Joe Hablo

“No estoy seguro si es posible aprender una lengua nueva a mi edad.”
Or,
“I’m not sure if it’s possible to learn a new language at my age.” Probably with a few errors illustrating my point. (Just edited to correct a few errors even I could see.)

This comment was part of a short speech of introduction I made the last time I was in a Spanish class, about two years ago. The class was one in the first-year sequence offered at Oregon Tech, my former employer. Since all of the students except me were majoring in either engineering or one of the health professions, everyone was there only to satisfy a requirement. There wasn’t a lot of involvement or preparation by anyone else, and the overall quality of the class was poor at best. It ended up being a class in which we spoke about Spanish in English, kind of a Spanish Appreciation course.

Since then, I’ve studied on my own and managed to make some progress, though you can only go so far without instruction and opportunities to speak and practice. Not very far at all, really.

Today, I’m moving our trailer over to a little RV park outside of Ashland, home of Southern Oregon University, a liberal arts and teaching college with a Spanish department that has a good reputation. Monday, I’ll be starting an intensive Spanish summer program, all of year two in eight weeks. I’m a bit nervous that either the course will be way over my head and go much too fast, or that it will be badly taught with yet more unmotivated students and will prove of little value. My hope, of course, is that the reality will be somewhere in the middle and I’ll be able to make more progress in the next eight weeks than I’ve made in the last two years. We’ll see.

It’s hard to say exactly how my interest in this all started. At first, living in a bilingual and bicultural community, I thought it would be the least I could do to learn a few phrases, be able to say “excuse me” when I reach past someone in the supermarket, or “what a cute baby you have.” (A dangerous comment in Spanish since “mono” can mean both cute and monkey. “What a baby monkey you have!”)

Beyond my vague initial interest, I began to feel more and more that as an Anglo-American, I’m missing out on something important if I don’t at least speak some of the language I hear all the time around me. I reflected on the often-heard comment, “If you’re going to live in this country, you should learn English.” The corollary being that if you’re going to live in any bilingual community, you should speak some of both languages.

But I continued studying not because of some sense of a social imperative but because I became once again fascinated by the structure and astounding complexity of language, a complexity mastered with no study or effort by any average three- or four-year-old. Maybe in another year or two, I'll be able to have a meaningful conversation with a Mexican four-year-old.

And it gives a retired person who doesn’t play golf and stopped drinking four years ago something to do. Otherwise, I risk taking up shuffleboard.

This is all so exciting. I’ll be living in our trailer four days a week, studying as close to full time as I can, riding my motorcycle to school, and coming home on weekends. A perfect way to spend the summer.

Or maybe not. What if I can’t find my room? What if they all make fun of me? What if I can’t find the bathroom and wet my pants?

What, (my greatest fear), if the class is a dud and we spend four hours a day speaking English about Spanish?

I’ll post the occasional update here on my blog.