My Language Journey: The Early Days

Feb 27 OS / Mar 12 NS, 2019

Language learning has been with me since as far back as I can remember. And no, I’m not talking about acquiring English from my parents. Though, that too is important. What I have in mind is a collection of experiences from my family, friends, and teachers.

One of my earliest language learning recollections is summarized in one word: Grandma. My late grandmother, due to both life circumstances and her own interests, was fluent in English, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and probably a few other languages she never told us about. As well, she had picked up a good deal of Portuguese, French, and Japanese, and her house would always have various language books tucked away here or there.

When she wasn’t speaking English to her grandchildren, she would be using a mix of Spanish, Tagalog, and/or Thai to speak with my older relatives, Spanish or Portuguese for business, or sometimes other languages I didn’t recognize to watch TV or make long-distance phone calls. It always amazed me to see her do this.

If memory serves correctly, it was my grandmother who gave me my first language learning materials. The set was a flat, but relatively large, square cardboard box, and it contained a large book and some cassette tapes. I remember the box being red in colour, and it always drew my attention. I fondly remember spending hours flipping through the pictures in the book and reading the simple words that I could at the time. I did play the cassettes now and again but found them hard to follow as a child.

Little-by-little, I picked up some phrases (numbers, greetings, etc.) through the book as well as from Spanish speakers I met through school and other sources. My grandmother would always ask me to recite the number 1-20 and other such things whenever we would get together, and she would always praise me in front of family and friends. From an early age, I learned that being able to speak a foreign language was to be applauded.

Anyway, at some point, I also discovered a black, vinyl box set of Thai materials tucked away on a bookshelf in my parents’ basement. The set had been given as a gift by some Thai family to my mother many years before I’d come along, and I’d take a peak from time-to-time to see what it contained. There were few pictures, so it didn’t hold my attention as well as a child. Yet, I was still curious.

To this day, I still remember thinking that if I could just memorize the Thai or Spanish equivalents of all the English words I knew, I’d have a secret code and could communicate with people in Spain and Thailand. (Of course, as a young child, Spain would be the only country in the world that spoke Spanish!)

I was convinced of this fact that this was all that “foreign language” was, a special code that some people used to speak English. Yet, as an adult, I see echoes of it in many a language learning system or school. How many of us have seen teenage or adult students asking for individual words to be translated so that they can compose a stilted, artificial sentence?

While I have, hopefully, outgrown this worldview, it is amusing to imagine that I considered every other language to simply be a coded language to obscure meaning. Even though everyone the world over could obviously speak perfectly fluent English, they have all opted for centuries to speak their coded versions of English instead. Perhaps, that says something about my childhood experience.

That’s the end of our first installment. I will move onto my schooling years when I next have a chance.