My Language Connection

Languages have always been a fascination of mine. As a native speaker of English, I never really had to speak another language, but I have always wanted to speak and understand all languages. Perhaps that has to do with my love of human connection. The more languages I speak, the more opportunity I have to connect with other people and understand more about who they are.

I started with Spanish in high school, and after traveling to Costa Rica my senior year, I decided to declare Spanish as my major for my undergraduate degree. In college I made some friends who were students from Spanish-speaking countries and I traveled to Spain and studied abroad in Mexico for a semester. 

Later I met a group of Brazilians in Philadelphia where I lived at the time, and through immersion I started learning Portuguese. After a few months of hanging out with my Brazilian friends and listening to Portuguese, I began to speak the language quickly and native speakers would often think I was Brazilian. Surely, knowing Spanish gave me an advantage in learning Portuguese, but I noticed something important in my process of language learning. It took me years to learn Spanish in school, but my Spanish improved drastically after spending time in Spanish-speaking countries. Even though I was in Philadelphia where the native language is English, by surrounding myself with native speakers of Portuguese, it was much more effortless to learn the language.  Eventually I signed up for some classes in Portuguese to learn how to read and write. But then life happened and I didn't really practice the language for years until I discovered Livemocha.com in 2008.   


At the university, I took a year of intensive Italian classes with a wonderful professor who believed in teaching by immersion, so he spoke only in Italian during class. He became my inspiration when I began teaching Spanish after graduation. At first the immersion approach was quite daunting, but eventually it became easier. His technique was to repeat over and over the phrases of the lesson. He went around the room having each of the students respond to his prompt. Then he had the students practice the same type of dialog in pairs. At the end of that year I went to Italy. While I felt fairly prepared to interact in the target language in nearly any sort of conversation, I realized that all the hours spent in the classroom paled in comparison to just a few days completely immersed in a country or culture where the “real” language is used.  

A year later, I met a French guy who I ended up being married to for a few years. I had taken a year of French my first year in college but it seemed so difficult, that I gave up, almost resenting the language. After a few months with my ex-husband, I realized that I needed to learn the language to communicate with his family and to travel with him to France and Senegal. His parents came to visit, and after several weeks of hearing them interact in French, I was able to speak better than I ever could after a year of French classes. I began to love the language once it became familiar and comfortable to me. After traveling to French-speaking countries a few times with him, I was able to navigate the language almost like a native. Of course, after the divorce I never really practiced my French anymore, and now that 8 years have passed, I’ve forgotten so much. That’s not to say it isn’t still there, somewhere in my brain for me to access. If I want to resuscitate my French skills (just like my rusty Portuguese skills), I would need to do some review with a software learning program or language classes and travel to a country where the language is spoken, or hang out with a group of native speakers here in California.    

I have realized that the key to learning languages is immersion. In order to learn a language well, it’s necessary to spend time speaking with natives and observing them speaking amongst themselves. Learning languages in schools and with software programs is fantastic for learning the foundation of a language and for reinforcing vocabulary and grammatical structures. It’s very important to have this didactic practice to develop proficiency, as well as live speaking practice with natives to develop fluency and the natural patterns of the language.

After I graduated college, I started teaching Spanish in a high school. Well, I had a brief job in between as Content Manager for a start-up online Spanish bookstore. But as was the destiny of many of the internet start-ups in the early 2000s, that particular one didn’t have the funds to make ends meet, so by chance I ended up in teaching. As it turned out, I loved teaching and I was a natural at it. What I most enjoyed was the human connection with my students and feeling their happiness as things were starting to click for them with the language.  

As many Americans do, I found a second job a couple years later. I started teaching private English classes in the evenings to foreign adults working in the Philadelphia area. I discovered how much I enjoyed this work as another layer of connection with others opened up. I’ve met people from all over the world and through them I’ve learned new perspectives about life and our human existence. It has also been very satisfying to watch my students progress on their journey of language learning. They know that speaking English puts them at the top of their respective industries, given that English is the international language and it also opens them up to entirely new life opportunities such as connection with others.  

I feel honored to help my students in this process of learning the language of the culture I was born into. Growing up fascinated with foreign languages, I never realized how fortunate I was to speak English as my native language until recently. To this day, I really don’t know how it turned out that English is the international standard, but it is. If I can be of service to others by helping them improve their English while sharing my patience, compassion and knowledge of learning languages and combining that with my personal development coaching, then I feel that I am contributing to greater global awareness and connectedness. I believe that the world is becoming more and more connected and interdependent. Or perhaps our new technology is simply allowing us to realize that it always was that way, that we never really were separate from one another. We are all here at this time, sharing the human experience on this beautiful planet. Teaching English is a bridge that I use to contribute to the expansion of human connection and self-awareness.