Confronting Faults

Most often, I hear from adults how smart I am. How proud my parents must be. However, they do not see my struggle with what I want to obtain the most: better linguistic skills. Do not get me wrong, as everyone else, I enjoy the praise given and, even more so, I am thrilled that I can make my parents proud. I would like very much to please them and myself with enhanced linguistics. Currently, I am in the process of understanding and speaking passable Spanish. In past years I have tried to obtain passable Navajo. Both languages continue to elute me despite my efforts.

I have come to believe that memory is the most important factor in learning a new language. Unfortunately, I seem to have a rather weak memory for items of importance. For example; give me a totally useless, unimportant scene in a movie that has no relevance to anything important and I can remember exactly what happened. However, give me the simple starter questions of the Five W’s in Spanish and I will not be able to remember them in correct order the next day. Coming to a conclusion, I see that I simply must try harder to remember and pay close attention to my studies in such areas.

At the start of each course, I would be afraid to even try and say words out loud. I could not get my tongue wrapped around the words. Verging on pathetic, my voice became the murmur in a sea of what seemed to be natives to the erotic words. Every group assignment would be turned to my dread, as they became a show of my incorrect pronunciations. No matter how many times I ran over the words in my head, I could not seem to get them right. They came out as horrible, abnormal accents. Followed by this, came unmeant giggles. I minded at first. Thinking how rude my fellow students were at my effort to learn something completely foreign to me. After awhile I joined them, laughing at my own bad accents, particularly since I seemed fond of a French accent. The accents remain and seem to have no intention of leaving. I guess it is as though they will be my own flare to frustrating, yet necessary, subjects.

Although I can accept my faults in linguistics at present time, does not mean that I will not try in the future to correct them. I have withstood terribly hidden giggles, mental scoldings and infinite corrections. I know that I will need to work harder on my linguistics then any other subject since I plan to do a lot of traveling when I grow older. In the end, I have to say that I am rather proud of myself for learning as much as I do in my mother’s language, Navajo and my father’s language, Spanish.