On Language Learning

I have done my fair share of learning languages. I have spent weeks of my life studying subjects and pronouns and indirect object pronouns. I shudder to think of the quantity of trees that died to make it possible for me to have conjugated so many verbs in so many tenses on so many charts during my time in language classrooms.

Studying language has been fundamental to my development as a person. Studying language (not just Spanish, but all the other languages that I've touched on in between, too) has changed the way that I view the world, and the words that I use to describe the world. It has altered my perceptions of big ideas like "culture" and "individualism." I think it's more than fair to say that if I hadn't spent so much of my life studying language, I would not be the same person I am today. If I hadn't spent so much of my life studying language, I'm certain I wouldn't be where I am today, trying to impart the language learning experience to Chilean students. I really, really believe that understanding somebody's native words is a huge part of understanding them, and this, for me, makes language learning more than important; it makes learning a language fundamental to learning about and understanding our fellow human beings.

Perhaps because I spend a large chunk of my time in front of whiteboards, writing definitions and verb schemas over and over again and deciphering my students' facial expressions (is that confusion or boredom?), I've been thinking a lot lately about the process of learning a language, and how different it is from teaching a language.

We all owe a lot to our teachers. Everybody has some teacher (formal or not) from some point in their life who inspired them to work just a little bit harder, or dream just a little bit bigger.

When I remember learning Spanish, there's one teacher I always remember: Señora Jespersen. Mrs. Jespersen did not inspire me. She did not particularly encourage me, either. She was not a coddler, and did not appreciate whining. She was straightforward and strict; I dreaded going to her class, because I knew it would be difficult and exhausting. But I went. Somehow, this little Colombian woman made me feel so incapable and stupid that I fought back by learning.

In retrospect, Sra. Jespersen was never mean. She never told me that I was incapable or stupid; she was actually a very nice lady. But it was her mission to make us learn Spanish and learn it well.

When people ask now where I learned my Spanish, I usually say Chile, because studying abroad here taught me to express myself fluidly, without particular mental strain. But this isnt entirely fair: the teacher who really taught me how to manuever in the language, which tenses should be used when, how to read a paragraph without a dictionary, and where those damn accent marks went, was Sra. Jespersen. Her class laid a foundation that I didn't really build on until I got here in 2007, but which served me extremely well until then, and which continues to serve me well today.

Sra. Jespersen recently had her leg amputated; she had cancer that had sunk into her marrow. So it goes.

I am no Sra. Jespersen. I do not make my students repeat verb conjugations endlessly on pieces of lined and labelled paper, and I certainly don't test their spelling unless the curriculum calls for it. My students will never love me the same way I love Sra Jespersen--with a grudging, grateful admiration--because I don't make their brains hurt the same way she made mine hurt. I wasn't hired to teach the same way she did.

When I stand in front of the whiteboard, repeating iterations of the verbs "to sing" and "to dance," I can't help thinking about her, though. Did the words melt together into nonsense for her like they do for me? After the third person singular, I stop believing that "sing" is actually a word; it starts to look like garbled nonsense script on the board, rather than a series of words. I start to lose track of the parts of speech and their meanings. My own language becomes disjointed and nonsensical.

I don't remember this when I was learning language. I remember conjugating the verb "hablar" in all sixteen forms and being acutely aware that the word I was conjugating meant "to talk". I wasn't just writing disjointed letters, I was writing and learning meaning.

It's just so very, very odd, feeling like you're losing your grip on your own native tongue through the endless, mindless repetition of... your native tongue.