Category Archives: Language

Gaining Confidence as a Non-native Speaker

I’ve always had a passion for Spanish since I began learning it when I was in middle school. I loved speaking it and always enjoyed participating in class and practicing as much as I could. However, when I got to college I began to feel self-doubt in my Spanish abilities. I was aware that the Spanish program in my school district wasn’t the most diverse, to say the least. None of my teachers were native speakers nor did they come from a heritage speaking family. None of my classmates had connections with native speakers either. I was really intimidated by the idea of being in class with native speakers because pronunciation was never the main focus when I was being taught.

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Lost in Translation

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I came to live in this country when I was ten years old. My father got a job at Dartmouth. It was a temporary semester appointment, but we came to visit him, and all the family fell in love with the beautiful New England winter. I had never seen snow before, and I can still remember the awe and the thrill of sliding down those immense hills in Hanover. However, the real experience came from actually moving here a year after. I entered 5th grade without knowing any significant English. My teacher at the time, Mr. Stone, asked to speak with my parents because he lacked the experience of teaching an international student. After that initial complaint, the school was great, and they sent me with a teacher who was really qualified to help me. She had a Ph.D. in language acquisition and was very helpful with my transition.

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Building Connections, With and Without Language

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In 2015, I met my mini-me. I was fourteen, she was eight. We met at her home outside the city of San Pedro de Macorís, Dominican Republic, on an enclosed campus that houses over 200 disadvantaged children. Despite our age gap, I felt more connected to this child than to most of my friends. We met on a sunny morning after my eighth grade class arrived for a week of service. We were on a tour of the home when two little girls snuck up beside us, giggling to each other. One of them was my mini-me. She grabbed my hand and I asked her, “¿Cómo te llamas?” It was that simple question that sparked a now five-year relationship. We never left each others’ sides for the rest of the week, building our friendship through nothing more than the basic Spanish I knew and shared human experiences that didn’t require language. It was a unique combination. I was appreciative that most of our activities didn’t require us to speak. Heading into the trip, I was fearful that that only words would allow me to bond with the children, but I was quickly proven wrong. My mini-me and I walked around the terreno hand-in-hand, we played countless games of tic tac toe, and she painted my nails five different colors. Still, I asked her simple questions and she gave me simple answers. I struggled to find words and she filled in the blanks. There were times when oral communication was necessary but too difficult, and we had to resort to physical gestures.

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Learning Mandarin and Spanish at the Same Time

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As a Spanish major, I have primarily spent my time taking Spanish courses both in Amherst and abroad in Spain. In my spring semester of freshman year, I decided to try something different and enrolled in Chinese 110. Learning Mandarin was something that I had always wanted to try since it is a language that my family speaks and is one of the most spoken languages in the world. Although my family speaks primarily Cantonese, I knew a few phrases and words in Mandarin before taking the class. What I wasn’t prepared for was the writing. Unlike English, Spanish, and other Romance languages, in Mandarin, you don’t have the luxury of being able to use letters and attempt to sound out and spell unknown words. In Mandarin, words are composed of characters. A number as simple as zero is pronounced as ‘líng’ but translates on paper to ?. In addition to having characters, there are four distinct tones. The way in which you pronounce words has to be very specific otherwise you could be saying a completely different word. For example, m? is the flat first tone translating to mother, má is the rising second tone translating to a toad, m? is the third tone translating to a horse, and mà is the falling fourth tone translating to scold.

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Not your average Spanish story…

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My experience with the Spanish language and culture is slightly different than the majority of students I have met throughout my time at UMass. When I was 11 years old, my parents sat my brother and I down and told us that we would be leaving the town we had lived in our whole lives to move to a third world country. At this time in my life I had never even traveled outside of the United States. After many tears and much resistance, I eventually tried to come to terms with the fact that we would be expanding our worlds and moving to Costa Rica.

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Change of Language: A Spanish Major Who Grew Up Portuguese

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As a child, my Portuguese identity was a significant part of my life. I grew up making wine with Avô in his basement, I spent time at the Holy Ghost Club making malasadas with my Avó’s friends, and, like any Portuguese child growing up, I was fed a lot of delicious food. And while I could understand Portuguese fairly well, I was never able to speak it. Instead, when spoken to in Portuguese, I would always respond in English. And while I would like to blame it on my surroundings (as I was never exposed to it in my Massachusetts elementary school, and my mother never forced me to speak it), I knew it was entirely my fault for not speaking the language. As I reached middle school, my parents gave me the option to take a Portuguese 101 class at my local community college and I decided to give it a go. After sitting through classes surrounded by people twice my age, I was finally able to spark the language within me, and pretty soon, I was speaking to everyone in my family in Portuguese (after being surrounded by it my whole life, it came to me fairly easily). I never used to consider the Portuguese an important aspect of my life, but when I was in high school, everything changed.

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Tips for Learning Spanish in your Spanish Classes

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The Spanish/Portuguese department at UMass definitely prioritizes teaching about culture and history just as much, if not more, than teaching about language. This being said, the courses definitely still provide opportunities to improve fluency and pick up vocabulary.

Throughout my time in the Spanish department, and even more so my time studying abroad in Spain, I have been able to take note of the kind of techniques and situations which inspire a Spanish lesson to stick in my mind. Of course, everyone is different, so my findings may not be universally applicable. However, if there is anything this post leaves with you, it is that there is great benefit in making a conscious effort to understand your own learning style by reflecting on the moments or habits during which you have picked up a new concept or vocabulary word, and strive to discover what connects them.

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Combining Spanish and Portuguese with Political Science

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Everyone says, “be expected to change your major a bunch of times in college.” However, in my case, I kept on adding majors until I ended up with three: Spanish, Portuguese, and Political Science. I have strong personal connections to all three of these majors and did not want to choose between them, as a result, I have to explore ways in which they can be combined to meet a common academic and career objective.

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My Journey with Spanish

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Being multilingual is important to me and relevant in this continually evolving and ever-diversifying country. No one in my family speaks another language besides English, except for myself of course. I speak 4 languages in total, and my passion for languages started with Spanish back in the third grade when Spanish instruction became a mandatory component of my school district’s curriculum. Not only did the prospect of learning another language intrigue me, but the entire language-learning process proved seamless to me, and I picked up on words very quickly for not having had any prior education in Spanish. At nine years old, the instructor and even other students were shocked by my comprehension of the language and my little “authentic” accent. Over the years, Spanish classes of course became more complex, but the language’s difficulty to me remained consistent: easy. When it came time to take AP Spanish Language and Composition in high school, I was a bit apprehensive, but I worried for nothing because I received an A in the class and passed the College Board exam with a score of a 5.

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Siobhan Elvin’s journey from SpanPort to District C-11

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My journey with studying Spanish and foreign languages started about 12-13 years ago at Boston Latin School; for whatever reason, I opened a Spanish book for the first time, and I instantly fell in love with the ability to communicate with people in another way. For me, it was that simple, and I couldn’t get enough. Spanish to me was like a secret code that I could talk to some friends in but not others, which fascinated me. I couldn’t help but love learning how to speak with people from different parts of the world, so we could understand each other and form relationships through our common thread: Spanish language, history, and culture. Continue reading →