MSI Press Blog

  University Spanish Classes After the 7 th 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 met...

  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...

  Spanish House I didn’t live in Spanish House; I lived in German House. They were located, however, just two floors apart in my Penn State dorm. French House was there, too. So, it should not have been surprising that we would all run into each other many times. For me, it was fun. I could speak French to my friends in French House, Spanish to my friends in Spanish House, and German to my friends in German House, which was where I spent most of my time and most of my talking. My roommate Brigitte, a native speaker from Koeln, Germany, had a very close friend, Patrice, who lived in Spanish House. They had become friends at the Mount Alto campus prior to moving to the main campus in State College their junior year. It was a given that Patrice and I would become friends, too—a three-some. Brigitte was dating a young man who lived in the same apartment as Patrice’s boyfriend, all of them friends from Mount Alto. So, again, it should not have been surprising that they invited me ...