Good Signal

by Jake H.

My ideas about knowing a second language have changed drastically over time. Since I can remember, I have romanticized having the ability to communicate with someone who didn’t speak my native tongue. Probably from movies or books where the dashing lead role just so happens to have the ability to traverse a sticky situation with foreign communication. You know the type, even Harry Potter has his moment using Parseltongue. Very likely for me it started with Tolkien. He made up or adapted several languages to build his world with a little more magic and mystique. I’ve always wanted to be the one that possessed the secret knowledge…just in case.

So I began taking Spanish in high school because I figured it was more useful than French and I had always been attracted to the Latin ladies in the movies. Flamenco and classical guitar have been loves of mine as long as I remember and Antonio Banderas as El Mariachi in Desperado is one of my heroes.

At first I believed I could simply practice and memorize, practice and memorize until I would one day suddenly be a confident fluent speaker of Spanish. I took two years in high school, another in college. Then I joined a college trip to Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Arguably, and without too much bragging, I was the most proficient in Spanish of my group. However, I could still not explain to a stranger if I was lost. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was slowly experiencing language learning as it was meant to happen. I soaked up more in those eleven days than I did in countless hours of class or study time. Pura Vida.

Fast forward two years. I’m sitting in ESLP 4100 watching a man named Krashen tell me that my experience learning in that natural setting was actually the way he believed language is acquired. In his words put simply: receiving and understanding messages.

Fast forward five months. I’m attempting to get a four year old out the door and into the car for kindergarten, but she doesn’t speak English. This tiny human’s first language is German, and she is absolutely ready to tell me what to do, what she wants, and what she needs. After spending three months with this little girl, my intermittent learning and studying of Spanish over the last ten years has now been rivaled by meine Deutsche. It’s all about receiving and understanding messages.