My dad died on Father’s Day in 2000, and lately he’s been following me around quite a bit.
I spoke only English until I was into the top end of middle age. I am not alone, as many Americans speak only one language. It’s common to live in communities where English is the only language used, reducing the opportunities to speak with non-English speakers. And as the saying goes, “use it or lose it.”
But my dad was a linguist, of all things, someone who specialized in creating methods and programs for language-learning, so why did I show such little interest in becoming bilingual? (“Becoming Bilingual” is actually the title of a book he wrote) Part of the answer lies in the fact that my dad was not big on traditional language-learning programs, like those taught in school. He was not anti-school, but his expertise was in helping people (missionaries mostly, often Southern Baptists), learn the language of the community they were living in, and from the people who they lived with. If you were a missionary living in a remote village in New Guinea in the 1960s or 70s, no language school would have existed, so you had to take a different approach. Helping missionaries with that different approach was my dad’s life work, and he called it “barefoot language learning”.
I attended public high school in the late 1970s when standards were low. You could graduate without taking a foreign language, very little math and science, and there were plenty of “soft” courses like Car Care, Advanced Sewing, and, if you were really good, Intermediate Sewing to fill in the gaps left by not taking language, math, and science. In deciding not to study a foreign language in school, I was either following my dad’s lead, or possibly using his opinions as an excuse for my laziness.
But after several tongue-tied trips to Spain and Latin America over the years, I finally decided to take a stab at learning Spanish. My dad was already gone at that point, so no looking to him for advice or opinion.
Though not impossible, it would have been difficult to take a “barefoot” approach in Saint Paul, Minnesota, so I started small, easy and cheap by enrolling in a community ed class. The teacher made it clear on the first day that we were not going to conjugate verbs in this class. That was all right with me because I had no idea what it meant to conjugate a verb, so I figured I wasn’t going to miss much. If I came away learning to ask “Where is the bathroom?” that would be enough. Turns out I didn’t learn to ask where the bathroom was, but I did learn the names for foot, leg, hand, face and hair, which I promptly forgot. You don’t use those words in conversation when traveling unless you get hit by a bus and break your foot, hand, or leg.
There’s a joke about a salesman who lands in Boston, gets in a cab, and strikes up a conversation with the taxi driver.
“Everyone told me to get scrod when I was in Boston. Do you know the best place to get scrod?”, he asked the driver.
The driver paused to consider his answer.
He finally responded, “I’ve been asked that many times but you’re the first person to use the past pluperfect tense.”
I get the joke partly because I’ve gotten to the point in my Spanish learning that I am conjugating verbs.
Yo hablo un poco español – I speak a little Spanish
Yo hablé con americano acento – I spoke with an American accent
He hablado solo inglés durante muchos años – I have spoken only English for many years
Since that first community ed class, I’ve spent a week at Spanish camp, taken month-long visits to Mexico to study and practice Spanish, used on-line apps, and watched movies in Spanish. Right now I am taking two Zoom classes a week with Vicky, a 25 year-old Argentinian teacher who I met at Spanish camp for adults in Bemidji, Minnesota. She has a lot of experience teaching Spanish to children, which undoubtedly comes in handy when teaching Spanish to forgetful and unfocused older people. Vicky patiently repeats herself multiple times in each class. Her most commonly used word is “Recuerdas?” or “Do you remember?”.
“Yes, yes I remember. I just forgot at that precise moment.”
The other day while deep in a grammar lesson about one of the umpteen forms of verb conjugation, Vicky asked me “What is ‘pretérito perfecto compuesto’ called in English?”
I loved that she was serious. Vicky is so confident in my abilities that she actually thought I might have an answer. But has she not learned at this point that my US public education was sorely lacking when it came to English grammar, and that anything I may have learned about English grammar I would also have forgotten by now?
But instead, I said,
“Vicky!”
“Vicky, I have no idea. I know what a verb is, it’s an action word. I know what a noun is, it’s a thing word. I know that an adjective describes a thing and an adverb describes an action, but I have no idea what a future present with participle is, or what a past perfect something-something is because I learned to speak English when I was 3 but I never really learned English grammar, because frankly, I didn’t need to. And frankly, with Spanish all I want to do is communicate, but if I need to learn the difference between future perfect and past imperfect in order to do that, so be it. But I have no idea what these things are in English, so please don’t ask me. And need I say that whatever I say from now on will continue to be imperfect, or, no perfecto.”
In that moment I really missed my dad.
I wanted to have the conversations we never had. I wanted to talk with him about verb conjugation, and barefoot language learning. I wanted to ask him why he thought helping missionaries (those who took up a very problematic profession in my opinion) learn languages was such a great idea. And oh by the way, had he heard the recent news about the Southern Baptists and their heel-digging when it came to women in the ministry? I wanted to ask him whether he was doing his work for himself, for the missionaries, or for God. I wanted to ask him if he really was a Christian, and if so what kind, and if he believed he was going to heaven. And even though I know the answer, I wanted to ask him whether he thought all of those people the missionaries failed to save were actually going to hell.
And after we got all of that out of the way, I wanted to tell him that joke.
THE UNREACHABLE ITCH 