Always Keeping My Spanish Language Active
After a year of Latin in high school, my parents and I moved to a new town for us, Seminole, Texas - about as far West Texas as you can get, without being in New Mexico. Since I enjoyed Latin, I signed-up for Spanish, since that was the only language offerred. We had a great teacher, and I took Spanish my sophomore through senior years.
I talk to people all the time that took a language in high-school, but they still graduate without being able to speak the language. Often, a person can read and write the language, but cannot teach it. Our teacher emphasized conversation and actually speaking the language.
I worked at a Dairy Queen and a janitorial company in high school. In both jobs, I had plenty of opportunities to work with Latinos. I even picked quite a colorful vocabulary.
At the end of my junior year in high-school, I went on the Spanish Club’s trip to Mexico. Travelling to a Spanish-speaking country is obviously a great way to boost your skills. I created an audio-scrapbook for the trip, and got 3 hours of transferrable college credit from a junior college.
When I went to college, I took CLEP tests - advanced placement tests for Spanish. They actually awarded me 14 college credits from my test results. Wow - that saved me one entire semester in college.
During my Bachelor’s in Business, I took three more Spanish classes. One was in Spanish conversation, and the other two were Spanish literature, where the teacher spoke in Spanish, we took notes in Spanish, and of course the tests were in Spanish.
After college, I was curious about other languages, so I delved into French, Portuguese, and Hebrew. Later I even tried a sampling of Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Greek, but I can’t really claim to speak those languages. Before the internet existed, it was hard to find courses, and of course they were all on audio tapes back then in the 1980s.
In 1995, I was a consultant and got a job offer in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Being single and living by yourself is not the optimal way to learn more Spanish. But on the job, I was able to put a lot of Spanish to use, even though it wasn’t a requirement.
After burning a lot of money on dozens of differents types of language courses, I got a good feel for which ones worked, and which ones didn’t. Eventually, I started creating my own courses for Hebrew and Spanish, and started building my own Spanish online learning center. We are currently working with several native Spanish speakers from different parts of the world.
