How I Learned to Speak Spanish, Part I

The reader Angie Harms. asked me how I learned to speak Spanish. Thank you, Angie, because I love sharing this story. First of all, I have to tell you that my Spanish is really fantastic. Learning this language is my proudest achievement, and I don't feel that I need to be modest about it. It always takes me a while to convince native speakers that I'm not one of them. And that I never lived in a Spansih-speaking country. And that my parents are not Spanish-speakers.

So it all started back in Ukraine when I was in my late teens. Suddenly, there were all those Latin American soap operas on television all the time. (Yes, it started with watching soap operas in Ukraine and culminated in a PhD in Hispanic Studies in the US.) When I watched them, I always thought, "Here is this entire civilization that I know absolutely nothing about. And nobody I know has any knowledge of it. How strange is that?" I was a university student majoring in English literature then but I decided that I didn't want to continue with that program any more. I tried learning Spanish on my own, with a textbook, but that was useless. There was not a single Spanish-speaking person in my Ukrainian town. Spanish wasn't taught at my university (even though it is the oldest university in the country.) There was no scholarship in Hispanic Studies in my country at all. And there still isn't, unfortunately.

In Canada, however, there was. (The only place to do research of the kind I like in Hispanic literature is North America. That's just how it is for now.) After we emigrated to Canada, I applied to the Department of Hispanic Studies of the country's most famous university. As soon as I was accepted, I made a visit to the wonderful person who was then the Chair of the department.

"I want to do a PhD in Hispanic Studies. Eventually," I said. "And it would be great to teach at this university. I really like these offices and would be glad to occupy one of them."

"So you like Spanish literature?" the kind Chair asked.

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "I never read a word of it, not even in translation."

"But you speak Spanish, right?" she said.

"No, not a word," I responded brightly. "But I will do a PhD in Hispanic Studies and learn." (Remember that video on the robotic prospective PhD student? As I said, that was me.)

The Chair is a very polite and proper British lady but at that point she laughed so hard, I was afraid she would hurt herself. And if you now want to tell me I made an idiot of myself during that conversation, I will let you know that exactly two and a half years after that conversation I started teaching Spanish at that very department. And one of the pretty offices I liked so much was mine (shared with some other people, of course.) And four and a half years later, I left the department to do a PhD in Spanish after receiving every single award that was ever offered by our program. (As I said, I'm very proud of this and don't see why I shouldn't be. I invested a truly Herculean amount of effort into this.)

(To be continued. . .)