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Me and Languages

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. Mom was born and mostly raised in Danzig, a very cosmopolitan freistadt (independent city state), except for the years that the family spent in the country during World War II to try to safeguard everyone as best they could.

When the war ended, she found herself in the newly created communist East Germany where she was required to take Russian in school, which is why I know a few words of Russian.

She left East Germany to return her sister's baby to her, so she was a young illegal immigrant in West Germany when she met my father at a party. She spoke extremely proper High German. His American accent plus the fact that he mostly learned German from farmers, meant she couldn't understand a word he spoke and she asked someone what language he was speaking.

My older sister was born in Germany. Her first language was actually German and she translated for my parents while she was a toddler. So I grew up in a bilingual home, and not merely because "My mom spoke German."

In high school, one of my dream careers was simultaneous translator. There was a school for such in the nearest big city.

I've had people ask me what that was and then go "Oh. I didn't know they were actually translating live at the UN. I thought those were all prewritten, pre-translated speeches." so forgive my tangent.

To learn simultaneous translation, you first need to be fluent in two languages and then they train you to repeat everything someone else is saying in the same language and when you can do that, they have you start saying everything they just said in the other language. It's extremely rigorous.

I never became fluent in a second language and it aggravates me when foreigners talk smack about Americans only knowing English because when I was living in Germany for nearly four years, I didn't get to practice my German as much as I imagined because most people leapt at the chance to use me to practice their English.

Anyway, I dreamed of learning six languages: In addition to English, I wanted to be fluent in German, French, Spanish, Russian and an unspecified more exotic language from probably the Middle East or Asia. None of that happened.

Instead, what happened is I learned too late that my dream college -- a small liberal arts college with campuses in two states and a Great Books curriculum -- required two years of a foreign language in high school to apply at all.

So I took one year of French in high school during my senior year because my high school had two teachers that taught foreign language and the other one taught both German and Spanish and had an atrocious reputation in the German American community for telling students their German mother was an idiot who spoke "hillbilly" German instead of admitting she didn't know anything. (FYI: there's no such thing as hillbilly German.)

So it was that psycho bitch or French. Ergo, I ended up in French.

Where there was a Turkish exchange student from Bolivia and we would sit in the back of the class passing notes in multiple different languages and the teacher looked the other way if we didn't giggle too much. So, weirdly, I know a tiny amount about the Turkish language because I took French, though I only know one word in Turkish, the word for love.

He was probably hitting on me and I didn't see it.

I also had a Korean immigrant as a best friend who taught me a few words of Korean. I don't remember any of that, unfortunately.

I graduated as STAR student (highest SAT score plus top ten percent GPA) and a National Merit Scholarship winner accepted to one of the two big name colleges in my state and ultimately turned it down to go to the local college in my hometown, primarily because of my as yet undiagnosed health problems.

There, I continued my French studies imagining I might yet someday go to St. John's. I took four quarters of French from a professor whose first name was Caryl which sounds exactly like Carol in English but not French, so I remember her first name but not her last name.

She had a PhD in French Literature and wanted to expand the program but admin was not letting her, so she was always bringing enrichment materials to class and I likely got a better French education than one typically gets from four quarters of French.

In my teens and twenties, I also used audiotapes to try to work on my French and German and never felt that accomplished much. In my twenties, I tried to continue reading French literature in the enrichment materials from my college classes and couldn't maintain the habit.

When I homeschooled my kids, California law required them to study a foreign language. One picked German and one picked Spanish, so I picked up some Spanish during that time.

We were living on an isolated military base where the Internet was my life and I also studied Russian a bit as a hobby and expanded my small vocabulary. At one time, I knew about half the Russian alphabet (as in knew what sound that letter should make when I saw it) but I don't anymore.

For a time, I had a long distance relationship to an Iranian man and imagined I would study Farsi as that sixth language but I was very ill and that didn't happen. I did learn that Farsi, like Japanese, has a single gender neutral pronoun and both cultures are better about gender equality than the third world country of Merika.

In college, I also took Intro to Linguistics and two quarters of Classic Greek. So I have a long-standing interest in languages which helps me understand people of various cultural backgrounds but never really became fluent in anything but in English.

I have an ear for German because so many friends and relatives spoke it. I don't have that for any other languages.

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