquires a language secondarily or how one’s age affects that acquisition—I can honestly say from experience learning Spanish over the years, that less exposure leads to less ability in the language over time.

People have differing opinions on this, and I can only give my opinion based on my life experience. The reality is that for me, English is written on more than just the mind. I don’t think about it when I speak. It’s something I feel, it’s at the very core of me.  Words aren’t really words, but feelings.   Spanish comes in at a close second, but “close” is not close enough. If I don’t maintain a relationship with the Spanish words, whether visually or orally, then I forget them.  And it’s not something that happens all at once.  At first it’ll be words I rarely use, like the words for certain foods or colloquial phrases. Then it will be problems remembering placement of accent marks or the spellings of Spanish text. Next medical vocabulary in Spanish will become more difficult. Last, even the sentence structure of very basic conversational phrases will be affected.    I do not want to let this happen, after so many years of hard work to make this language a part of my life!  But I know it can happen if I let it, because there were times I can remember, particularly after college and before medical school, that I let my Spanish exposure slip a little, and when I had to start working with patients, it was like starting all over in the language again.

Fortunately, with 38 million people in the United States that speak Spanish – according to the recent US Census – there is no shortage of resources for me in an effort to keep my knowledge alive.  It really is just a matter of making the initiative to review and read every day. I want to provide you with some resources I find particularly helpful in keeping myself and my Spanish, up to date. 

I enjoy online newspapers, particularly: 

http://www.elmundo.es/   for global news

http://msnlatino.telemundo.com/  for mostly entertainment news

Online newspapers are great and so easy to access—I just read the pages on my computer or my Ipad during my down time.

If you’re looking specifically for ophthalmology related sites, the following are excellent for plain language based explanations for patients regarding various eye conditions :

http://www.sao.org.ar/index.php/informacion-para-pacientes/patologias-y-afecciones/alergia-ocular  patient-focused information (de la Sociedad Argentina de Oftalmología) on various eye diseases

http://www.geteyesmart.org/eyesmart/espanol/  available from the American Academy of Ophthalmology, a patient-focused website on various eye problems

For non-ophthalmology, general medical and health care information, I use:

http://www.howto.gov/web-content/multilingual/spanish-guide/health-care-terms  a great site for Spanish health care terminology

http://www.healthinfotranslations.org/  In 18 languages, including Spanish, this site was put together through a collaboration of Ohio State University, Mount Carmel, Ohio Health, Central Ohio Hospital Council and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. It offers various topics that enable you to talk to your patient in his/her language. For example, one topic is Home Care. Under this tab, you can find numerous instruction pamphlets including How to Care for a Foley Catheter. You get side by side translation of the materials in English and your language of choice.

Finally, I want to remind everyone reading this that for practice in any language, you can find someone anywhere around the globe via www.mylanguageexchange.com    You can exchange emails together, or Skype or both. Not to mention, you can make friends from different parts of the world with the same goal you have: to learn a language and bridge the linguistic gaps.  

To keep a non-native language alive and well in your mind takes a little consistency and initiative, but to have that ability to communicate with the extended world around you is well worth the effort!

Food & Wine Festival, Zadar, Croatia 2011