Skipping English

I know that a lot of people who want to learn a language with SpeaQ With Me are probably interested in English, because well it’s the most popular foreign language to learn. Well, I guess for me as a native speaker I can’t really tell you about my struggles learning it, so instead I wanted to share a contrasting story of how “just saying no to English” really helped me learn a foreign language and better appreciate the culture.

So the story starts in Oregon, when I was still in High School. The older brother of a friend of mine had just come back from an exchange year in Denmark with the Rotary organization and was telling me what a cool experience it had been. He managed to convince me that I should also give it a try, and so I applied to travel abroad the next school year. I managed to get a spot in the program and when it came time for me to let them know where I preferred to be sent, I said I wanted to go somewhere with snow so I could still cross-country ski in the winter. They ended up assigning me to Sweden, so I was pretty stoked about that.

A few days before I was going to leave for Sweden a friend of mine stopped by my house and gave me a book by Kurt Vonnegut titled Galapagos. This friend was a bit of a literary maven, and she always knew the right book for the right situation. So I wasn’t surprised when she told me that part of the book is about a guy who runs off to Sweden. I didn’t start reading the book right away because I figured it would be a nice to bring it with me and start reading if I was getting a bit homesick or lonely. 

When I arrived in Sweden I had a really great first two months getting to know my host family and enjoying the summer. Life was too full of new experiences to really think about homesickness so the book sat patiently on the shelf in my new room. Also, at this time I was really only speaking English and just using a few Swedish word I had learned here and there. Then school started and I was suddenly surrounded by a lot more Swedish and started to feel a little bit more out of place and far from home. Of course, the other students in school were nice and most had no problem speaking English with me, but the social world of High School just moves too fast to constantly be translating.  So I got the impressions that I was missing out on quite a lot and that I wouldn’t really get to know my classmates until I could keep up in conversation.

So after the first few weeks of school, I talked to my host family and the kids at school and insisted that they not speak any more English with me.  I knew I would learn faster if I didn’t keep going back to English as a back-up for when I wanted to say something.  I would just have to make a lot of mistakes and pay attention to what other people were saying. Well, that all sounds good when written out into two clean sentences, but for the first few months it was really challenging. So when I would come home exhausted from trying to think in Swedish all day, one of my favorite ways to relax was to read the English books I brought with me. After about the third month of my Swedish only rule, when winter was creeping in and the days were ridiculously short, I finally picked up the book my friend had given me.

It took me about 2 weeks to read through the whole story. During those two weeks (at the beginning of December if I remember correctly), a couple other things were happening. First, I started to notice that I could handle pretty much any normal conversation with my classmates and my host family in Swedish. Second, it finally started to snow, which for me is always a good feeling. And Third, I was getting involved in a lot more sports and social activities which really helped me get over my homesickness. And while all these positive things were taking place, I reached the end of the book, with the last line of the story saying “Don’t worry, you’ll learn Swedish”. 

When I read that, I realized that it was actually true. It was a totally strange feeling to look back at the last few months and discover that I had already worked through the hard part. And now I was feeling comfortable in the language and with my social group.  So if there is a lesson from all this, it’s that my friend was awesome for reading my mind and giving me that book. Oh, and that sometime learning a language isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but if we stick with it, and are committed to practice it often, we may find that the hard part is already behind us before we realize it. 

Make lots of mistakes, don’t be embarrassed, and keep trying.

Patrick