In junior high, I had to take a quarter of French. I don’t recall if I was given the option of Spanish or German; I just know that I suffered through one quarter of French during a year in which we had to take four different electives, each lasting one quarter of the year, for one of our class periods. I say “suffered” because French and I do not get along. I can understand a lot of French by sight, but I absolutely cannot pronounce it or understand a lick of it when someone else speaks it.
Thus, I was thrilled that I only had to take nine weeks of that demon language.
When I got to high school — which at that time in Norfolk was only 10th through 12th grade years and not 9th — I needed to choose a couple electives my sophomore year. One was already spoken for and that was journalism class because I had grand plans to become a journalist back then, but I needed a second elective. This would have been band, but I had opted to quit band — if my memory serves me correctly, though, I believe that was because it conflicted with journalism class, but I still needed a second elective.
I resisted because of how much I had hated French class, but then I reluctantly decided to give Spanish a try. Funny how Fate steps in and shoves us down a road we had no plan to follow, isn’t it? If you’d told me then that I would spend the bulk of my adult years teaching Spanish, I would have laughed and laughed and laughed.
No way, José, I would have said.
Much to my relief, Spanish was much easier to pronounce, spell, and learn than French had been. Of course, I was older, and learning that little bit of French probably helped me with those initial Spanish lessons, but I still maintain, all these years later, that Spanish is the easiest Romance language to learn (Romance languages come from Latin). The Spanish teacher was okay, and I got along well with her, but I don’t think she ever really challenged me. She did, though, make the class both tolerable and educational enough that when it came time to sign up for my electives for my junior year, I chose to take a second year of Spanish.
As anyone who has ever studied a foreign language in high school knows, that first year has many students, but the second doesn’t have too many. Continue on to a third or fourth year of foreign language and you might find yourself alone in the class as I did when I opted to take Spanish during my senior year. The benefits to this are many — extremely individualized learning experiences, much laxer homework requirements, nobody to hear your mistakes or dumb questions, etc. The cons are many, too, and in my case, there was one major con that almost kept me from taking that third year.
My Spanish teacher spit excessively when she talked.
You can shield yourself from your teacher’s spittle spray when there are many students in the class and she keeps her distance by remaining at the front of the room by the blackboard, but when you are the ONLY student in the class, there is no protection from that salivary soaking! Since I was alone in the room, I chose a seat a few rows back from the blackboard, giving myself a slight buffer zone, but she still would come too close for comfort to answer my questions, so I didn’t ask many.
When I left Norfolk High, I honestly thought I wouldn’t ever take another Spanish class at all, but when I enrolled at UNL with a major in English, I learned that I would have to take some electives there as well. After studying the schedule of available classes and wanting to give myself ample time to commit to the field that mattered to me (as well as give myself ample time to party — woohoo!), I decided to take a basic Spanish class because I knew it would be an easy A for me.
Once again, Fate stepped in and shoved me further down a road I didn’t even know I was traveling yet.
I’m very thankful for that first class because that’s where I met the girl who would be my best friend until her death a few years ago — Amy Vojtech. However, I hated that class because it was taught by a professor from Spain, and he expected us to learn Spain Spanish — which is actually Castilian (or castellano to be more precise). Actually, he expected us to already know it, and he was quite pissed that we didn’t.
Essentially, textbooks here in the U.S. are geared more toward Mexican Spanish in terms of vocabulary and grammar. The most significant grammatical difference is in the usage in Spain of the vosotros form in verbs. Vosotros means “you all” in a very informal way. Pretty much nowhere outside of Spain is this form used, so grammar work in Spanish textbooks here glosses over it. It’s there in every verb chart, but it’s not practiced in worksheets, etc.
The professor I had was adamant that we all use and perfect our vosotros knowledge. This would be fine if we were only dealing with one verb tense, but when you then have to learn this form for other tenses, it gets confusing. It’s only been with years and years of teaching Spanish that I finally feel like I have command of the vosotros, so I definitely struggled with it during his class — and so did all the other students.
When it came time to sign up for the second semester’s classes, I didn’t really think about taking any more Spanish, but by then I’d been encouraged to add a minor and it just made sense to have that minor be in a second language. I made sure, though, to never take Spanish from another professor from Spain — for many other reasons beyond that tricky vosotros.
Still, at that time, Spanish was only meant to fulfill a requirement for a minor. It wasn’t meant to be my life’s work.
