First Steps
February 10, 2010
So I’ve begun my journey to be able to speak spanish an achievement I’ve yet to conquer, I’m always hesitant to call spanish my native language only because I was born an American and english should be considered my native language. But nonetheless, I was brought up to be a proud Chicano and to value my culture as a Mexican-American so conquering the language is one of my goals in life. I’ve been around the language all my life so I’m hoping now that I’m finally putting a focus in learning, it wont be as difficult on me as it would be for someone that has never been around the language at all.
I recently bought I spanish one a day calender that has a different spanish phrase for each day of the week, even though they might seem random, they do still help. My plan just to reiterate is to completely immerse myself in the language by using it, and listening to it as much as possible. I tuned my radio to 107.5 in hopes that once I start to get more familiar with the words that everything will start to make sense to me. I’m not enrolling in any spanish classes as I am already enrolled at the art institute part time and can’t afford to have any distractions from that. Not having any formal instruction or education is going to be diffcult but I’m almost confident that this is something that I can do.
If I were to describe what its like for me personally, I would have to say that its like recongnizing a person that you pass on the street but not being able to remember who they are until its too late and they’ve already passed you by. I hear words that are familiar to me in sentences, but by the time I know what the word or words are I can’t remember the order they were in or the conversation has moved beyond that. Its frustrating at times, because I start to think why didn’t i just make the effort when I was a kid to learn it and I cant think of a good enough reason.
When I was a kid no one really pushed me but myself and the only things I was interested in was, watching tv, getting away with being bad, and girls I wasn’t interested in communication I didn’t realize what my potential could be if i had just learned it. The majority of my aunts and uncles speak spanish including my mom, so its a mystery why she didn’t teach me. I started to notice that a lot of my friends that didn’t speak spanish had parents that were young during the civil rights movement most of whom were second generation Americans. So I talked to my mother about it and she says that it was us trying to speak out and say even though our culture comes from Mexico we are American, so she tried to teach me to speak and act as an American or Chicano and not just a mexican.
