{"id":1579,"date":"2013-05-16T17:17:51","date_gmt":"2013-05-16T20:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tracyleekarner.wordpress.com\/?p=1579"},"modified":"2020-10-06T23:22:02","modified_gmt":"2020-10-06T23:22:02","slug":"how-to-learn-a-foreign-language-i-became-a-spanish-orphan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/2013\/05\/16\/how-to-learn-a-foreign-language-i-became-a-spanish-orphan\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Learn a Foreign Language: I became a Spanish orphan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1972--I<\/a>
1972–I wanted to look like Lori Partridge, but my teacher thought I looked like a Spanish orphan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nI’ve been thinking about how we become the people we are.
\nBecoming<\/em> is a theme I like to explore… I wrote a memoir about becoming a writer<\/a>.
\nAnd I’m always becoming something new. These days I’m working on becoming someone who understands multiple languages (or tries to). I wonder where and how my fascination with languages started. I didn’t grow up in a multi-linguistic environment.
\nMaybe it began when in Kindergarten, my Sunday School Teacher taught us to sing “I’ve got the joy-joy-joy-joy down in my heart”<\/a><\/em> in Chinese. I felt very clever. I like feeling clever.
\nFor years, I sang that Chinese song. It went like this (I don’t know the Chinese characters, so I’ll have to write it in transliteration): “I’ve got the peesah-passah-kooki-mahcki<\/em> down in my heart….”
\nOkay, so she only taught us a few of the words in Chinese.
\nActually, as I discovered many years later, she wasn’t teaching us Chinese at all. Eventually I learned that this verse of the Joy-joy song goes, “I’ve got the peace-that-passeth-understanding<\/em> down in my heart.”
\nBut my five-year-old heart was so enamored with the idea of speaking another language, any other language, that I invented an opportunity to speak Chinese. I already sensed the power of words and I wanted to know them all, every word in the whole world. (Greedy for words, that’s what I was!)
\nAt the same time, I intuitively understood something profound (as children often do). Ideas and concepts (such as “peace”) are so vast and mysterious that no single language could adequately express my thoughts. Children, still immersed in the dramatic wonder of language acquisition, understand some things that we adults barely remember we knew. Learning a new language takes me back into that time when naming something was powerful, when just speaking the word peace might\u00a0conjure\u00a0<\/em>peace,<\/em> (Friede, Paix, Paz, Shalom)<\/em> \u00a0as if wishing it and then saying it could make peace reign. (Couldn’t it?)
\nAnd then, in third grade I, a child of 100% German-Lutheran heritage, became a Spanish orphan, when my\u00a0school put on an\u00a0operetta.<\/em>
\nAn operetta is a cheesy musical for children actors, often with a moral message. Ours was called\u00a0The Man With the Crooked Nose.\u00a0<\/em>I played Carmencita, a Spanish waif living at a Swiss orphanage run by (come on, guess….)
\nOf course.\u00a0The Man with the Crooked Nose!<\/em>
\nAs Carmencita, I lived in an orphanage in Switzerland founded by the man with the crooked nose. He collected German orphans, French orphans, Dutch and Norwegian orphans. It annoyed me that we all spoke only English. We each knew only one word in our mother-tongues. Yes… \u00a0Si…\u00a0Ja…. Oui…
\nWe bickered mildly about which way of saying “yes” was the right “oui.” But in true operetta fashion, soon (and without any believable motivation for doing so) we all joined hands and sang (in American-accented English, of course):
\nWell, who cares
\nas long as we
\nagree
\nwith one another? \u00a0<\/em>
\n<\/em>But by then I knew it wasn’t that<\/em> easy for people to get over their differences, especially when only in operettas do people from all those different countries speak the same language.
\nMaybe that’s how I became someone who always wants to learn another language. I think language-learning is important for understanding, which is important for peace.
\nAnd maybe you’ve figured out that this post is introducing a new series for my blog–language learning, why and how.
\nWhat’s your second language? (or third or fourth?) Or which one would you like to speak?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about how we become the people we are. Becoming is a theme I like to explore… I wrote a memoir about becoming a writer. And I’m always becoming something new. These days I’m working on becoming someone who understands multiple languages (or tries to). I wonder where and how my fascination with …<\/p>\n

How to Learn a Foreign Language: I became a Spanish orphan<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[232,410,575,616,735,811,1078],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tracyrittmueller.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}