Courage

“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

Courtesy: Ostdrossel 2018 from American Bird Conservancy
Red-Bellied Woodpecker