My Life-long Journey to Learn Foreign Languages

Who wouldn’t want to be fluent in several languages with only minimal effort and time invested? I used to be one of those people with unrealistic expectations that I could become a superhero of foreign language mastery overnight. The more I envisioned and idealized this fantasy, the more painful my actual relationship with languages had become in contrast, reflecting a severe disconnect between my dreams and reality. I recall spending countless evenings attempting to engage with an original text in a foreign language and forcing myself to look up every single unknown word in a dictionary, only to later realize that I had not retained any of these new words for more than a few minutes. I also remember doubting myself and thinking that I would never succeed in learning any foreign language to a sufficient extent to be able to converse with native speakers and read fiction in that language.

To sum up my early experiences with language learning, my various efforts to learn languages failed. The school system of language instruction stagnated for many years and did not teach foreign languages with pragmatism in mind. The curriculums were mostly based on endless and tiresome memorization of vocabulary, and dedicating countless hours in the vain hope of being able to comprehend esoteric grammar structures never actually used in real conversations. Students were expected replicate complex, memorized sentences without ever being able to produce a simple one on their own. The fact that my mother was a senior editor of French at a publishing company surprisingly did not help me to learn French either because she was much more concerned with the niche usages and particularities of word definitions and with insignificant grammar technicalities than teaching me how to actually speak French. The whole system paralyzed me regarding language acquisition because of its absurdly tedious monotony.

The first foreign language classes outside of my school system were in English. I wanted to study archeology in college, and English was part of the entry exams for the history department, to which I was planning to apply. I signed up for an intensive English program that was two years long and consisted of classes meeting twice a week for three hours. The instructor for the class studied in England and was the perfect personification of British culture. 

I absolutely adored her, and she gave me hope that with consistent study and persistence, I would one day be able to sustain a conversation with a native speaker and read the works of Dickens and Jack London in its original language of English. At the beginning, I pushed forward purely out of admiration of my English instructor and her profound knowledge of English  language and culture. The process language learning still seemed difficult and time-consuming, but the more I attended these classes, the more I grew to love learning the English language. I was motivated by other students and their personal paths to master the language. As my studies progressed, I started to comprehend what I was hearing and what I was reading. I still remember when we listened to the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles for the first time in class, and how satisfying it was to understand what the song was about. 

As a result of my two-year English program, I decided to major in English instead of becoming an archeologist, as I had been planning for many years. During my last year of high school, I applied for foreign language programs and majored in English and French. Not only have I yet to regret my choice, but my voracious love continued when I moved to the United States in 2002. I went back to school and got my MA and my PhD in French at UC Berkeley.

As a child, I was always surrounded by books because my father had an enormous library. In that library, there were many translated French books. I read and forever fell in love with the works of Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal, Rabelais, Rousseau, Dumas, and Montaigne. At the time, I had never dreamed of ever reading them in French. While I was preparing for my MA exam in French, I had a chance to read all of them and many more in French. My fascination with French studies was not limited to language and literature, as there were so many other aspects of French culture in which I was interested. So, before applying to PhD program, I went to study at  the Sorbonne in Paris. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2016, I was happy to teach French cinema, a 16th century, French literature class, and other classes on French culture at the University of the Pacific. 

The third foreign language that I learned was Spanish. My interest in the Spanish language started when I was still a college student, but unfortunately Spanish was not offered at my university. After graduating, I started taking private Spanish classes by going to my tutor’s home. It was challenging because my tutor lived very far away and I worked very long hours at my job. I sacrificed many hours of sleep in order to learn Spanish. In the United States, I continued taking many undergraduate and graduate classes in Spanish and Latin American literature. While teaching at the University of the Pacific, I was offered the job of summer program director in Guatemala, and I also taught beginner Spanish to college students. 

My quest to fully master English, French, and Spanish has yet to conclude itself. I continue practicing these languages by reading novels and academic articles, and listening to the news and to songs. I also have future ambitions  to learn more languages. While I was writing my dissertation, I took a beginner Italian course and two Latin courses. At some point, I was able to translate parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Latin into English. I was eventually convinced that I would have to go back to continue studying these languages. 

I hope to start taking Italian classes sometime next year. However, the next stop in my language journey is the Japanese language. I do hope to learn Italian and Japanese to the point of being able to comfortably converse in them, and being able to watch news and read fiction in those languages like I do with English, French, and Spanish. In the distant future, I dream of learning, at least superficially, Arabic, German, and Portuguese. However, these studies will only take place in the relatively distant future. For the next few months or years, I will be struggling with Hiragana and Katakana and maybe, only maybe, will I one day be able to read The Tale of Genji in Japanese, which I read in English last year and The Tale of Beautiful Otikubo that I read in Russian when I was still in middle school. 

Olga Sylvia, PhD