Somewhere during my sophomore year, I realized that I did NOT want to become a journalist. I still wanted to be a writer, but I was no longer sure how I was going to make a living at it. I went to a guidance center and took an aptitude test. It came back with teaching as the number one thing in addition to my language skills. I didn’t want to teach, but I also knew I would be good at it, and I thought it could be something to get me by until I could become that writer I planned to be.
So, I added a teaching endorsement through the Teacher’s College to my English major and Spanish minor, which were through the Arts and Science College. My advisor pointed out that the number of hours needed for a second endorsement in Spanish were only one or two classes more than the minor I was already getting and that having a second endorsement would serve to make me more employable, so I added a Spanish teaching endorsement, too.
However, I only wanted to teach English. That was the plan. I thought that maybe I could teach one or two Spanish classes if necessary, but I wasn’t too keen on the idea. I simply agreed with him that having that second endorsement would make me more employable.
So, a few years later, I got my first teaching job at Newman Grove, and I taught English and two levels of Spanish. After one year at that school, the Spanish position at Neligh-Oakdale opened, and I applied for it because it was much closer and it paid better. I was offered the contract at my interview, so I took it, and then I ended up spending the next 29 years of my life there. Initially, I only had one non-Spanish class, but as the years went on, I began teaching more and more English and language classes like speech, creative writing, linguistics, etc.
Believe me, I never planned to teach for 30 years, and I certainly never planned to teach primarily Spanish for a large chunk of those years. However, after my initial reserve, I enjoyed teaching Spanish more than I enjoyed teaching English.
Also, my own Spanish ability and understanding and depth of knowledge grew and grew with each year. I think that’s one of the reasons I so enjoyed teaching it — I was learning something new all the time, too. I hate getting stagnant.
Eventually, I got to the point where I was thinking in Spanish at times. Not translating an English thought, but truly thinking in Spanish. This doesn’t happen much because I’m not immersed in Spanish all that often, but when I travel to Mexico for an extended stay, then I will find my thoughts start forming in Spanish again.
My understanding of what I hear in Spanish also improves each time I’m in Mexico. One time, Silvia — my first exchange student and now my dearest friend — and I were stuck in traffic, and we had the radio on. The announcer suddenly went into a long speech about something, and I found myself really tuned into what he was saying and understanding every word of it — again, truly understanding it; not translating it. When he finished, I exclaimed so loudly that I’d understood all of what he’d said that I scared the crap out of Silvia with my shout of exultation. It’s very difficult to understand a foreign language when you can’t see the speaker’s lips or any other visual context clues to help you understand, so that moment was a proud one for me.
I’ll never be as fluent in Spanish as I would like to be, but I do understand most of what I read and a lot of what I hear. Since I’m no longer practicing it by teaching it, I do daily exercises on Duolingo as well as read passages from some books I own that are written in Spanish.
On Duolingo, I’ve also begun learning and practicing Portuguese, and I use it to add to the Italian knowledge I began cultivating years ago before my trip to Italy. I also dabble with French because I would like to visit France some day, so I would like to be able to understand it a bit more (but I will never be a fan of that demon language). These languages all came from Latin, so they all have enough similarities that make it both easier and more difficult for me to master each of them. Sometimes I confuse the languages due to their similarities.
I’ve been bilingual for many years; now I’m working on being multilingual.
I share my love of learning other languages and of building my English lexicon by learning words in other languages through the other thing I write on Substack. It’s called “Cognate Cognizance” and can be found here: Cognate Cognizance
I recently opened the paying part of it. Paying subscribers will receive weekly posts while the free subscribers will only receive posts twice a month. A couple of you already subscribe to it, so thank you. If you’ve never checked it out, I hope you’ll consider doing so.
Knowing another language opens parts of the world to you and expands your life in ways you simply can’t imagine until you’ve experienced it. Knowing multiple languages opens even more of the world and expands your life even more. I can’t even begin to tell you all the things that I now understand because I know Spanish and have traveled in Spain and Mexico. Add to that the things that have become clear to me after learning only a little Italian and visiting Italy only once so far. I can’t wait to see what future trips to Portugal and France will add to my world.
I love learning new languages. Me encanta aprender idiomas nuevos.
Thank goodness for high school electives that lead us down roads we never would have traveled.
I’ll add back in the “Tomes” part of this when I get more of my fifth book finalized and ready to publish.
Until next time. Hasta luego.
Tammy Marshall