Posted in My languages

It was not inevitable that I ended up studying languages.  Or maybe it was.

I grew up in a monolingual English-speaking family.  Both sides had been in the US since the time of the Revolutionary War (one part from 1640 or so), and my distant ancestors came from England and Ireland. So I have no heritage language, really.

As a young child, I loved looking at maps and making up songs about the countries I saw on them.  In second grade, we must have done a unit about other countries, because my teacher wrote phrases in different languages on the board.  I copied them down and kept that notebook for a long time.  I still remember that one phrase was "Takk for maten" (Norwegian for "Thanks for the meal").

As I got older, I loved writing stories and poems and noticing things about language.  I kept a list of adjectives that had two opposites; for example, the opposite of "light" can be either "heavy" or "dark."  I understood grammar and was good at it.

At the end of seventh grade, I had to choose either French or Spanish for the following school year.  Since my aunt had been a French teacher and all my older sisters had taken French, I chose French, figuring that if it ended up being hard for me, I would have lots of help available.  I'm sure that my French teachers, if they even remembered me, would tell you that I showed no special promise in French.

The summer between seventh and eighth grades, I had an interesting experience that is still affecting my life.  One night I had a dream about an unknown boy.  While thinking about the dream the next day, I heard a song on the radio.  It was Menudo's first single in English, called If You're Not Here.  That evening at the mall, I found their album and discovered that one of the boys in the group looked just like the boy in my dream.  I bought the album, of course!

I really started liking Menudo, and that was their only album in English so far.  So I started buying their Spanish albums.  I withstood some ridicule from my sisters for that, because they couldn't understand why I would want to listen to songs I couldn't understand.  For two years I listened to those Spanish albums, and then in my sophomore year of high school, I took both French 3 and Spanish 1.

Spanish was my favorite class, because I loved the language and because my next older sister took it with me.  We would study together for the tests, and due to that, I finished the year with a final average of 96.  I remember at one point telling my teacher that I had been listening to Menudo albums for several years, and she exclaimed, "That's why you have such a good accent!"  It was during that year that I realized that I really liked languages, and I wanted to take French 4, Spanish 2, and Italian 1 in my junior year (I would have preferred German, but Italian was the only other language my school offered) , but my school would not let me, so I ended up only taking Spanish.

I went to college early, after my junior year.  I didn't study any languages right away. I finished the credits I needed for high school and wasn't sure what to do next.  While looking at the college catalog, I became intrigued with the idea of majoring in International Business. So then I started studying German.  By this point, studying a language was not hard for me at all, and I excelled in German.  But the class was only offered Wednesday nights, and I decided I wanted to attend a Bible study group that night, so I didn't take the second semester.

By that time, I had realized that I wasn't really a businesswoman type, and under the influence of my father, had decided to major in math (I'm sure if my high school math teachers remember me, they would be hysterical about now.)  The normal progression of courses led to my taking calculus in the summer.  In case you didn't already know this, that's a bad idea.  Summer course plus bad teacher equalled Jeanne studying calculus all summer, trying to make it make sense.

One evening after a test, I drove the half hour home in tears.  I had done really badly on it. (As it ended up, I actually got an A, because he graded on a curve and everyone else had done really badly too.  I seem to recall that just finishing two problems on the test was an A.)  As I drove home, I thought, "I don't even really like math!"  So then I asked myself, "What do I like?"  And the answer was - languages.

I summoned up the courage to call my dad on the phone (even though I lived in the same house, I couldn't summon up THAT much courage!) and tell him that I needed a break from math and was going to concentrate on languages for a while.  I sat down with my college catalog and figured out that I could graduate the following May with an AA in Liberal Arts.  I contacted my German professor and asked for his permission to study the second semester material on my own and enroll in Intermediate German that fall, which he happily gave.  I enrolled in Intermediate Spanish, after three years of no formal Spanish.  And I was happy!

After graduating from the two-year college, I transferred to a four year college and continued studying both languages.  I ended up majoring in German and minoring in Spanish (a double major would have taken another semester) and deciding to go on to graduate school to get my doctoral degree and become a professor.  What happened after that is another story.  The point is that it wasn't until the summer of 1991 that I realized, at age 20, what had been written on the wall since I was a child.  I loved languages!