A Few Words on Words

When I asked the Spanish teacher in spring if I could skip the first year course, and dive right into Spanish II, he asked me if I was an honors student or a CP one like him. I was surprised; I'd heard so much about this teacher, how smart he is, how good and fluent at Spanish he is. But he wasn't one of the overachieving students. I always figured that you had to be either an overachiever or a genius to become fluent in another language. But he apparently wasn't. He was just another student who, like me, wanted to learn, but didn't necessarily want to work too hard for it.

I took home a Spanish I book from a pile of books that the school was getting rid of. He didn't tell me to do that, but I wanted to be prepared. And, in a way, I wanted to impress him. My friends who take Spanish told me some basic rules of pronunciation, and I started my studying. I went through the book, writing the vocabulary over and over in a notebook, until I knew it. I only did this for a bout a month before I decided to move on to other things for the summer. I intended to start again before school started, but I never did.

The first day of school came, and my Spanish class was filled with people much more prepared than me. The teacher went over the rules for the class, and two rules especially stuck out to me: class participation and the homework policy. Not the punishments for breaking the rules, but the thing they encouraged: practice. The teacher expected everyone to participate and use the language, and devoted a large portion of our grades to it. He also gave us a written policy on homework, saying that his high school Spanish teacher gave him the same one. If his math teacher had given it to him, he would be teaching math, he said. Homework would be assigned every night. He wanted us to work. I trusted him, because it clearly turned out well for him.

We did some review. Everyone in the class had taken a year of Spanish, and I was trying to keep up. They spoke, and I mostly heard gibberish. Mostly. I could pick out a few words here and there, but I still couldn't understand what they were saying.

But then I realized I could understand what they were saying. I just needed a minute to figure a sentence out. Of course, by the time I knew what it meant, the class had moved on, but I understood that sentence. And if that's all it took then, when I work on it, it will become easier. The translation time will get shorter and shorter, until someday I'll be able to skip the English and simply hear a sentence for what it is. I just need to work at it, do my homework. I can learn a foreign language.

And now I think about my brother. We aren't so different. We're both stuck with people much more fluent in a language that we want to learn. The only difference is that he wants a first language. He's autistic. But the problem is the same: we want to know what people say, and we want to know how to say something back. If my teacher could do it, why not me? And if I can do it, why not my brother?

I am going to be fluent.