Precerpt from My 20th Language: English, L1 (continued)
 |
Really Getting
into It
In high school and college, I joined the debate team. Debate
taught me how to use language with purpose—how to wield subtleties, double
entendres, logic, and evidence to persuade. That training sharpened my
awareness of how language functions beyond vocabulary lists and grammar charts.
When I later began learning foreign languages, I instinctively looked for those
same tools of persuasion and nuance.
Speech competitions reinforced this skill even further.
Standing before an audience, I learned how rhythm, tone, and word choice could
sway listeners. Political speeches—whether for student council elections (which
I won) or workshops I conducted later—added another layer of practical
application. Each of these experiences deepened my understanding of English as
a system of communication, and I carried that awareness into my study of other
languages.
Getting Into
It Even More
My academic path added another dimension. A university
phonetics course opened my ears to the nature of sound itself. When a
phonetician helped me alter my New England dialect so that Midwestern debaters
could understand me, I discovered how sounds can be “lateralized out of the
brain”—the set of phonemes recognized by a speaker being limited by those of
his/her native language around the age of puberty, or earlier, depending upon
which expert one believes, and I expanded my limited set through the development
of the ability to hear and produce sounds differently from what I was used to.
That skill became invaluable when learning foreign languages, where producing
and perceiving new sounds is often the first hurdle. (A friend whose first language
is Greek has flawless English pronunciation even though he came to the USA well
after the age of lateralization. In fact, he was a senior in high school. When
asked how he learned to speak English so well phonetically, he said that back
when he came, there were no ESL programs, and because he spoke with an accent,
he was sent to a speech therapist. Indeed, that will do it!)
Courses in historical linguistics and dialectal change
broadened my perspective even further. I began to see English not as a fixed
system but as a living, evolving language. I relearned spellings—“theater”
instead of “theatre,” “catalog” instead of “catalogue”—and understood them as
reflections of historical shifts, as well as dialectal differences, my New England
roots reflecting more often British spelling conventions. This awareness of
change helped me approach other languages with curiosity rather than rigidity.
Sharing It
Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) gave me the
chance to see language learning from the other side. I witnessed firsthand the
challenges learners faced when their L1 structures clashed with English. For
example, Russian speakers often struggled with English word order because they
processed meaning morphologically, reducing the need to rely on word order for
meaning. These cross-cultural difficulties reminded me to anticipate similar
challenges in my own L2 studies.
By teaching, I learned to recognize parallels and
disconnects among languages. More important, I realized that my mastery of
English—the debates, speeches, phonetics, and linguistics—was not just
background knowledge. It was the foundation that allowed me to approach other
languages with insight, flexibility, and confidence.
For more posts about language learning, click HERE.
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