Day 1, part two -- My Language Learning Backstory

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.