16:35 EST
Note: Allow me to apologize but
this ended up being far longer than I initially expected. It is approximately
eight pages in a Word document so if you don’t have either the time or
inclination to read it, I fully understand. I would still recommend reading the
introduction as it will make some things less confusing than they might
otherwise be for you.
Let me dispel some possible confusion before we go any
further. Aside from my smart phone, I do not have internet so I have to post
from somewhere that either has a computer I can use, such as the library, or
somewhere that has wi-fi so I can use my netbook. As a result, I will be
writing my posts from home and then entering them into WordPress from a
location with internet access. What this means for you is that I will be posting
multiple posts at essentially the same time and their date and time stamps
(inside the post, what I wrote) will be different from the time (and sometimes
date) which WordPress has on them. If you want to follow the posts in order, as
I would recommend doing, pay attention to what I have at the top of the post.
At the beginning of each of these Camp NANOWRIMO entries
will be a date in the year – month – day format. Multiple entries on the same
day—remember I should be writing on average sixteen hundred sixty-seven words a
day and I will normally break those up into at least two different posts—will
be followed by a decimal point and the corresponding number. At the top of this
post therefore, you will see the date followed by “.2” which indicates that this
is my second post of the day. (I’m not trying to be pedantic here but not
everyone follows along at the same pace. We are all that way
about something.)
Okay, now that I have clarified what otherwise might be a
mystery, allow me to provide some of the background information that I promised
in my previous post.
My Language Learning Backstory
I have a lifelong love and fascination with languages and
culture. I grew up in a fairly small Midwestern city that, at that time, had
next to no immigrant population. I don’t remember when I first encountered
foreign languages but it was at a fairly young age and it was probably on
television or possibly at church where the elderly couple who taught us held us
spellbound as they recalled their days spent in foreign lands as missionaries.
I do remember thinking how miraculous it is that people can speak and
understand each other just as easily in a language that is totally
incomprehensible to me just as easily as I can understand people in English.
How could this be? I knew right then that I wanted to know more about this.
Time passed. The neighbors who lived across the street from
us had a garage sale one summer and I found my very first foreign language
material—a Berlitz Spanish phrase book. I was so excited! I bought it and took
it home and began to puzzle out the language using the pronunciation guide in
the front of the book. Eventually I bored with that; after all, I didn’t know a
single person who spoke Spanish and I had no means of finding them either (I
was probably about eight at the time and this was long before the internet
became public). My fascination turned to frustration and I put the book aside
to pursue other simpler things.
When I was nine years old, my Mom, maternal grandmother and
I took a trip to Hawaii during summer vacation. I found my second foreign
language learning material—another tourists’ phrase book, this time in
Hawaiian. I repeated the experience as before. I studied excitedly both while
we were in Hawaii and later when I was back home again but just as before, I quickly
got bored because I knew no one else who wanted to study with me and I had no
one to practice with. The phrase book got shelved.
Time passed as I grew up. I attended a small K-12 Christian
school for most of my schooling that did not offer any foreign languages until
high school. As eighth grade drew to a close, I eagerly anticipated the
following year when I could finally begin learning a foreign language in
earnest. As we returned from summer vacation to select our classes I was
dismayed to find out that the language teacher had left the school over the
summer and had not been replaced with another.
By pure happenstance I discovered that one of the ladies who
worked in the school’s administration office had been a missionary with her
husband in Japan and she spoke Japanese. When I asked her if she would
teach me, she was more than willing to do so. I eagerly arrived on time for my
first lesson. When it was over, she gave me her small pocket-sized dictionary
to keep and use for studying. I went home and began to use the dictionary and
to practice what we’d covered in that first lesson.
The next time I saw her, she gave me a chagrined look and
said, “I have some bad news for you; my husband and I just found out we are
going to be missionaries again. We’re going back to Japan and we have to leave
immediately.” While I was happy for them to have this opportunity, I couldn’t
believe my bad luck; there would be no more Japanese lessons because she didn’t
have the time. They were packing already.
