Paciente: Su español es bueno. ¿Nació aquí? ¿Dónde nació?
Me: Aquí - Nací en Nueva York. Gracias. Pero, no es
perfecto. Tengo que practicar más...
P: Sí, bueno, su
español es bueno. Para mí, inglés es muy difícil.
M: Ajj, ahora
sabe lo que digo yo, es difícil aprender un idioma - porque no quiero sonar
estúpida, o como una tonta, cuando lo hablo.
P: Es muy
difícil.
M: Le entiendo.
Pero he aprendido que, a aprender un
idioma bien, tiene que usarlo a menudo. Tiene que hablarlo. Escucharlo. Escribirlo.
Leerlo. Tiene que escuchar al radio en inglés, la televisión en
inglés. Tiene que leer libros en inglés. Lo tiene que llegar a ser una parte de su
horario al diario.
P: Bueno, cuando
trabajaba como pintor, sabía bastante inglés a hacer el trabajo, ¿me entiende? Yo
sabía como decir: ‘Lift this up’, ‘Paint the wall’, ‘I need the brush’, pero
eso es todo. Ahora, hace muchos años
desde trabajaba y olvidé mucho del idioma. Puedo entender más a escuchar
inglés. Pero tengo miedo hablarlo. No
quiero sonar como tonto.
M: Le
entiendo. Es un problema que todas
personas quienes aprenden una lengua tienen que enfrentar y de que tienen que
superar.
*
Whenever I go
through something difficult or challenging in my life, it has always been
helpful to know that-
1) I am not
alone in the struggle—someone else is going through it,too &
2) that other
people have risen above the same struggles and succeeded
Of the many years I have worked with the
Spanish-speaking patient population, no one has ever talked about his personal
struggle learning English. Yes, the
patients have expressed gratitude to me for trying to communicate with them in
Spanish, but they’ve never shared their own personal challenges learning and
communicating in another language themselves.
I really appreciate my patient taking the time
recently to document his own struggle: learning English vocabulary, using it
and then forgetting it. Forcing himself to listen and use it – when he had to.
But especially, his fears of sounding foolish when speaking it. This fear he admitted is so powerful that it
has kept him from even trying to use English. Sometimes, I think, pushing past this fear is more difficult
than the language learning itself.
I completely understand this, because I have felt
this way many times myself. There have been many days in the course of my
Spanish learning that I have felt tongue-tied and frustrated. There have been
times when I felt embarrassed, not wanting to look or sound foolish when
speaking to a patient. And then there have been moments when I even felt a
twinge of anger knowing I would have to use Spanish with my next patient,
because I knew that it would mean a longer exam time (due to my slow
explanations in Spanish) and potentially a more awkward exam (not always
understanding everything a patient says to me, and not communicating fully
everything I want to say and could so easily say, if I was speaking in
English).
I visited my husband’s family in Croatia for the
first time in 2011. In Croatia, not surprisingly, the people speak Croatian. I bought some Berlitz books for myself before
the trip and gave myself a crash-course in basic Croatian phrases. When I finally got there, I did well
communicating, yes, until I ran out of basic phrases. And when his family spoke
to me, well, anything beyond the bare minimum was tough to comprehend. And this
doesn’t even include regional accents or dialects, which took the difficulty of
the language to a whole new level.
It is daunting to be different. To be thinking in one language, and yet
speaking another. To sound different. To
know that even if I use every word correctly, my accent and mannerisms expose something
that I’m trying to conceal:
That I’m not a native speaker. That I will make
mistakes. That I will sound strange, maybe even a bit foolish. But it’s helpful
to know I’m not alone in this struggle. And I know that my struggle is not in
vain. Knowing my patients go through the same challenges too, well, this
reassures me. It makes me want to try
harder, and it makes me want to encourage others when learning a language to
try harder, too.
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| Dare to be Different, Mohonk Mt., NY |
