The closest thing I have come to being multilingual is through my studying of Spanish. I would not consider myself fluent in Spanish in any sense of the word. Taking Spanish since the third grade I am on my 10th year of learning the language. I think because I have never been fully emerged in a place for a long period of time just speaking Spanish I am not fluent. I love Spanish, but I can defiantly understand more then I can speak. The later part in my Spanish education I have been in classrooms where only Spanish is spoken. I have always been able to understand what my teachers are saying with out much confusion. If someone told me I had to teach a Spanish class you would be able to tell that I am not fluent in Spanish. I have sat through over 1,000 Spanish classes and have understood so much in all of them but I would not be able to duplicate how the classes went. This is an idea that Canagarajah speaks about when he says, "We understand more languages then we can speak" (5). In my own personal experience I have found this true. If I could speak everything that I understood I would be fluent in Spanish. That’s obviously not the way it works! I would say that I am very close to being fluent in my understanding of Spanish but not close at all to being fluent in speaking. I have friends that have told me very similar experiences with other languages. My one friend understands a lot of Italian because his grandmother and mom speak it but he cannot speak Italian besides a few words and phrases. Another friend of mine understands Chinese very well. He told me that his mom will speak Chinese to him and he will reply in English because he does not know to speak it. This whole idea that Canagarajah brings up is very interesting to me. That fact that your brain can take in and understand a language more effectively then you can speak it is very thought provoking. I wish I knew how it all worked! The mind is an interesting place especially when it comes to language!
I’ve never really sat down and thought about my experiences related to multilingualism. Now that I have thought about it, I realize that I have constantly been surrounded by multilingualism. One of the first memories I have of multilingualism is from my cousins. My uncle married a French woman so their kids grew up leaning English and French. When they were toddlers there would switch back and forth between English and French. When my cousins would speak they would choose their words from whichever language was easier to pronounce. I remember hearing them say “I was eau”. Eau if French for water, and saying eau is easier to pronounce then water. In my Spanish class last semester we talked about something very similar but with Spanish and English: Spanglish. We read two poems that were written in Spanglish called “Bilingual Blues” by Gustavo Pérez Firmat and “Where you from?” By Gina Valdés. The theme of multilingual is evident from the use of Spanglish and the words of the poem. The authors talk about how the see themselves from 2 different places which they find pride in and confuses them at the same time. This idea is very foreign and interesting to me since I was raised only speaking English. Do any of you have any experience with the mixing of languages? If you do, how do you identify your self?
Welcome to my blog! Tomorrow I will be posting my first blog. :)
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Erica FischerWriting about things happening in English 101 at Emory University. Archives
April 2015
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