“Whatever you do, you need
courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there will always be someone to
tell you that you are wrong.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
At any given time when I am preparing an entry for
the readers of this blog, I’m usually working on two (or more) potential
entries at the same time. My thoughts will shift from one topic to the next. I
dedicate some time to one and then some to the other and before I know it, a
month has gone by! A month that could have had four (or more) good, seminal
blog entries, but due to my procrastination and topic-jumping, I squeak out one
or two at best.
Well, this month of January 2018 is no exception. I
was in the middle of writing a Spanish conversation I had with a patient for
one of my Una conversación con un
paciente series while balancing another entry meant to reflect on the growth
and dominance of the Spanish language over the years in Miami-Dade County, Florida.
I was set to complete one (or both) of them, and then, a set-back occurred.
It’s the kind of set-back that is painful for me to write
about, but I feel it is important to share what happened with my readers.
Important enough to stall my completion of the up and coming entries on which I’ve
been working.
You know that I talk ad infinitum in this blog about
certain recurring themes:
“Don’t be afraid to make mistakes when learning a
language, your efforts will be appreciated.”
“Don’t worry if your language skills aren’t perfect,
it’s better to make an effort than not at all.”
“If a person sees you make an effort to speak his
language, that person may be inspired to make efforts to communicate in your
native language, too.”
“Language doesn’t have to be dividing, it can be
uniting as it helps us learn a little bit more about each other with every
communication.”
And so on and so on. I try to be encouraging. I try,
even through my own moments of frustration with language learning, to show how
I pick up and move on, learn from the situation, and hopefully grow.
I know that I’ve shared with you how the vast
majority of my Spanish-speaking patients have appreciated my language efforts over
the years. This is true—they’ve told me in Spanish! Again, my Spanish may not
be perfect, but it is understandable and coherent enough to elicit the
responses I have needed to provide exacting care to my patients. And, as proof
that it works, my patients have done well.
Because of my successes using Spanish language with
my ophthalmology patients, during my residency, I decided that I wanted to be
helpful to the larger community of doctors, nurses and staff (for whom Spanish
is not a native language) that provide care to Spanish-speaking patients and
might benefit from some of the language tips and phrases I’ve acquired over the
years.
One of the ways I’ve attempted to accomplish this is
through this blog. But, in addition, I
wanted to make the Spanish I learned through daily patient interactions available
in a guide form. I thought it would be a good idea to compile actual
doctor-patient conversations I’ve had with patients while treating various eye
problems and make those conversations available to other health care providers.
It’s easier, in my opinion, to learn this way. Instead of memorizing lists of
vocabulary, reading the back and forth speech between doctor and patient seems
more realistic. This way, a doctor in an urgent care facility, when confronted
with a Spanish-speaking patient with a corneal abrasion, would know what
descriptive words to listen for and be able to faster hone in on the problem
and its cause. Better communication equals better diagnosing, better treatment and better patient.
So, I started this guide as a resident at NYU back
in 2007. Then I graduated residency and entered a private practice in a
suburban community. During this time, I
continued to add to the vocabulary/ conversations/ phrases that I had initially
gathered as a resident. Before I knew it, I had compiled a complete set of
doctor-patient dialogues – enough to be able to put a usable guide together for
other eye care providers. I had my guidebook reviewed and edited by a bilingual
(English/Spanish) medical editor. And then I self-published the book through
Amazon Kindle KDP.
Almost immediately, I received a 5-star review from
an appreciative doctor working with Spanish-speaking patients. And though the
book is not a best-seller, listen, it was never meant to be! – it has been read
and used by various readers over the last three years that it has been
available online. It’s simply another reference made available to health care
providers who want to expand their language and cultural repertoire. And the
book’s 5-star rating has held. No one has had anything negative to say about my
piece – well, up until now, anyway.
The other day I was updating my resume and wanted to
include the Amazon link to this guide that I wrote (incidentally it is called
“Eye,MD Dialogue: Ophthalmology in Spanish ~ Oftalmología en Español”).
