Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Lost in Translation

My son and his Spanish teacher

Parenting is a high-pressure game. I spend long, unhealthy amounts of time thinking of all the ways I'm screwing it up. To me, parenting is a series of decisions you make that transform your pure and perfect little person into someone you won't want around in a few years.

Most of my effort to date has revolved around the simple idea that not everything I think of ought to be said aloud. It's not that I think you shouldn't swear in front of kids, or that kids don't know about (and use) swear words. I just realized that if I wasn't more careful Eli's first word could very well be fuckstick, and even though that would make a hilarious YouTube video I've been trying to use more discipline in my outbursts.

And then there are the things we do as parents that we don't even know are harmful until some scientists point it out:
"...researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard."
— Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language. Perri Klass, M.D. Published: October 10, 2011 in the The New York Times

An article like this can really ruin a morning cup of coffee. Eli turned six months old yesterday, and what I hear when I read this is that I'm permanently screwing up my child's brain by only speaking English. I'm already paranoid about vaccines and water systems full of anti-depressants and their effects on his tiny neurons. Now I feel bad we can't afford a maid.

Even though he has yet to learn his first language, I've been feeling a lot of (self-imposed) pressure to teach Eli a second language. I think a lot of this drive comes from feeling guilty. It's well documented that Americans are in last place in knowing other peoples' languages, and that just makes me feel bad, like the rest of the world is looking down on us and thinks we're really spoiled and ignorant. I hate it when I go to a "local" business and the cashiers greet me and then turn to one another and start rolling their eyes and laughing as they chatter in a foreign language because they know I can't understand them.

"Get a load of this guy. We're talking about him right in front of him and he doesn't even know it."

"I know. We could be saying anything, like making fun of his station wagon, and he would have no idea."

"Look at him, trying to understand us while he pretends he's not listening."

"He has dandruff."

And so, if for no other reason than to be able to interject while buying canned beans at the bodega, I decided ¡Mi hijo hablará español o moriré tratando! (courtesy of Babelfish.com). That is when I enlisted the help of Jorge.

Jorge is a stuffed monkey a friend got for us in Japan. I named him Jorge as a joke because he looks like a foreign knockoff of a certain monkey famous among children for his curiosity. He is about the same build as his namesake, but he has these saucer eyes that bore into you with their blankness. He looks like an acid casualty. Eli loves him.

I had the idea that Jorge could help me teach Spanish to Eli because Jorge, as you probably guessed, is Spanish-speaking only. By employing a drug-addled stuffed animal to impart a second language, I figured  it would reduce the confusion of switching back and forth between the two. To me this was a simple and beautiful way to convey to my infant son that some people speak one way while others speak another way. Eli will see Jorge and begin to understand that Jorge doesn't speak the same language as Mommy and Daddy. And hopefully he won't only associate Spanish with monkeys, but we can talk about racism later. One thing at a time.

After a few sessions with Jorge, I still believe my idea is good. The only obstacle—and it is a really big obstacle—to my plan is that I don't technically "know" Spanish.

It's not like I'm starting from scratch. I took it in high school, but that was almost 20 years ago, and my teacher was a white guy from Marion, Ohio that we had to call Señor Cheney.

Señor Cheney was ancient, a relic from another era when you could still berate and humiliate your students. I've never met a teacher that hated being in class more than the shiftless potheads I went to school with, but Señor Cheney was at least a tie. He was a humorless and slow-moving man who growled menacingly at us when we did poorly in his lessons, which of course made us want to do poorly. He chain-smoked like a dragon and would come to class five or ten minutes late every day reeking of tobacco. He would conduct twenty or thirty minutes of Spanish and then leave early to do it all over again.

Ironically, his disdain of students and school in general made us like going to his class, if only to see if we could trigger a heart attack.

In his imagination, and perhaps in the days when you were allowed to paddle students, Señor Cheney's classes were conducted entirely in Spanish with the students asking and answering questions fluently and politely. But by the time we got to him there was no such deference, not to mention we'd learned very little Spanish so this was probably not even possible. Rather than apply ourselves, we found it much more rewarding to create nonsensical phrases like por supuesto el sombrero (literally: of course the hat).

Another rule was that each of the students would address one another only with their chosen Spanish names. I chose Paco. For reasons I still cannot fully explain, I got a real kick out of being bellowed at when the teacher wouldn't use my real name.

We also liked to use es muy—which means is very—all the time, for any reason. A typical exchange went like this:

"Señor Cheney, may I go to the bathroom?"

"¡Paco. En Español!"

"Señor Cheney, may I es muy go to the bathroom?

This was unendingly amusing to us, mostly because Señor Cheney's English, when you could get him to break his own rule, was exemplary.

"You peons! You couldn't find your way out of a parking space," he'd fume and we would howl with laughter. "Go ahead and laugh. You sound like a sack full of idiots!"

It was one of my favorite classes ever. I took four years of this. Sadly, my Spanish never sharpened much. Nevertheless, in the great tradition of oral histories, I set out to teach my son what little I know.
...

Even if you can read and understand a language pretty well, trying to have a conversation is another story and you're quickly and keenly aware of the gaps in your fluency. But I saw this coming, so I decided to try to brush up on my Spanish a bit.

The problem with this plan... well, there are several problems with this plan, but the biggest problem with this plan is that learning a new language is hard. I'm 33, and I ingested a lot of substances when I was younger, so my ability to retain even important things like paying the rent on the first of every month, not just some months, is about the ceiling of my capacity.

And maybe you already suspected this but, after a rigorous afternoon of playing a Spanish language app on my phone, I'm starting to believe you can't just cram for a second language and then pass it along to your child. You have to actually know the language and be able to think and understand it.

Another problem is that most Spanish instruction tapes are aimed at people who are planning to travel to a Spanish-speaking country. They're instructive, but most of the lessons skip over conversation to focus on practical phrases like, "Where is the swimming pool?" and "Do you have a kids' menu?" And some of the inclusions and omissions are curious. For example, I can differentiate between a sofa and a couch, or a table and a little table, but if I'm in a foreign country what I really want to know is how to ask directions to the airport and how to spot a prostitute.

Jorge speaks Spanish in this velvety accent that I learned from the tapes Señor Cheney used to play for us. His pronunciation is very good. Sadly, Jorge speaks Spanish only as well as I do, which is about a Kindergarten level. He can greet you and ask how you are doing, he can make small talk about the weather, and he knows a few random nouns, but that's about it.

For now, with the help of a diccionario, I'm focusing on swapping Spanish for the English words we frequently use with Eli, like asking if he's hungry or sleepy. We point at objects, like the dogs, and try to cobble together descriptions of them. I am sure my Spanish isn't very nuanced—I was recently informed by a nurse that the word for ice cream is not, as I assumed, crema fría—but it's fun. I only hope I'm not doing irreversible harm to my son's ability to learn real Spanish. I can see him in class:

"That's es muy not correcto!"

Whatever happens, I feel this is time well-spent. The rhythmic qualities of the romance languages cannot be overstated. To my ear, anything sung in Spanish sounds beautiful and poignant, and Eli really enjoys Jorge's singing because, even with an extremely abbreviated vocabulary, that monkey can craft a catchy tune. Below is his favorite one about boiling water for my morning coffee:

Necesito hacer
agua caliente
para café
para papá.

If that doesn't promote effective brain growth, nothing will.

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