Language Learning

I’ve always enjoyed learning foreign languages. Between sixth grade and graduation from college, I studied a total of 12 academic years of various languages—Spanish, French, Italian, German, Latin, and Ancient (Attic) Greek. During my high-school and college travels abroad, I eagerly absorbed a few words of several others. I can count to five in Rumanian, say “thank you” and “goodbye” in Polish, and ask “What is your telephone number?” in Dutch. A high-school friend taught me how to say “Would you like to take a shower with me?” in German, but I’ve never had occasion to use it.

When I was in eighth or ninth grade, I taught my parents some rudimentary Spanish. At the time, Dad was working for University of Houston, which was a member of CAMESA, a pan-American research consortium that held most of its meetings in Guadalajara. Mom went with him on several of the trips. My mother had studied French in school and had a pretty good ear for the sound of Spanish; my father had studied German but was a fairly hopeless case. (Sorry, Dad!)

They bought a set of cassette tapes of Spanish lessons. A few evenings a week after dinner, we’d listen to the tapes, and I’d supplement the training by explaining lessons in greater detail, writing out words, drawing diagrams of verb forms, and so forth. It was a source of pride that I had something that I could teach my parents!

When I was in ninth grade, I had just arrived in Spanish class one morning when a student from a lower-level class came into the room to tell our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, that the other teacher hadn’t arrived, and neither had a substitute. I’m not sure what the student expected her to do, but Mrs. J. took decisive action: she sent me and another student from our class across the hall to teach the class. I don’t remember much about the experience, but I can’t imagine that a couple of ninth-graders could have taught Spanish very effectively to a room full of eight-graders.

After I graduated from college, most of my language learning went into cold storage. Living in Tennessee and Texas and working in overwhelmingly English-speaking settings, I rarely got a chance to flex my language muscles. But all of that language study added a lot to my understanding of the roots and nuances of meaning of English words, so I never felt that the time had been wasted.

I always theorized that with my facility for learning languages and my years of study, if I were ever immersed in a Spanish- or French-speaking environment, I could become conversant in a month or two. The only opportunities to experiment came on the occasions when I dated guys who spoke very little English. My Spanish would help to fill in some of the gaps in our conversations when their English wasn’t sufficient. But then I met Mark, a Mexican-American who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. My skills didn’t improve much during the eight years we were together.

Then last November, I got the chance to test my theory in an unlikely place: Italy. I was five days into a two-week vacation in Rome when I met Augusto, an Ecuadorian who’s lived in Rome for the last seven years. He speaks Spanish and Italian, but barely any English—only a few random words that he’s picked up from American movies.

We chatted online several times before we met in person. I was able to scrape together enough Spanish to get through the standard getting-to-know-you conversations: What is your name? Where are you from? What do you do for a living? How old are you? What do you do for fun? When we decided to meet for dinner, I warned him that my spoken Spanish wasn’t anywhere near as good as my written command of the language. I don’t think he believed me, but I proved it to him by becoming completely inarticulate the moment we met. (In my defense, I can only say that I was overwhelmed by the excitement of the situation: meeting a strange man at an unfamiliar Metro stop and being whisked away into the night on his motor scooter…but that’s a story for another time.)

In Italy, I frequently ask people if they speak English, and they say, “Just a little,” and then I discover that they speak English a hundred times better than I speak Italian. But it quickly became clear that Augusto really doesn’t speak much English. So after my initial nervousness wore off, I accepted the fact that we were going to have to get by with my Spanish. I dug around in my memory for the most useful phrase in any encounter at a language barrier: ¿Cómo se dice en español ____? (How does one say ____ in Spanish?) Another helpful phrase: Más despacio, por favor. (Slower, please.)

Augusto and I hit it off despite the language barrier, and we ended up spending most of the remaining 10 days of my trip together whenever he wasn’t working or playing soccer. Immersion in his Spanish- and Italian-speaking world was the perfect laboratory for refreshing my skills. We were surrounded by objects I could point at to renew and expand my vocabulary: How do you say artichoke in Spanish? How do you say towel? How do you say socks? And I was amazed to find that as the days went by, I grasped more and more of what he was saying from the environmental context—where we were and what we were doing—, from his physical gestures, his facial expressions, his tone, and from the ever-expanding context of our shared experience.

It’s hard to fathom or explain the cognitive mechanism behind that last element. But I found that as I got to know him, I often just knew what he was saying to me in spite of not knowing all of the words he was using. Then I would ask him to explain a specific word or phrase, and he would rephrase it—or sometimes just repeat it more slowly and emphatically—and my seemingly intuitive understanding would give way to another morsel of certainty.

I came back from that vacation with the conviction that it was time to take my love of languages out of mothballs for good. I went to the iTunes store and subscribed to several Spanish language-study podcasts. I particularly like Notes in Spanish, which offers free conversation podcasts that help you learn new vocabulary and grammar from context, supported by handouts that you can download for a modest fee. I bought a Berlitz CD boxed set for learning Italian, which included a bunch of vocabulary exercises to load on the iPod as well as lessons to take on the computer. Mark and I enrolled in a five-week Italian I course at University of Houston Continuing Education.

UH CE is a major client of our graphic-design business, Starfall Graphics, and their accelerated language study program is a mainstay of their business. I asked the director of the AL program to evaluate my Spanish skills. She interviewed me in Spanish for about 10 minutes and then told me that I was ready for Level 5. (What a delightful surprise! I had been thinking that maybe I could manage Level 3.) For the next two weekends, I’ll be taking an intensive Spanish V course.

Oh, and I’ve started reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits in the original Spanish. I also asked for help from my friend Joe, a Panamanian who’s lived in the U.S. for many years. He’s agreed to help me practice my Spanish occasionally when we go for walks together at Memorial Park. He’s fluent in English, so I can ask him to clarify in English when the Spanish gets to be over my head.

I don’t know where all of this language study is headed in terms of academic goals or career direction. I’d like to sharpen my skills enough to be able to travel in Spanish-speaking countries (and Italy) with confidence and ease, but I don’t know exactly what I’ll be traveling there to do. I don’t think that uncertainty matters, though. Learning languages is a sufficient end in itself. Understanding a person’s language is a key to understanding that person’s way of looking at the world. For example, I was fascinated by the fact that Joe couldn’t think of a direct translation for the English expression to save time. He thought about it for a few moments, then said, “In Spanish, we just don’t think of time that way—as something you can save.”

I’m excited to imagine the fresh ideas and perspectives that will come from learning more languages and getting to know people who speak them. And at the same time, actively exploring other languages is bound to make me a more skillful speaker (and writer) of English.