Now You're Speaking My Language

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.

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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.

Dare to be Different, Mohonk Mt., NY