My mom is or at least has been fluent in Spanish in the past (she minored in college)…I think she’s getting rusty now…

I’m the same way with the getting flustered and no words come out bit. It’s like I need a faster chip in my head. Wendy encourages me, like your teacher, to blurt it out even if it’s not perfect. Her folks have adopted me as the tall white guy who sort of speaks Spanish from time to time. Cheers.

i’ve had a few close korean friends. you remind me of them now when you speak of this.

and is it true you learn a language faster by being held under water? sounds sort of like how someone tried to teach me to swim once.

(i’m joking on “submersion”, while we’re here talking language!)

I currently live bilingually. When I am really tired I can become tongue-tied in French. Actually, that’s often an indication to me that it is time for a break (or to go home to bed! Good barometer for those late nights…)

These stories of language and understanding I’ve been reading lately, here and on Jose’s blog, remind me of that movie Babel. Speaking the same language doesn’t always mean we speak the same language. The most poignant communication was between two people who did not, linguistically, understand each other. It needs to come from a place of caring to be understood.

yes, that was my class, too. no english allowed. lots of ¿cómo se dice….?

i can roll r’s (hooboy with my last name its a gooood thing!)…what i loved when i came back to spanish was how my brain remembered the sounds. they came to me as if i had been practicing them for years, it was beautiful. even the aspirated sounds or things like the soft ‘th’ of the ‘d’ leapt right to my tongue. it was like a magic trick.

but its dangerous. of course having good pronunciation (as i’m sure you’ve found) makes you sound better at the language then you are. and then people begin riffing while you stand there stupified until you stutter out “hable mas despacio, por favor!” jeje.

thanks for adding so much to the page.

I grew up between Tulare and Visalia (California). The central valley is plurality latin@. Tulare also had a fairly large Portuguese population, with somewhat more Laotian and Hmong than Visalia, iirc…

Growing up, I would always hear (white) adults lament that knowledge of Spanish was becoming a necessity around there. These were the people who were shocked and outraged to hear other people talk to each other in Spanish in public. They hardly masked it: they feared the brown people were taking over their world.

I chose to learn Spanish as I entered high school, having gleaned from those folks the message that learning it would be a responsible, pragmatic thing to do. But I was also curious. I was falling in love with language (I would later enter college intending to double-major in graphic design and linguistics) and it seemed to be a language and culture I would enjoy knowing.

My sophomore year I entered the class of Señor Torres. He is a Madrid native who retained his Spanish citizenship, voting in every election. He was a weird guy — some of it was surely cultural, but he had a personality all his own. It was universal: he had every student scared silly for their first year as his pupil. I watched him reduce several students to tears in class. But after that first year, those who remained were able to leverage their familiarity for level footing in the student-teacher relationship. And that relationship was a deeply rewarding one.

There was no English in his class that was not preceded by the words “¿Cómo se dice …?” English was checked at the doorway. Once you stepped into his classroom, you spoke Spanish and Spanish only — beginners and masters alike.

You stumbled, you grasped at empty air, you fell on your ass. But it’s amazing what you learn when you spend one full hour, five days a week, ten months a year speaking exclusively in a second language. Our classmates under other teachers completed word searches and worksheets on grammar and syntax, but they couldn’t form the simplest of sentences in speech. We came to know those same rules intuitively, continually refining our understanding, adding nuance, expanding vocabulary.

I still cherish those three years (sophomore through senior) in his classroom. He is, by far, the most impressive and memorable secondary teacher I have ever, ever encountered.

I am out of practice by now, four years later. I can form basic sentences, fumbling for the right words. But I remember when he boasted to another teacher that I had a native’s accent. (With one exception — I never have been able to roll my r’s.)

It was beneficial. There is no doubt about that. It was an incredible experience, not only being part of his class, but being allowed a glimpse into a culture saturated with meaning, a language that is so beautiful and so satisfying as it rolls off the tongue — or fingers.

I miss it.