Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua- What are these language schools of which you speak?
Acción
Starting in November, Josh and I spent five weeks at Juan Sisay Language School in Xela, Guatemala. Xela is peppered with language schools, many of them similar to each other. We chose Juan Sisay because it is cooperatively run and part of the revenues are used to support a student scholarship program. Our classes were from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, including a half hour (at least) break. We met one-on-one with our teachers. I switched teachers nearly every week; Josh kept the same one for 4 weeks. Our lessons were a mixture of grammar drills and chatting in Spanish with our teachers about our life experiences, cultures, and politics. On our walks home in the afternoon, Josh and I would try to out-do each other with the things we tried to explain, in Spanish, to our teachers. (e.g. “Today, I explained how the Federal Sentencing Guidelines take power away from judges and give it to prosecutors.” “Oh yeah, I described vegetarian shark-fin dim sum.”) In the afternoons, the school would organize trips to nearby towns, lectures and other activities. The language school also coordinated our stay with a host family.
After five weeks in Xela, my brain felt mushy, and we decided to take a week-long break from school. We traveled through El Salvador for a week and then continued our Spanish studies at CENAC language school in Esteli, Nicaragua. We just finished two weeks of studying there. The structure of CENAC is similar to that of Juan Sisay: We spent 4 hours a day in one-on-one sessions with a teacher and the school hooked us up with a host family. The proceeds of the school help fund a retirement home. My classes at CENAC began with a discussion of the Spanish children’s book I had been reading, newspaper articles I had read, and politics and history. After a coffee break, we worked through grammar exercises in a textbook. In the afternoons the school organized meetings with local organizations and institutions. We visited a coffee-roaster, human rights center, natural medicine laboratory, prison, university and the local offices of the Sandinista political party.
Reflexión
How much Spanish have I learned? Am I learning fast enough? Oh, wait; this is still the reflection part of the blog. I vacillate between being pleased with how much Spanish I’ve learned and feeling despondent over how much I have to learn. For example, I experienced the thrill of victory when I went to a salon, described the haircut I wanted (in Spanish), and got it. My greatest victories, though, are when I intentionally make my teacher laugh, even if it takes me 5 minutes to tell a joke. The agony of defeat occurs when I have to ask someone to repeat a question 3 times before realizing that they’re just asking some variant of “Where are you from?” When a conversation occurs without any context, like random conversations on a park bench, or with background noise, I get lost easily.
I’m constantly looking for yardsticks to measure how much Spanish I comprehend, other than how long it takes for me to tell a joke and how good my hair looks. Counting how many times I need to consult a dictionary per column inch of newspaper text, though, is too compulsive by my standards.
There was one incident that provided the perfect metaphor, however, for my level of Spanish comprehension. When we were in El Salvador, I spent a morning playing with the niece (age 6) and nephew (age 4) of Paty, our hostess. They developed a ball game that was a sort of variant on the simple game of catch. The girl would tell her brother, Josh, and I to stand in different places and after throwing the ball around for a while, she announced a winner and a loser. When I wasn’t sure of where to stand she would gesture or physically move me. I wasn’t always entirely sure how I was supposed to throw the ball or to whom. Usually, I would just mimic my girl-leader. After a few minutes of playing, I felt comfortable developing my own style and moves, like throwing the ball so that it would bounce once before reaching the intended recipient. Just like in Spanish, I kinda got the gist of what was going on. Here, it was throwing the ball around. In Spanish, if someone speaks clearly and/or uses hand-signs, I can generally understand what they’re saying. After some time in a new situation, I even develop the confidence to contribute to conversations myself. But I’m often not sure of what exactly is going on around me and I have to rely on context clues.
Cuestión
How have you learned languages? When did you feel like you understood a language? What games have you played where you didn’t know the rules?
Starting in November, Josh and I spent five weeks at Juan Sisay Language School in Xela, Guatemala. Xela is peppered with language schools, many of them similar to each other. We chose Juan Sisay because it is cooperatively run and part of the revenues are used to support a student scholarship program. Our classes were from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, including a half hour (at least) break. We met one-on-one with our teachers. I switched teachers nearly every week; Josh kept the same one for 4 weeks. Our lessons were a mixture of grammar drills and chatting in Spanish with our teachers about our life experiences, cultures, and politics. On our walks home in the afternoon, Josh and I would try to out-do each other with the things we tried to explain, in Spanish, to our teachers. (e.g. “Today, I explained how the Federal Sentencing Guidelines take power away from judges and give it to prosecutors.” “Oh yeah, I described vegetarian shark-fin dim sum.”) In the afternoons, the school would organize trips to nearby towns, lectures and other activities. The language school also coordinated our stay with a host family.