Senior year came around and I had, through sheer willpower
and much begging, finally convinced my parents to allow me to attend public high
school. When we went to register for classes, I was so excited—the school
offered four foreign languages! Not only did they have the standard Spanish
and French but they also had German and Japanese. My biggest problem was going
to be selecting the language I wanted to study the most. As I contemplated
which I would choose, our turn came to see the student counselor assigned to
me, the man who also helped make sure that all of his students had what they
needed in order to graduate.
As he perused the transcript from my previous school, it
became apparent that he was getting increasingly distressed. Finally he stopped
and asked, “What’s the deal with all of these religion classes?” As a student
at my previous school, everyone was required to take Bible class every semester
of every year they attended. At that time—I believe this has changed since
then—private schools were allowed to decide for themselves what was required of
their students in order to graduate. My former school’s requirements were quite
different from that of my new school’s requirements. But that wasn’t the really
bad news.
“You won’t have enough of the right credits to graduate
unless you can get through all of the required classes this year. If not,
you’ll have to either go to summer school or come back for another year.”
I froze. My heart sank. All of my hopes, all of my plans to finally
get to take a foreign language were out the window—or were they?
“What about languages? Can I still take a language?”
My counselor looked down at my credits and the calculations
that he’d been making.
“I don’t see how you could. Not unless you want to take
summer school to finish the rest of your classes; I wouldn’t recommend it.”
My heart felt in danger of crashing to the floor. I
definitely didn’t want to take summer classes and I was even more certain that
I didn’t want to attend high school for yet another year. I resigned to my
fate.
I graduated with my class the following May but I did not
take any foreign languages that year either. It seemed like I was destined to
remain monolingual forever. I got a job. I met a man. We moved away (he was in
the Army). Nearly a decade later, I finally went back to school. This time, I
had some say in what classes I took.
In the summer of 1993 (if I remember correctly) I finally
found a Conversational Japanese class (one semester) at my local community
college. I also took a class in ASL (American Sign Language) and I was looking
forward to taking the follow-up class when the teacher died unexpectedly. The
man who taught the Japanese class was sent back to Japan by the company who he
worked for full-time. Living back in my small Midwestern hometown, I knew
neither any Japanese nor deaf people. I did not know anyone else who wanted to
study with me. My short language experiments faded away, forgotten for the time
being as life went on and I moved away again.
Another decade came and went. I was living back in my
hometown again and working as an Assistant Manager at a Waldenbooks store. We
had a fantastic group of employees and work was a true joy. Unfortunately two
of our co-workers were college students who, after the summer was over, were
both moving away to attend other schools. It was during the spring months of
2003 while I was thinking about that and the effect it would have on our store
when it occurred to me that I wasn’t getting any younger and I really should go
back to school and start taking classes that would eventually lead to a degree.
I picked up a catalog from my local community college for summer enrollment,
talked to a student counselor and enrolled in English (because it was required)
and in Conversational Spanish. At that time you needed to have language credits
in order to graduate and I thought that it qualified for some of those credits.
(Oh, and because I really wanted to take it.)
I eagerly awaited the beginning of classes. When they
started I joined about thirty other students who all thought we were getting
the credits we needed to continue our Spanish language learning at the college.
At one point during class, about halfway through the semester, I remember asking
the teacher if I would be prepared for the second semester of Spanish after
taking her class because I hadn’t been able to sign up for the first semester of
Spanish 101 since it was full (a perennial problem at that school; the teacher
is really popular). Since I was taking this class I would be okay for the
second semester anyway right? Right?
Our teacher looked at me and said, “This class is separate
from those classes. It doesn’t count towards your language credits. Your
counselor should have explained that to you.”
I just looked at her. Not again, I thought. Why
can’t I just take the language classes I want to take? Am I cursed?
After studying my face for a moment, the teacher stood up and
addressed the class. “You do all know that this class doesn’t count towards
your language credits, don’t you?”
She was met with stunned silence. Apparently no one had told
any of the students this little fact. (This has since changed but it
hadn’t by the time I graduated.) After a more thorough explanation to the
entire class, conversations resumed again (we were broken up into groups to
study at that point) and it seemed that everyone had been planning on our class
counting towards the language credits we all needed for our degrees. No one was
happy about this turn of events.
