Reflections on Learning a New Language

Original writing started 2/24/25

 I am in my last week of official Spanish school in Costa Rica. My past three weeks have been one on one learning with Andrea, the class coordinator of Academia Tica. She has been an excellent tutor and become a special friend as well. In our conversation, I asked her how she learned Spanish, and she revealed to me she never formally learned English. What??? She does speak English well. I would not have guess...obviously I had no idea. She certainly can learn more about English and grammar, but I am just amazed at the power of the brain and the resilience of the human spirit! I have met people here who speak English, feeling insecure but I have thought it will a relief to speak Spanish at least as well as they speak English! Haha! They do very well! They can be understood. Of course, they reassure me of the same. We are all in the same boat here.

This past week, I passed into the second book and am approaching an A2 level. Time for learning the past tense. Ey yey yey...oy...ooomph! *Crossed eyes and tongue sticking out to the side* By the end of this week I will have around 150 learning hours and most A2 is around 180-200 hours. With a few more weeks of dedicated independent study, I will continue to improve.

My reflection here is inspired by another exercise from the book. In this exercise, the student is asked to compare their feelings or experience of learning a new language (in this case Spanish) to experiences of some other students. Some of the students expressed feelings of timidity, insecurity, embarrassment, frustration along with feelings of stupidity or ridicule, general bad feelings, a dislike for grammatical correction and extra practice homework. One student mentioned how important a motivated, energetic teacher influences the class, learning in small groups is ideal, and learning a new language is fun.

A couple of these things I relate to are feeling shy and insecure about speaking. I also am enjoying learning a new skill but that is pretty typical for me. I love the extra practice homework. The feelings that gave me pause were those of embarrassment and frustration. I had to pause and think about how I would define any feelings that might be considered negative. 

My feelings are more those of overwhelm, mental tiredness, discouragement, and feeling trapped inside myself. When people talk to me, they ask me questions that I can answer in an elementary way, but I don't have the words to ask the questions back; then I feel rude. Being able to reciprocate a conversation is very important to me; being curious in return is important to me. I appreciate connecting with people through two-way conversations. When I try to write, the confounding feeling is precipitously stronger. I discovered its easier for me to express my writing in English first, then translate it to Spanish. Andrea pegged me as a visual learner, and I can see her point.

Then there's the thing I call my "mom" phenomenon. I have this "skill" of being able to "tune out" some noise. I met a special lady at Academia Tica this week as well...Christine from Georgia, USA. She brought up how she too tunes out the Spanish around us. I quickly related with what she expressed.

It's interesting because at other times, some noises are amplified for me. For example, one night there was this motorized hum in the middle of the night (during the quietest hour) and the more I tried to settle back to sleep, the louder the noise seemed. When I arose to investigate, I found the window shutters through the kitchen were left open from the housekeeper cleaning and the humming was coming from the refrigerator. 

With Spanish, I often find myself with the sounds of Spanish in the background of my mind. I think this is a positive thing because I want my mind to eventually think in Spanish and I have a little after being in class with Andrea for a few hours. However, when in public, I just tune it all out somewhat automatically. I think listening is a difficult skill for me. Maybe I am a little inattentive? I prefer to let my mind wander. 

Not only is the speaking rapid but because I don't recognize vocabulary, I'm not sure which words should be separated, and which are actually longer words. My teacher encourages me to listen to music and watch Spanish movies, but I struggle with this because I have to make myself NOT tune out. I can turn on the subtitles, but the combination of reading and listening is exhausting whether in Spanish or English. An additional tidbit for my learning style is that if I am reading the words while listening, I can quickly derive the meaning by reading based on my linguistic knowledge as well as context clues. In this way I don't have to rely so much on the listening. This feels like cheating because the listening is difficult. Clearly, I still have a lot of work to be done in these skills. 

Another positive is I have Spanish in my dreams. This started within a few weeks of beginning to learn last fall. Recently, I dreamed I was hearing the Spanish word for search, but I was searching for something too. Except, it was as if I was searching for the Spanish word for search, but it was already there...buscar. A few of the same phrases and words will go in circles in my dreams; my minds way of processing my learning.

I would highly recommend for everyone to take up the challenge to learn a second language. I cannot express enough how valuable the skill is for the character and as a useful tool in the world. I have met so many wonderful, kind, hard-working people, each fascinating in their own way (as every individual naturally is). Some will be friends for life. There is a whole international community to take part in when a person decides to embark on a journey such as this. I feel so fortunate to make these discoveries and to have the ability to follow up on these opportunities.