After five weeks in Xela, my brain felt mushy, and we decided to take a week-long break from school. We traveled through El Salvador for a week and then continued our Spanish studies at CENAC language school in Esteli, Nicaragua. We just finished two weeks of studying there. The structure of CENAC is similar to that of Juan Sisay: We spent 4 hours a day in one-on-one sessions with a teacher and the school hooked us up with a host family. The proceeds of the school help fund a retirement home. My classes at CENAC began with a discussion of the Spanish children’s book I had been reading, newspaper articles I had read, and politics and history. After a coffee break, we worked through grammar exercises in a textbook. In the afternoons the school organized meetings with local organizations and institutions. We visited a coffee-roaster, human rights center, natural medicine laboratory, prison, university and the local offices of the Sandinista political party.
Reflexión
How much Spanish have I learned? Am I learning fast enough? Oh, wait; this is still the reflection part of the blog. I vacillate between being pleased with how much Spanish I’ve learned and feeling despondent over how much I have to learn. For example, I experienced the thrill of victory when I went to a salon, described the haircut I wanted (in Spanish), and got it. My greatest victories, though, are when I intentionally make my teacher laugh, even if it takes me 5 minutes to tell a joke. The agony of defeat occurs when I have to ask someone to repeat a question 3 times before realizing that they’re just asking some variant of “Where are you from?” When a conversation occurs without any context, like random conversations on a park bench, or with background noise, I get lost easily.
I’m constantly looking for yardsticks to measure how much Spanish I comprehend, other than how long it takes for me to tell a joke and how good my hair looks. Counting how many times I need to consult a dictionary per column inch of newspaper text, though, is too compulsive by my standards.
There was one incident that provided the perfect metaphor, however, for my level of Spanish comprehension. When we were in El Salvador, I spent a morning playing with the niece (age 6) and nephew (age 4) of Paty, our hostess. They developed a ball game that was a sort of variant on the simple game of catch. The girl would tell her brother, Josh, and I to stand in different places and after throwing the ball around for a while, she announced a winner and a loser. When I wasn’t sure of where to stand she would gesture or physically move me. I wasn’t always entirely sure how I was supposed to throw the ball or to whom. Usually, I would just mimic my girl-leader. After a few minutes of playing, I felt comfortable developing my own style and moves, like throwing the ball so that it would bounce once before reaching the intended recipient. Just like in Spanish, I kinda got the gist of what was going on. Here, it was throwing the ball around. In Spanish, if someone speaks clearly and/or uses hand-signs, I can generally understand what they’re saying. After some time in a new situation, I even develop the confidence to contribute to conversations myself. But I’m often not sure of what exactly is going on around me and I have to rely on context clues.
Cuestión
How have you learned languages? When did you feel like you understood a language? What games have you played where you didn’t know the rules?
2 Comments:
At 4:25 PM, Jen said…
'How have you learned languages'
Unfortunately, only the 'traditional' classroom way, which is probably the worst way to learn a language.
'When did you feel like you understood a language?'
When I wasn't paying attention one day in French class my senior year, and Madame King asked a question. She thought she caught me - so she directed the question at me and, without thinking, I responded and got the answer correct. She gave me a 'look' because she knew I wasn't paying attention, but she couldn't fault my french. That's when I thought, finally, after 6 years, maybe I understood french more than I gave myself credit.
At 10:16 AM, lernerm said…
I've never been very good at learning languages, and I think it gets harder as we get older. It amazes me how some of my foreign born patients speak English so poorly despite being in America for many years, while their children speak it fluently after just a few years. I'm not sure this is so much a matter of being hard wired (Chomsky's language acquisition device) as of laziness, and general difficulty of learning new material as one gets older. Why is it that in general older people have more trouble with new media like computers? And when one can't speak the language, it has important implications - for example, one tends to disparage those who speak the language you can't learn (if you are a member of the dominant culture that is), and one isolates oneself from a large part of the world (sort of like the person who is hard of hearing and who ends up disengaging from others because he can't hear).
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