I started learning English when I was in preschool. The institute was almost next door to my school, the Escuela Kennedy. Between the two buildings was the church that my grandmother used to go to, a couple of blocks from her house. The priest, at the time, was Padre Montes. I have a very vague image of him, I think he wore glasses. I think he was the priest who baptized me. My grandmother took me to that church without my parents knowing, my father, being protestant, was of course against my being baptized catholic. I followed his religion as a child – I was *very* religious as a child, and later, when I was 11 or 12, I asked to be baptized int he Methodist church to which we belonged. They wouldn’t do it as I already had been baptized as a Christian.
Padre Montes later became the main priest at the La Plata Cathedral, later he became a bishop. He has been accused of having a close relationship with the military. One of the accusations is that he refused to give information about the whereabouts of the small daughter of disappeared people to her grandparents – saying that the girl was fine with the family who had her. It’s weird to think that my grandmother, who was possibly the nicest, “goodest” (I wish that was a word) person who ever lived, took spiritual advise from that person.
In any case, I went to the English institute next door to the church. I don’t remember much about it, other that it was an immersion program and that I learned very, very little. I remember watching a slide show with the story of a red hen, and not understanding a word of it. My parents wanted me to learn English as that was the language of my grandmother. My father spoke it fluently, but just as with my children, he was unable to pass it on to us.
Given that experience, I’ve become very skeptical about the ability of children to learn English in a school environment, at least when they are young and have no reinforcement at home. That said, I’d put my kids in Spanish classes if there were any nearby. Isn’t that ironic? I struggled to learn English in Argentina, and now the situation is reversed for my kids.
What is interesting is that I also didn’t learn any English when I lived with my grandmother and aunt as an almost four-year-old. I’m pretty sure that they communicated with each other only in English. Despite living in Argentina for over sixty years, Granny never learned Spanish that well. But I still managed to not learn any English during those three months.
I started taking more formal English lessons when I was 8. I don’t remember the name of the institute, though perhaps it will come to me at some point, but it was a couple of blocks from my house. I went there for four years, always with the same teacher, whose name, of course, I don’t remember either. I don’t think I liked her very much. I also failed to learn much English during that time – though perhaps what I learned was a good basis for advancing relatively quickly once I came to America. It was British English, of course, though at such elementary level it doesn’t make that much of a difference. I did learn the word “rubber” for “eraser”, which is somewhat funny given its meaning in American English.
My next exposure to English came when I came to America. I started school and was put in ESL (English as a Second Language) 1, but I quickly made it to the group of advanced readers. There were kids from several Latin American countries in that class, though I only remember Cecilia and Brenda, from El Salvador – but there were also kids from other countries, being 1982 many were from Iran. Of those I remember Dahlia (who might have gone to the US via Spain) and Cyrus (who had some relationship with Germany). I could only speak with them in English, and my English skills advanced pretty quickly. By the time I finished I could have basic conversations in this language.
I returned to Argentina, to live with my aunt Gladys, about nine month after I left it. Once back in La Plata I started English lessons at the Instituto Británico, which was at the time the premier English-teaching institution in my city. It also was just a few blocks from my aunt’s apartment. I learned quite a bit of English during that year and a half – though perhaps it was less due to the lessons and more to the practice I got talking with Gladys (though I don’t really remember much of that). I had problems understanding the spoken British English, however – and it would be after several years of living in America and watching PBS that I became comfortable with their pronunciations.
I did learn one specific new word in English, however: verger – one of the stories we read was about a verger who was fired from his job because he couldn’t read, so he opened a shop and then more and became a very successful businessman. The “punchline” was that at the end of the book someone remarked at how amazing it was he could do so well without being able to read, and what he could have accomplished if he knew how to. The ex-verger responds: I know exactly what I’d be, a verger at so and so church. I like the story, not just for the end, but because pretty much nobody in America knows what a verger is. It was fun, specially at the beginning of living here, when my English was quite deficient, to know a word that even my teachers did not. Of course, with the years I realized that I knew many words in English that people, even my husband, did not know. English, it turns out, is about 60% Latin – for that reason its quite easy to “anglicize” Latin-derived Spanish words. Some of these words are either obscure or just not used a lot in English, so people don’t really know what they mean. This may be a reason why I’m so good at scrabble, and always beat my husband.
My next stage in learning English came when I returned to America about a year and a half after leaving. They gave me a placement exam and I didn’t do that well – mostly because I didn’t know the meaning of the word “still” (I knew “yet”). Placement exams are quite stupid.
They put me on ESL 3, but I knew I wanted to be in 4 – so when I had my first writing assignment, a self-portrait, I worked really hard at it. It payed, as they transferred me.
I made several friends in my class that year (we were together for two periods of ESL 4 and one of ESL History), they were from Iran (of course), Poland, Mexico, Brazil and Germany. We /had/ to speak in English as we didn’t have another language in common. I think that helped me learn English more than the class.
What helped me the most, however, was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. At that time my father worked selling encyclopedias – and he bought one set for us. I had always been interested in history, so I decided to start from the beginning and read everything in the encyclopedia that had to do with the subject. I started with the ramapithecus, which at that time was considered a possible early ancestor, and finished with Assyrians or so. Reading the encyclopedia wasn’t difficult – as I said 60% of English comes from Latin, and probably even more of the dry language of encyclopedias is Latin-derived. But of course, reading it exposed me to all types of new words, and my English increased exponentially. Unfortunately, my grammar never caught up to my vocabulary.
And that’s it, the history of my English learning. The saddest part about it is that as I learned English, I lost my Spanish. It became less idiomatic, more forced and my facility with words went away. As a child I had wanted to be a writer, but having lost Spanish and never having really perfected English, I was left without a language. I experimented using both, but alas, probably the greatest obstacle is that I am not a storyteller.