is one of the topics she is hugely passionate about. She kindly invited me to give a talk about my project in one of her classes. Alejandra was the first ones to have volunteered to participate and it was a pleasure to hear her story. Union City, which is just about 20 minutes’ ride from Midtown New York, is a linguistically and culturally vibrant area where walking along these narrow streets with Catholic churches and statues as well as cafés selling all sorts of Latin American specialties, one can mostly hear Spanish rather than English being spoken.
Alejandra is doing her Master’s degree in Education at New Jersey City University. She is also a teacher of her native language – Spanish. Alejandra started learning English at school, but it was not until she was around 20 or 21 that she applied for a job that required English. That was how she was able to improve her skills. Back at school she remembers struggling with understanding simple structures or even writing a simple word. As a result, she grew to hate the subject and had no idea why she couldn’t succeed. At some point, she started seeing this language as a challenge that she was determined to overcome. That was a native speaker that she once met who helped her understand some simple grammar rules and that discovery was a turning point. As for speaking, there weren’t many activities offered to improve it. She wasn’t still very confident about her English after she had got that job, but it involved talking and helping others and by taking risks, she eventually started making a more significant progress.
Nowadays in Colombia people are making an effort to learn English. Schools are trying to offer more than what used to be purely grammar classes as in order to land good jobs, people have to prove they are actually capable of speaking the language. In terms of continuing working on improving her English, living here in New Jersey is a bit challenging for Alejandra as a lot of Spanish is spoken and she has to find ways to practise her English. Living with American families and teaching people Spanish has been a great opportunity for her to speak English while sharing her culture with them.
No matter whichever language Alejandra is speaking, she always tries to be herself and others perceive her in the same way as well. Overall, being here and teaching Americans Spanish has been an amazing experience. Alejandra finds it incredible how people here are ready to embrace the culture and let go of some stereotypes. There are a lot of schools in New Jersey where people can learn Spanish. There are economic incentives for it as well as a lot of people in business speak Spanish as their first language.
Being one of the most frequently spoken languages in the world, Spanish has a lot of local varieties and according to Alejandra, Americans are enthusiastic about learning the Colombian Spanish as they think the accent is easier to grasp. She doesn’t believe there are too many differences – except some vocabulary – as Spanish speakers from different countries can pretty much understand each other.
Alejandra has also had some experience of living in Israel and learned to read some Hebrew there. She was able to read the Bible and for her that was a mesmerizing experience. Even though she didn’t continue to study the language, she is still happy whenever she hears some familiar words in Hebrew. In the future she would like to take up Chinese as she finds it really astounding how many people speak it.
Finally, she believes that finding a good teacher to guide you through the basics is essential if you want to succeed in learning a new language. This is what she thinks you should do before you invest into actually going to a country where your target language is spoken. «Make mistakes, be confident, take risks, then buy your ticket!», says Alejandra.
∞ I was really amazed by Alejandra’s enthusiasm for teaching and sharing her language as she offered me her help with Spanish, which was the latest language I’d tried to learn before my brief trip to Spain back in 2016 following my attempts at Italian and French. Being a foreign language teacher myself, I found it inspiring to hear how much faith and trust is put into us in our effort to make a difference in our students’ lives.
A routine life in Spanish and English
(Samantha, USA)
Languages spoken: English, Spanish.
Field of study/career: Linguistics.
I also met Samantha through the same professor I did Alejandra, my previous interviewee. That was my first online interview (if only we had known it would become «a thing» just a couple of years later!). Samantha is a first-generation immigrant as both her parents come from El Salvador (a country in Central America). She was also the first person I’d had in this project who had had this type of experience.
Samantha works at New Jersey City University. She grew up here in New Jersey in a Spanish-speaking family, but had had an opportunity to pick up some English before she started learning it at nursery school at about the age of 3. Her father, who was born in El Salvador and moved to the U.S. in his twenties, spoke to her mostly in Spanish. Her mother used English more and Samantha would use Spanish with her grandparents as well as other relatives. She doesn’t remember having any difficulties growing up with two languages, it was just «a routine». Picking up English and using it on a daily basis was very easy as she would use it all the time with her teachers and classmates at the public school she attended. The only difficulty she remembers having early on in her studies was with some letters. Overall she can’t say she was learning English as a foreign language. Now she calls it her primary language and doesn’t feel that she has any foreign accent at all even though she’s met some people who say she does.
According to Samantha, she sometimes feels she has a foreign accent when she uses Spanish. As for her nationality and identity, she prefers to call herself Hispanic, but the problem is that this nationality is often not listed so she chooses «white» instead. Spanish is still part of her life as she would still sometimes uses it at home and sometimes has difficulty remembering English words for some things, e.g., vegetables. Her Mum watches a lot of soap operas in Spanish and Samantha finds it amazing how she can switch between the two languages and understand them without even realizing it. In her job Samantha uses Spanish with some international students. Generally, she doesn’t feel discriminated against based on her ethnicity as in this part of the country in particular, there are a lot of people who were born and raised here but have another linguistic and cultural origin that they identify themselves with. Therefore Samantha finds being able to speak two languages advantageous as she believes bilingualism is regarded as something valuable despite the current political reforms in regards of immigration.
Overall she thinks that Hispanics are having an easier time adjusting to the U.S. culture these days than they used to. Her advice to anyone trying to make a living in the U.S. is to «push on through» remembering about the long-term benefits they are going to have. Using the example of her own father, she argues it might be hard to start feeling fully integrated here in the U.S. especially after coming here at an older age. As grateful as he is for all the benefits he has enjoyed after moving here, he hopes to be able to spend more time in his home country of El Salvador during the retirement.
∞ In her talk Samantha outlines some issues facing first-generation immigrants and their parents which include those pertaining to adaptation and certain identity struggles associated with it. The U.S. is known to be a nation of immigrants, but obviously full accommodation to living here is a long journey that not everyone is resilient enough to complete. The immigration policies enforced by the Trump administration also sent waves and it remains to be seen if they are going to have any far-reaching effect on the country’s language policies.
A researcher experiencing bilingualism in Asia and the U.S. (Suqin, China)
Languages spoken: Chinese,