Recently, the Lily published a really nice first-person piece written by a heritage speaker of Korean, Dabin Han. One of my favorite lines from the article is “As I grew older, my language didn’t have the chance to grow with me.” I’m sure many heritage speakers can relate to the feelings of being “stuck” with their language abilities and the feeling of impotence when navigating complex situations or deep conversations. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that this is precisely why courses designed specifically for heritage speakers are so important and valuable. Not only do such courses serve to prevent further language loss, but heritage language instruction allows the speaker to expand their language skills, to communicate on topics of interest with “depth and breadth,” and to gain confidence in self-expression. Heritage language courses also create community with other bilingual speakers who are experiencing the world in a very similar way.

Every time I go to a Zumba class, I’m reminded of the difference between accuracy and fluency in language teaching and language use. In Zumba, I’m usually not doing the moves correctly. The teacher leads with the right foot and I lead with the left. Move your right arm while leading with the left foot– and I’m doing the opposite. You get the point. But I keep moving because I want a good workout. This is fluency: when you keep going despite not doing it exactly right. Accuracy, on the other hand, is about trying to get it right, that is, trying to avoid mistakes. When you focus on accuracy in a second language, you inevitably slow down because you’re focusing on things like gender agreement, verb endings, etc. In language learning there should be room for working on both fluency and accuracy. Most formal learning situations, in my experience, focus obsessively on accuracy and students rarely get the chance to get a good (language) workout.

Entry posted in observance of International Mother Language Day, February 21.

If you’re a Polish kid, you’ve played “berek”. I didn’t know what berek was until I watched my son play it with friends (it’s basically “tag”, but it can have certain rules depending on what the kids make up). One way to think about the heritage speaker experience is to observe monolingual kids in their natural environment (e.g., school, playground). This sort of comparison gives you a sense of what the heritage speaker might have missed, depending on the age at which they were separated from the speech community. If you’re a careful observer, you’ll notice the richness of language when there is a community of monolingual speakers. Even simple games elicit a lot of language such as negotiation about the rules of the game, playful teasing, comparisons between players, etc. For my son, playing tag in any language is great fun, but there is something sweet in knowing that he had the opportunity I missed—to experience it as “berek”.

“You are Polish, right? But you have an accent.”

That’s what I heard from the lady who works at my favorite local bakery. It doesn’t bother me that I have an “accent” or that some features of my speech are perceived as non-native. What perplexes me is that I cannot hear it.

During four months, I lived as a returnee—a heritage speaker experiencing the language in a monolingual environment. In those months, I had some time to reflect on my strengths and limitations as a heritage speaker, but the questions that keep coming back to me are about my sense of self—who am I and where do I fit in?

One thing that I should clarify from the beginning is that I am barely literate in Polish. I can read street signs, restaurant menus, and other simple texts. I can get through a children’s book with some amount of effort. But in general, reading anything that is meant for literate adults is difficult and frustrates me quickly. Sometimes it’s funny to discover written words for the first time, but words that I’ve known my whole life. For example, there are words that I thought were one word are actually two, or vice-versa. “Oh, that’s how it’s written!” I think to myself. But fun discoveries aside, it’s painful to not read fluently, especially when you can read well (and enjoy reading!) in another language.

There is a sense of sadness when browsing books at the bookstore, and putting back the ones with too many words. I put back the ones that, realistically, I won’t be able to read. Once I purchased a book for my son with fairly large print and beautiful illustrations. The salesperson commented that it was a great book for a beginning reader. “Yeah, that’s me,” I thought to myself as I paid and left the store.

This is a thorny question. First, I’d like to start off by pointing out that learning any language in adulthood (as a second or third language) is a difficult task. Many researchers debate whether adult learners can ever reach the competence of native speakers. But that’s a debate for another entry. So, learning any language well–including Spanish–will require hundreds and perhaps thousands of hours of exposure to the language, opportunities to produce the language in meaningful situations, and the motivation to keep honing one’s skills. That said, Spanish has some similarities with English that make it seem easier to learn, at least initially. First, the sheer number of cognates (e.g., politics = política) will facilitate the learning process. It also shares the same alphabet as English, so the task of learning a new script is not an obstacle.  If you are able to read Spanish, then this is another way of getting input (which is the most basic requirement for language learning).

The experts at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) recognize this in classifying languages into categories for the purposes of training government personnel. For example, a category I language (Spanish) will require less instructional time than a category III (Russian) or category IV (Japanese) language. At the Defense Language Institute (in Monterey, CA), those learning Spanish and those learning Japanese are expected to reach the same level of proficiency in speaking, listening, and reading–but the Spanish course is 26 weeks and the Japanese course is 64 weeks (note: these are intensive courses with 8+ hours of instruction per day). However, these assumptions regarding language difficulty have recently been questioned. My colleague Charlene Polio has written on this topic here.

There is also a difference between learning some basic Spanish (enough to get around as a tourist, for example) and reaching a high level of proficiency. Having advanced proficiency in any language will necessarily involve knowing a large quantity of vocabulary–probably around 8000-9000 word families. This is a monumental task, even if you can rely on cognates to get you started. When in comes to grammar, Spanish has a number of obstacles for the English-speaker, including more flexible word order, grammatical gender, and highly inflected verb paradigms (each verb has 48 forms for the simple tenses alone). In addition, learning any second language requires you to make distinctions that are ignored in your native language. For example, the Spanish verbs ser and estar get translated as “to be” in English although they have very different meanings. Learning to make new distinctions in a second language, and doing it consistently, is not an easy task. Other distinctions in Spanish that cause major problems for the English speaker are aspect (preterite vs. imperfect) and mood (indicative vs. subjunctive). There are hundreds of verbs that convey differences in meaning depending on the presence of the particle ‘se’ (e.g., despedir=to fire; despedirse=to say goodbye). These are just some of the complexities of that are not easily mastered by non-native speakers, which casts doubt on the idea of Spanish being “easy.”