Learning Spanish, Rough draft, 10/24/2020
“Levantate y brilla, Sleeping Beauty!”, I hear Maria’s mother exclaim enthusiastically. I check my phone and the time reads 7:30 am. “Es hora de hacer el desayuno!” I guess it’s time to make breakfast. I stumbled out of bed and wake up to the whole family surrounding the kitchen table already dressed for the day, and everyone was speaking Spanish only. This was going to be a challenge.
While doing research on the subject of learning new languages, I was amazed at how many people in the United States only speak English. According to an article written by the VOA Student Union, 95% of the people in America only speak English. 95 percent. As a country with one of the highest immigration rates in the world, one would think that Americans would attempt to learn a variety of new languages. According to Leonardo De Valoes, “Language impacts the daily lives of members of any race, creed, and region of the world. Language helps express our feelings, desires, and queries to the world around us.” It is so important to learn languages besides English in order to help connect with other people from different cultures.
Growing up near Indianapolis, I had always been around people who spoke Spanish. I began to fall in love with the language, culture, and I eventually met a girl named Maria who became one of my best friends. For my immersion experience, I attempted to learn more about the Spanish language and culture. While I had taken Spanish in high school, I figured that I would get firsthand insight from a Hispanic family before I declared my Spanish minor. Mind you, going into this, I did already know how to speak and write Spanish quite well. My complications were centered around understanding native Spanish speakers as they were speaking the language.
I decided to break my immersion experience into three parts. Part one would be touching up my Spanish, part two would be practicing listening to Spanish, and part three would be immersing myself in Spanish. For the first part of my immersion experience, I used a website called Babbel to touch up on my Spanish. Babbel is a website that people can subscribe to in order to practice words and phrases in different languages. This website was the perfect start to my immersion experience because since I hadn’t taken classes since high school, my Spanish was a little rusty.
For the second part of my immersion experience, I watched a few Spanish films with English subtitles to get a feel for the translations. I watched two films recommended to me by my friend Maria called El Labelrinto del Fauno and Diarios de Motocicleta. These movies helped me to learn about culture in South America and Spain and challenged me to try and understand the movies. After a few films and since I knew many Spanish words and phrases, it became easy for me to understand the tone of voice and facial expressions and that helped me quite a bit while trying to understand the films. Since I touched up on my Spanish using Babbel, understanding key words was not as challenging for me watching the film.
For the third part of my immersion experience, in order to really put my skills to the test, I spent the weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) with Maria’s family and told them to only speak Spanish while I was there and I would only speak Spanish in return. No English, no help, no broken Spanish. I wanted them to treat me as if I grew up in their household only speaking Spanish just like they did. Of course, using Babbel and watching the films significantly helped me to get a feel for some of the phrases and tone of voice. In the film I watched for my film review, the children were in immersion school systems and they were placed in classrooms where the only spoken language was a language that is foreign to them.
De Valoes, Leonardo. “Protected: Order – September 14, 2015 @ 04:09 PM.” Trinity Washington University, 13 July 2020, discover.trinitydc.edu/continuing-education/2014/02/26/importance-of-language-why-learning-a-second-language-is-important/.
Student Studies, VOA. “American-Borns Are Increasingly English-Only.” Voice of America, www.voanews.com/student-union/american-borns-are-increasingly-english-only.