My Relationship with Language

I have the unusual position of being a polyglot geographer. This perspective has informed much of my adult life so far, and it's been an "interesting" ride. I first studied languages with half a year of Spanish in 6th grade. It was fun! My teacher was a bright, energetic feminist who gave wonderful lectures.

Most of my peers didn't have such good fortune, though! The foreign language program was cut mid-year, and only half of my grade got to experience the world through another language as part of middle-school. Growing up in my community, it didn't appear that many kids had the good fortune of growing up in a multi-lingual home. Personally, I have only one native language, and that's English. Because of this, in professional translation settings, I'm typically only qualified to translate other languages into that one language, English.

I got to continue with Spanish in high school, when I was in the 9th & 10th grades. I restarted with the elementary level, and had a good head-start on the first sections thanks to my prior class. After all this learning though, I still didn't have the confidence to say I spoke or understood Spanish. On an impromptu basis, or if I were out of practice for a while, could I still communicate? I've always painted my language skills with a humble brush, as I do to too many of my skills.

While I enjoyed a half-year course of elementary Spanish and one year of American Sign Language during community college, I never revisited the topic consistently until after completing graduate school with my Master's in mathematics. I was always a passionate learner, and found myself on Duolingo, a website for learning languages. I had fun scouting the beginnings of many different language courses there, but ultimately stuck to Spanish. Learning Spanish through Duolingo and learning a lot about language in general together was a major aspect of my most recent relationship. I ultimately maintained a streak of over a year on Duolingo, and completed each lesson of the English to Spanish skill tree at the time. I still operate my Android phones in Spanish, with a handful of other non-English languages as second-choices, but have fallen out of study since my love passed away. Recently, I've absorbed a lot of French from reading the blogs and webpages of French free software activists.