To Dream, Perchance to Speak

When I was learning the Spanish language in high school, I had a 'leg up' because both of my parents had studied Latin as a required subject in high school. Neither could read or speak Latin, except for the responses at mass. No, I wasn't aided by any knowledge they had gained but by the fact that they both still kept their old Latin textbooks on a bookshelf in our home.

When I found myself bored because I'd read all of my library books, I was in the habit of taking a volume of the encyclopedia or any random book from their shelves into the bathroom when I bathed. The bathroom was the only quiet place in a house with six younger siblings, so sometimes I liked to take a bath just to have some privacy. I never learned Latin, but from this reading I certainly did learn more about grammar than most at a very young age. I also was blessed in seventh grade with one of the meanest English teachers ever: Mrs. Gittings of the Infant Jesus of Prague School, who had the audacity to insist that children learn to diagram sentences even though that was no longer the educational fad. I just loved Mrs. Gittings...even though she made me read David Copperfield, one of the most insipid novels ever.

First studying a foreign language formally in high school, my original approach was to view it as a study in cryptology. Grammar was part of the code; vocabulary the other. I just loved secret codes, and enjoyed solving cryptograms and word-related puzzles. I just knew that someday, I'd find the master key and the whole language would be revealed to me. Nope, this allegorical philosophy and method tanked. I was getting an 'A', so it was OK in that regard, but I knew that I wasn't learning to speak the language.

The next approach was musical: keep the rhythm and conversational tonal pitches and don't worry so much about the words. When I actually started listening to the language, I could feel that I was learning much better. In public places, I knew what language people were speaking even though I spoke none of them from the song that the language made* from the groups of people talking together. The Mexicans sounded different from the Cubans, but it was obvious the song was in the same genre. I learned to say "como se dice" a lot to my teacher, who would give me the words I didn't know. By this time, I'd finally started to study the past tenses, which I think was my major stumbling block and the source of my frustration. They teach only present tense in the first year of study, and I don't know anyone who actually speaks in the present tense.

The approach that finally worked for me was to work and work and work until I developed the ability to think rationally without using any language at all. Little children think like that, it is only when they are around four years old that they have a running verbal interior dialogue. My thoughts when I was doing this correctly were exactly the same as my thoughts when I was sleeping and having a dream. So, I started trying to deliberately dream in Spanish. That worked. I didn't think in English and translate it into Spanish anymore: I started to think and speak in Spanish because I made room for it in my thoughts instead of clinging to the more comfortable ways of thinking in English.

When I hear of people now who struggle with learning languages, I suggest that they try to dream in the language. Nearly everyone I suggest that to thinks I'm crazy. The idea never occurs to anyone, but some actually try it. Many more people than I had thought can learn to do it. Those who do learn to do it have always told me that was their turning point in overcoming their difficulties and eventually they master the spoken language.

The best ESOL teachers (English as a Second Language) that I substituted or served under in Collier County, FL knew all of this intuitively. When Sister Lorraine in Immokalee taught her tutors, the approaches and techniques that she taught encouraged the natural learning of language, especially by absolutely denying the use of the written word. Speech is a verbal skill, and the written word unwittingly short-circuits in favor of the translation mode that gets in the way of actually learning the language. My friends at our Literacy Society and the immersion classes in the elementary schools foster the right attitudes in the students and their results are very impressive.

All of the books designed to teach American children to speak foreign languages seem structured to learn and memorize individual words. Maybe we should play them foreign language TV and try an immersion system instead? We have the technology!

* A funny story about language as song: Once at the Calistoga coffeehouse, I heard a group of people speaking in Italian at a table in the outdoor garden. They were obviously tourists, as there were maps and folders from the hotel all over the table. So, as a good Neapolitan anxious to keep our good reputation as a friendly place and also as a good Sicilian/Markejan, I walked over to welcome them, babbling in Italian. We all had a good laugh: they looked at me like I had two heads, since the music that I took for Italian was actually Spanish with the Argentine accent of Buenos Aires! (I was doubly embarassed, since I should have remembered that, since when my grandfather 'Joe' fled Italy by emigrating to the United States, his brother went instead to South America.)