Summer semester ended and there had been no openings in
Spanish 101 so I held off, thinking that I would try again the following year.
My second year I was too late to register again; apparently there was no way
for me to get into Spanish 101. Frustrated but not cowed, I took French 101
instead and I later signed up for French 102 the following semester.
Midway through the spring semester my mother became ill and
she wasn’t getting better. It was my final semester and, as I was not working
and most of my classes were ridiculously easy, I had been gradually increasing
the number of credits I took each semester. My final semester I had
twenty-seven credit hours, all of which I needed in order to graduate with four
different associate’s degrees, as had become my plan. As my mother continued to
remain ill and continued to get weaker, I spent more and more time at her house
and less and less time studying.
Nothing came back on any of the tests her doctors
administered. Her blood work seemed to be fine. She continued to get weaker. I
began to withdraw from classes that were not essential to my core graduation
requirements. I withdrew from my French 201 class.
My mother eventually got better and the source of her
illness remains a mystery. But my French studies were over, at least for the
time being.
I graduated from community college in 2005 summa cum laude with
only one associate’s degree and one certificate. I did receive two different “student
of the year” awards and I had been accepted into both my first choice (American
University - AU) and also my fall back school (University of Indiana
Bloomington - UIB). While searching for universities that offered languages
that most interested me at the time, I had discovered the amazingly diverse
language learning opportunities at UIB and I had also happened upon their
summer intensive language for South West European Languages (I’m missing
something here; it’s acronym is SSWEEL). I was accepted there too! I was so
excited to finally be able to study not just languages, but less commonly taught
languages (LCTL’s) also, an interest that I had become increasingly passionate
about.
The summer of 2005 I studied Azeri (the language of
Azerbaijan and also known as Azerbaijani) in an intensive setting, accruing
eight credit hours in the process. I wish I could say that I did as well as I
could have but at that point I was still fairly new to language learning and I
did not understand many of the how’s and why’s of studying a foreign language.
I did learn a tremendous amount over that summer though and it helped to
provide a foundation for further study.
When I arrived at American University and registered for my
fall classes I was both surprised and delighted to learn that, for the first
time ever, American University was offering first-year Turkish language. Azeri
is a Turkic language and very closely aligned with Turkish; one of my fellow
classmates at IUB had recommended that I study Turkish to assist me with my
Azeri and to also help me maintain what I had
learned. I enrolled.
One of the reasons (but by far not the only one) I had
chosen to attend American University was the fact that they taught Arabic
language. This fact combined with the knowledge that there is an excellent
internship program at AU seemed like the perfect way for me to get my foot in
the door with many potential employers, including the Department of State where
I ultimately hoped to gain employment. I enrolled in Arabic too.
As an Honors graduate from my community college, I was one
of a handful of students who are granted the privilege of transferring directly
into University Honors at American University each year. University Honors not
only holds Honors versions of required classes but it also offers classes that
are available only to students admitted to the program. The classes are limited
to a small number of students to ensure that the teacher-to-student ratio is
kept low to maximize effectiveness, interaction and communication. The
professors selected to teach these courses are the best within the university.
The distinction of being admitted to University Honors is well worth the effort
to get in but the professors expect far more from their Honors students than
from anyone else. It is not easy but the classes alone are worth it; everything
else is just icing on the proverbial cake.
(I was not paid for that promotional blurb; I really do love
my school!) I believe I was a little off topic there…lo siento!
The school year started; I was very excited to be in
Washington, D. C. and I was even more excited to be attending school at
American University. Classes were tough; I had come from a community college
where, had my mother not become ill for mysterious reasons, I would have spent
my last semester earning twenty-seven credit hours. As it stood, I ended up
with something like eighteen credit hours that semester. Now I was taking
fourteen credit hours and it was hard, really hard. Two languages and two
Honors classes was a recipe for a level of studying that I was not accustomed
to. One of my Honors professors didn’t seem to understand that we had classes
other than his; he assigned six books for the semester—and this was a 100 level
class!
I kept going, working as hard as I could until Halloween.
