MSI Press Blog

    Spain   (after Jordan – Arabic words – the Moors); I knew a lot more Spanish words after living in Jordan. Spain, to me, was a reward for learning Spanish though I was sent there for work and had a native speaker in our group, so it did not matter whether I could speak Spanish for the business part of the trip. Yes, of course, it did help being able to understand and communicate without interpretation. The language was not the Spanish (Spanglish) of Salinas, and certainly one could not throw in some English words and expect comprehension—although Arabic words might have done the trick. Having recently lived and worked in Jordan, I was surprised at how many of the Spanish words had arisen from the influence of Arabic, through the Moors, course. The hotel I stayed in was located across from a beautiful Catholic church that had a Mass every evening. I attended—every evening. My San Juan Bautista experience was quite helpful here: I knew the language of the Mass, the so...

  San Juan Bautista When I first moved to SJB, I was clearly in Spanglish territory. We initially moved into a duplex, and the couple on the other side spoke mainly Spanish, especially when it was about important, shared matters. I quickly turned to a Spanish teacher at work, where I was administrator of a number of language programs. The teacher, wanting to impress, showed up with a nice binder and traditional lessons in hand. Oops! “Oh,” I told her. “I can read most of those things, and I can talk about academic stuff without much trouble, but what I really need is to understand when I am being asked if I have electrical tape or to be able to ask for help with plunging a plugged toilet.” Those are not the topics of textbooks, but they are the topics of life in SJB. The teacher quickly adapted, and I started learning how to live abroad at home, so to speak. In return, as payment for her kindness, I would attend her classes when she needed an interactive audience or non-stu...

    Salinas, California After my years with the Army and the State Department, I accepted a position at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. For a linguist, the peninsula was paradise — so many languages, so many chances to practice. But I couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Thirteen years earlier, as a military Russian student, I had managed just fine. Now, housing costs had soared beyond reach. The nearest realistic place to live was Salinas. Salinas is well known to readers of Steinbeck. He was born here, and his childhood home still stands, along with a museum honoring his legacy. Yet, the Salinas of Steinbeck’s novels is not the Salinas of today — layered, complex, and deeply human. The modern Salinas has a high proportion of Spanish speakers, including our landlord at the time, whose wife and I communicated in what could only be called Spanglish . Anna would begin in English, slip into Spanish at the first unknown word, and soon we were to...

Puerto Rico The first time I got a chance to experience Spanish in its native environment was when my Army reserve unit was sent to Puerto Rico to fill in for a group of soldiers who had been shot in separatist activity (this was the 1980s, and there was some friction there). I was able to use Spanish everywhere I went, and my proficiency shot way up. What had been latent – quite a lot—quickly became active. Most places I went did not expect me to speak English even though Puerto Rico is completely bilingual. My skin tanned up nicely since I was working night shift and spending days in the sun where the dollop of Native American blood in my body took over and protected me from burning. Whenever I went somewhere to eat with my unit, most of the soldiers being white as white can be, the reaction from the wait staff was pretty funny. “What would you like?” they would ask my buddies. “Que quiere?” they would ask me, assuming that I was a Spanish speaker, given my browning-up-nicel...