Precerpt from My 20th Language: L3 Spanish - University Classes
University
Spanish Classes
After the 7th grade self-taught experience, it
was quite some time before I would take actual classes. In the interim, my
Latin and French classes kept my Spanish going in a way, given their being
members of the same language family: similar grammatical structure, similar
lexical derivation.
It was only at the university that I picked up courses in
Spanish. Since I had a full plate of French, German, and Russian, Spanish did
not fit easily into my schedule, so I asked one of the Spanish instructors if I
could officially audit her class, and she agreed. Because I already knew some
Spanish, it was decided that I should audit intermediate Spanish. I did two
courses this way, which, had I taken them for credit, I would have finished the
two-year language requirement (a requirement I quite overfulfilled in my
college days). The teacher liked having me in class, let me participate with
everyone else, take the test, and do the assignments. She was as meticulous
about correcting me as her regular students. (Wish I could remember her name!)
After the audited classes, I approached the department chair
and asked to be enrolled in upper level classes even though I had no actual
credits for earlier courses. The chair agreed, and my first real course was Conversational
Spanish, taught by a Spaniard, who asked us to call him Don Antonio! (I will
leave the Spanish speakers among the readers of this book to put meaning to
that!) Not having had all the preliminary practice or the extramural interaction
with Spanish speakers that the Spanish majors (all the other students) in the class
had, I had to do what I had done for years: rely on my French and Latin knowledge.
That had Don Antonion scratching his head. “All the other students in this class
make anglicismos [errors based on the influence of English],” he said
quizzically, “but you make gauliismos [errors coming from the influence of
French].” Yeah, well…
After that, I needed a phonetics course for my major in
linguistics and figured it was about time to learn good pronunciation. So, I
took the Spanish phonetics course. An additional attraction is that the professor
was considered one of the best in the Spanish department, and I took followed
the phonetics course with a course in morphonology and syntax with him, also
needed for that linguistics major.
Three academic courses, but they took me far beyond what a
normal three-course plan would have. If I had taken the same number of credits
in a standard way, I would have had two semesters of beginning Spanish and one semester
of intermediate Spanish. Instead, I had one course for majors and two courses
in the 400-series (upper level undergraduation/graduate level courses), and
that really pushed my Spanish.
For more precerpts from My 20th Language, click HERE.
For more posts about language learning, click HERE.
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