I learned to speak English at the intersections along Warwick Road in Somerdale, New Jersey. My parents both worked full time, so I spent my afternoons running errands in my grandma’s minivan. She was a former preschool teacher, and she used our surroundings to teach me to speak, and then to read. Under her direction, I read the sides of trucks and buses, shop signs and billboards. She corrected my mispronunciations and pointed out my lisp. To this day, I don’t enunciate the way she’d like, and she lets me know whenever she sees me. It’s almost like I’m five again, repeating words and phrases over and over until she’s pleased. I learned English in the car, but I learned Spanish on the swings in my old backyard. My grandma bought a Spanish-English dictionary and took a course at the community college. Grandma taught preschool for several decades, and she valued education so much that when it came to her grandchildren, she stepped in the drivers’ seat.
“Repeat after me,” she said. “¡Me empuje, abuela!” (push me, grandma!) and a chorus of little voices, my brothers, cousins, and I, would repeat the phrase back, and she would >push each one of us on the swings.
I gained my foundation for the Spanish language at home, the way a language should be taught. Although my family is not Hispanic, the adults who raised me understood the benefits of being well-rounded. It was important to them that I developed strong communication skills, and not just in English. I learned alongside my grandmother, picking up secondhand words and phrases, colors and numbers, and I learned at school, too. In second grade, my elementary school’s world language curriculum began. Once every two weeks, our teacher put on a video, and a woman in a pink dress taught us about los pajaros, osos, y caballeros. We didn’t learn verbs or sentences, just nouns that second graders would like. I walked into third grade armed with my grandma’s teachings, and a big, proverbial bucket of nouns: birds, bears, and cowboys.
In third grade, the learning began in earnest. I started spelling and writing out things I had only ever been able to say. I could introduce myself, tell the time, and differentiate between the days of the week. Still, Spanish class came on a rolling cart, an hour for a week, with a part-time teacher. The course never had a classroom or adequate funding, so even the students knew Spanish was an afterthought. Before long, my classmates and I felt disenchanted with the school system and the curriculum, which offered us an underwhelming educational experience. Our teachers tried their best, but they failed to engage us, and the class felt like a waste of time. I went on to high school Spanish I with a weaker vocabulary than when I was five, and little interest in improvement.
However, my relationship with Spanish class changed swiftly, and to my benefit. Although it wasn’t always easy, I picked the language right back up. Throughout high school, I learned a lot of new words, mastered a lot of sentence structures, and practiced speaking, off the cuff. By graduation, I could create a sentence as I said it, as opposed to memorizing it off of a piece of paper. My conversations were no longer mechanical and robotic; they were spontaneous and interesting, purely through fluency. A testament to my growth, or maybe my senioritis, I did fifteen minutes of prep work for my final speech, and walked out with an A.
When I was eighteen, I gained employment at a movie theater in South Jersey. This situation exposed me to all different types of cultures, and all different types of customers. One day a woman walked up to my box office, with a panicked expression and shaking hands. She was definitely having a veritable bad day. This lady had two small children, and she couldn’t speak English, but I explained the theater’s seating policies as best I could, in English, but she still didn’t understand. She had bought tickets online, for the wrong showing, and she didn’t know what to do. When her eyes started to water, I decided to try something I had never done before. Instead of letting this woman grow more concerned, I explained as best I could in Spanish. I warned her that I wasn’t fully fluent, and I was missing a lot of words. This was evident in my speech – I remember speaking in choppy, broken sentences.
The woman cocked her head at “necesitas devuelves sus boletos aqui,” a grossly translated approximation of “you can refund your tickets here.” Despite this, she understood “puedo darte las entradas correctas,” “no hay problema,” and most importantly, “gracias.” “I can get you the right tickets,” I said. “It’s not a problem. Thank you.”
Using my knowledge of Spanish, I was able to provide a positive customer experience for someone who ordinarily would have struggled. As an employee, this benefits the company I work for, since my actions in this situation solved a problem for a customer. I think my words had a larger impact when I consider my role as a citizen and a member of a community. Someone who struggles with English deals with a language barrier every day, with every interaction they have outside of their home. I know from experience that learning a language later in life can be difficult and overwhelming. Learning a few words in a foreign language is a simple goal, and easier than it sounds. A non-fluent English speaker will never judge you for poor Spanish. They will be grateful for the effort, for meeting them halfway in the conversation, and for your patience. There is power in literacy, in fluency, and in understanding. I still speak Spanish regularly, at work and with my friends. I plan to continue working on my fluency in college and for the rest of my life. My grandmother overflows with pride at the fact that she helped teach me something so useful, and I am endlessly grateful to her for gifting me the power of words.
About the Author
Julia is a first year biology student at Rutgers University Camden, from Haddonfield, New Jersey. She plans to pursue a career in environmental law, and this is her first published piece.