That night I went out to do some shopping but while on my way back home again I
realized that I wasn’t feeling so well. Little did I know at the time but I had
pneumonia. Unfortunately for me I was misdiagnosed at the hospital because the
physician’s assistant didn’t know that my hair needed to be out of the way for
X-rays and so he didn’t see what should have been obvious.
I remained ill for most of November. Seriously ill. At one
point, right before Thanksgiving, I thought I was finally well enough to go
back to classes and I gave it a shot. I arrived early to my Turkish language
class to find that the door was still locked so I sat on the bench outside of
the room. I felt terrible. The effort of getting there had wiped me out and all
I wanted to do was lie down right there and go to sleep. Finally my professor
arrived. She took one look at me and with a look on her face that could not be
described as anything less than panic asked me, “Do you need me to call you an
ambulance? You don’t look so good.”
I would have laughed were I feeling even a little bit better
but that would have taken too much energy. I explained to her that I had really
wanted to come back to class and that I thought I was well enough. She told me
to go home and get some more rest and make sure that I was well before coming
back to class again. She then asked me again if I was sure I didn’t need an
ambulance…
I finally made it back to my classes roughly a week before finals,
after missing a good three and a half weeks of classes. I crammed for my Honors
classes and took an incomplete for my Turkish and Arabic classes. The Turkish I
had to make up by New Year’s Eve in order to take the following semester and
there was no way for me to catch up on my Arabic also; I was going to have to
miss the spring semester.
I made it through the following semester without a hiccup.
When I spoke with my Arabic professor he agreed to help me during his office
hours and he told me that, for the first time ever, American would be offering
first year Arabic as a summer course so I would be able to catch up on the
second semester then, if I wanted to. With much patience and assistance from my
Arabic professor I was able to complete my first semester of Arabic and I then
took the second semester that summer. When fall rolled back around again I was
able to join the class that I had started the previous year with for second
year Arabic.
My parents divorced when I was in my early twenties. While I
was in school my father had a girlfriend who lived with him and helped him with
his household (my father was blind). My mother has a boyfriend who she has been
with for ten years this year. When I had returned to school my father told me
not to work. He said that the biggest mistake he made when he went to college
was holding down a job while trying to get his degrees. He said that I should
not do that under any circumstances. He also said that he wouldn’t co-sign any
loans for me when I first asked him but he later relented and told me that if
my mother stopped co-signing he would do it so I could get my degree. (Stay
with me here; this all becomes relevant later.)
I was fortunate enough to have received a Phi Theta Kappa
scholarship at American University that was worth ten thousand dollars for each
of two years. Aside from that, I had to come up with the rest of my expenses.
My mother was kind enough to co-sign my student loans for me for two years.
After the second year she promised to co-sign them for a third year but then,
due to what I believe was a perceived threat from her boyfriend (who had the
unreasonable belief that he would somehow become responsible for the debt), she
stopped co-signing my loans. Unfortunately I was halfway through the fall
semester of my third year when she made this announcement and the bill had not
been paid yet. I went to my father, assuming that he would, as he had promised
me, co-sign for the last year of my bachelor’s degree. He refused. His
Alzheimer’s disease had gotten worse and he said that he’d never said that and
there was no way he would ever do it. He said that he had attended the
University of Michigan and I should have gone there instead. What made me think
I needed to go to some expensive private school? Public school had been good
enough for him and it should have been good enough for me too.
I was crushed. I was forty years old and I had waited for nearly
two decades to go back to school. I had been there for my (now ex) husband; I
had been there for my parents. Why wasn’t anyone there for me?
I told my teachers that I was leaving and I packed up my
apartment and came back home in the middle of the semester, utterly devastated.
When I returned from Washington, D.C. I
discovered that I was living in one of the states hardest hit by the recession
and with monumental debt, less than five years after I had clawed my way out of
all the debt I had accrued while trying to get away from an abusive ex-husband.
I was at rock bottom emotionally, or so I thought.
Less than six months later, the eldest of my two brothers
died unexpectedly, mere months before his fifty-first birthday. Some six months
later one of my close friends and a personal mentor also died unexpectedly. Two
years ago I lost my father also.