However, when I went to the actual site to copy the link, I noticed that the
book rating had dropped significantly. It went from 5 stars to 2.5. I saw that
someone left a 1-star review, and even before I read it, chills went down my
spine and I felt an immediate sense of dread. This is a short and simple
guidebook of acquired phrases I’ve gleaned directly from patient experiences meant
for an audience of doctors. Who could possibly find something wrong with my
experiences and, honestly, why?
The person’s review was short but not sweet. She
said something to the effect of, ‘don’t buy this book, the Spanish is wrong,
the author used Google translate, this is not how Spanish people talk, don’t
waste your money’. Smug, full of ill-will and honestly, totally wrong. I
thought to myself, if I had used
Google translate to produce this guide, I would have completed it a long time
ago! It would have been written, edited and published when I was a resident and
not taken the 8 years that it actually
took to compile all that I learned from patients.
When I got up the courage to read the review again,
I saw that it was given by an unverified purchaser. In Amazon Kindle
terminology, that’s pretty much akin to a bogus review. But bogus review or
not, it brought down my ratings. The review is full of lies, but the thing that
scares me is that people, for some reason, believe lies. Some people believe
lies before they believe the truth, if they ever believe the truth. The bottom
line is, reading that review was like being hit with a bullet. Anyone with a
gunshot wound stops right in her tracks, not moving forward or backward. Not
moving at all.
It really hurt me. Especially when I’ve been trying
so earnestly to improve my Spanish language skills everyday. Worse yet, it made
me begin to doubt myself. Before that review, I was feeling confident. My
Spanish is great! Maybe not perfect all of the time, but I have learned how to
communicate effectively! I can help others communicate in Spanish, too! After
that review, I wanted to crawl up in a hole and hide. Am I really that bad? I
know not all the phrases sound like a native Spanish-speaker, but they’re not
meant to sound that way. I even explicitly say this in the book’s prologue. They
are written from the perspective of a native English-speaker trying to
communicate with her Spanish-speaking patients. It’s not meant to be soap opera
dialogue or a movie script.
I am writing this blog entry because I want to give
you, my readers, powerful advice on what to do when you encounter set-backs
like this during language learning, how to shake it off, how to not care about
it. But I couldn’t think of any good advice. I even stepped away from this
particular entry for a time, to see if I could make sense of it all. I’ve come
back today to complete this entry not having found any great wisdom to impart.
I don’t have sage words that will cloak you in a protective armament. The
conclusion I have come to is simply: people will criticize your language skills
and it will hurt. It’s ok that it hurts. But that hurt (or embarrassment or
disappointment or anger) shouldn’t stop us from moving forward toward our
goals. There will be those who appreciate our efforts along the way, and those
that choose to criticize those efforts.
Sadly, it’s not uncommon in any language-learning
scenario. I took the following criticism left for a Slovak-speaker directly
from the comment section of a YouTube video:
“I, as a Slovak, can tell that the Slovak guy felt
way more comfortable while speaking in English, probably because, as he said,
he grew up in America. His Slovak was kind of awkward, actually. The structure
of sentences sometimes felt like those of non-native speaker of Slovak.”
My response to his statement is, So? And? You call
his speech ‘awkward’, but you understood him, didn’t you?
And I remember one time when I was in college,
native Spanish-speakers criticized the Spanish of an American student (who was
bilingual and Latina). They were basically telling her in Spanish that her
Spanish didn’t sound ‘like a native’. She answered by saying she knew enough to
have a conversation – to understand and be understood – but it didn’t satisfy
them.
I don’t know why this is. What makes these native
speakers feel so perfect, so pure, so wonderful that they and only they hold
exclusive rights to speak their language? Why don’t they respect someone for
learning, for trying? Do they feel it’s an attack on their culture? Do they
fear losing language exclusivity? I don’t know the answer to these questions,
but would appreciate input from my blog readers.
I’ve decided the next time I hear someone tell me, You don’t sound like a native speaker, I’m
going to answer something like this: Well,
I’m not a native speaker, and I don’t want to be. I’m a native English-speaker
who is learning everyday, and you can understand me, so, I must be doing
something right.
References
irisoidis.(2017). Re: How mutually intelligible is
Polish and Slovak? Polish Slovak conversation.[Video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRTuxDtzYCc
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| Courtesy: Ostdrossel 2018 from American Bird Conservancy Red-Bellied Woodpecker |