It took me six months to get a part-time job as a cashier,
less of a job than what I had when I worked for my mother in eighth grade. Two
months later I found a second part-time job and another two months later that
second job became a full-time job. I quit the cashiering job and became a third
shift security guard. Again.
If you’ve never worked third shift you might not understand
this but it has the tendency of leaving you exhausted. I have no problems at
night though; it’s only during the daytime when I need to sleep and I feel like
I could sleep but my body and mind just won’t agree on doing it. Things don’t
get done. Stuff piles up. Time elapses.
“I am going to do this in the morning,” you tell yourself,
making yet another list of things you really need to do. But then morning comes
and you’re tired so you put it off, “Until I get up later,” you think as you
lie in bed wide awake. After a while of doing this you decide to get up and “do
something” since you can’t sleep anyway. But as soon as you get up again you
feel overwhelmed with exhaustion so you go back to bed. Maybe you sleep. For
two hours. Maybe more. I usually sleep for two to four hours before waking up
as if I had just slept ten hours. Only to get up again and feel tired. Rinse
and repeat…it’s a never-ending cycle that drains the life out of you, bit by
bit.
Five years and some months later I was removed from site
because I accidentally gave an employee someone else’s paycheck. The employee
didn’t check to be sure it was his and only discovered the mistake after he had
opened it. (My father was blind, my mother is legally blind…as you might have
guessed by all of this, I have vision problems too—and my boss knew about it.)
I was so relieved that I had to keep from smiling as I left; I didn’t want them
to second-guess themselves and keep me on. I was the happiest that I’d been in
a long time. The job was supposed to have been a stop-gap measure but it was so
easy and there were no real alternatives around here that I just stayed. I was
relieved to finally be free. I met some great friends over the course of my
time at this job and I enjoyed many of my experiences there but honestly it was
holding me back from pursuing things that I really enjoy and to which I am much
better suited. Being set free is a much more accurate description of what
happened to me at that point.
Now came the tough part. I had to start looking for work
again. I do not know where we fall on the list of “worst impacted states” for
the recession, but unless you work in manufacturing or the service industry,
there really isn’t much to do around here. There certainly aren’t many
opportunities for growth.
I have management experience. I have years of customer
service, retail and security experience aside from that. And now I have an
associate’s degree and enough credits for a bachelor’s degree even though I
didn’t graduate (and from an elite university!). I was working in a job that
required minimal skills simply because I live in an area heavily hit by the recession—a
city where employers look at you as if you are crazy if you expect to earn more
than minimum wage—which isn’t a living wage, even here.
During my time in college and ever since then (and to a
lesser degree before that) I have been steadily accumulating language learning resources.
But due to a combination of utter exhaustion and an inability to decide what
language to study first, I have never spent more than a few weeks in a
haphazard attempt to study any of the myriad languages in which I have invested
so much money. The main reason for this, which I eluded to earlier, is that I
have no one else to study with (although this is now easier with the internet,
keep in mind that I don’t have regular internet access). Perhaps more
importantly, I have not been able to project the desire to speak a particular
language onto a future where I need the language, such as an opportunity
to travel or to use it for business. At least not since I’ve left school again,
with no hope of returning anytime soon.
Now that I have more free time and have had the opportunity
for the exhaustion to wear off, the thought occurred to me that I now know how
to study languages. I also have the desire to study enough of at least a couple
dozen languages so that I could, if the situation arose, easily travel in the
countries where those languages are spoken and get along perfectly fine without
a tour guide. In other words, I would like to be at least a high-beginner to a low-intermediate
speaker of these languages. (More on that later—not in this post.)
Similarly, since decent employment prospects seem unlikely
to appear anytime soon in my neighborhood, I decided that I should take this
opportunity to engage in acquiring new, more marketable skills. Having spent
the past several months scouring job boards and search engines for potential
jobs, I have come up with some skills that seem to be in demand. And while my
primary interest remains in acquiring language skills, I will be embarking on
additional skill acquisition adventures also. Much—if not all—of what I plan to
learn is freely available on the internet, if you know where to look. Please
join me on my adventures; perhaps you too will find new skills that you want to
acquire along the way. The road is wide open…and the world awaits.
