The most important trick is a dash of chutzpah

After watching my mom struggle with English when she came from Cuba, Stew go mano a mano with Spanish after we moved to Mexico 20 years ago, and my own experiences learning English at age 14, I’ve concluded that neither perfect grammar nor a flawless pronunciation are essential to learn a new language. What matters most initially is to persistently plow ahead despite the inevitable grammatical or pronunciation blunders and even the occasional snickering by some natives. I say, just fling your budding vocabulary and grammar confidently as if you knew what you were doing, and gradually store in your mind any new words or constructions for use at your next conversation. If you want to learn French, for instance, it’s no use practicing endlessly how to gurgle your Rs like Edith Piaf or speak at the turbo speed of an announcer of le football.

My mom and dad who came to the U.S. when they were in their mid-fifties, faced a similarly traumatic cultural shock but handled the challenge of learning a new language differently. My dad was by far the smarter of the pair, but also a quiet and proud man with little tolerance for mockery or eye-rolling by strangers. Indeed, after someone made fun of his English he retreated into a Spanish-only shell. Curiously, I occasionally caught him quietly reading an English-language magazine or newspaper—”Life” was his favorite—and he’d later mention to me some tidbit he had found interesting. Perhaps Life’s lavish use of photography helped him connect pictures with words. But whatever his knowledge of English was, it seldom came out for sheer fear of embarrassment.

Mom, on the other hand, never seemed flustered by the reaction of supervisors, co-workers or total strangers when she inflicted on them her fractured English that nevertheless got her through all the daily necessities. And if anyone dared laugh or make fun of her, she had a ready zinger: “Excuse me that I speak only one and a half languages; but how many do you speak?”

When we moved to Mexico twenty years ago, Stew enrolled at the Warren Hardy Spanish school, just like scores of newly arrived expats, but that was a bust. Then I went at it with Stew, armed with a first-year high school Spanish textbook but didn’t get anywhere either. It’s no wonder. The textbook took learners on an arid slog of conjugation tables of regular and irregular verbs and other hairy nooks of Spanish grammar, a rote drill that didn’t seem helpful for beginners hoping to achieve some conversational flow. Indeed, if you need to juggle the four tenses of the Spanish subjunctive before ordering at a Spanish restaurant, you’ll likely end up with lockjaw or octopus carpaccio instead of paella. Jack Connelly, an old Chicago friend, instead would sail forth in his conversations with waiters at Cuernavaca restaurants with his unique Spanglish patois which grew only more creative after two or three margaritas. It didn’t seem to bother him or the waiters, who found him an entertaining gringo.

Ironically, Stew’s best Spanish teacher has been Félix, our gardener, pet-sitter and indispensable handyman for the past nineteen years. It’s been an interesting process to watch because Félix resolutely refuses to utter a single word of English, even after our repeated exhortations, except what Spanish purists call “barbarisms” or English words that have been transmogrified into Mexican Spanglish. In Félix-speak, paint thinner becomes “tee-ner” and a light dimmer a “dee-mer.”

Stew says that he also found the phone app Google Translate quite useful to translate the back-and-forth of conversations between and Félix.

Yet Félix’ stubbornness forced Stew to become fluent enough to handle simple everyday conversations, a trick that neither Warren Hardy nor I had accomplished. In fact, I’d say Stew can speak more Spanish than the majority of English-speaking expats in San Miguel, some of whom—even after decades here—still can’t say how they want their steak done and may get huffy if a hapless Mexican waiter can’t speak English.

When I arrived from Cuba in 1962, with nary a nickel’s worth of English in my pocket, my learning curve shot up during the first few months, fueled by a potent mix of adolescent insouciance, a survival instinct—particularly because I came to the U.S. without my parents to live with an uncle I didn’t know—and perhaps most important, landing in the polyglot West Side of New York. My first school experience was at Joan of Arc Jr. High, a school the size of a small college, where I was placed in a homeroom harmonized by a half-dozen foreign tongues, among them Italian, Haitian Creole, Vietnamese and Spanish, under the kind and courageous direction of Miss Virginia Mazzaro. To this day, I can’t remember how she managed to teach introductory English to such a motley group of students. But she did and I’ll always be grateful to her.

From the cacophonous West Side where my uncle lived in a fourth-floor walkup on Amsterdam Avenue, I moved to another foster home, this one in Long Beach, Long Island, a placid, white-on-white, heavily Jewish suburb. I was the only Latino in a student body of probably a thousand. My curriculum featured English literature, which I remember included Dickens and Hawthorne, a trial by fire for someone with only rudimentary mastery of the language. But I survived, again under the gentle tutelage and steady encouragement of another teacher, Mrs. Paradine. Despite my wobbly grammar and vocabulary, she never gave up and in fact told me I would become a good writer. Many twists and turns later, I indeed ended up as a successful journalist in Chicago.

But as I soaked English it replaced Spanish in my head as my primary language. English is now my go-to language when I think, converse or dream. What happened was that as I stopped speaking Spanish, except at home after my parents arrived from Cuba, my Spanish vocabulary and grammar atrophied at the level of 14- or 15-year-old, a sad turn I’m reminded of nowadays when I try to speak with someone here in Mexico and sometimes Spanish words fail me. It doesn’t happen often but often enough that I’ve realized that in effect I’ve become an English speaker, even if my Ricky Ricardo Cuban accent gushes out when I get angry or frustrated.

My latest language venture is learning French, which I took for three years in high school. It’s also part an ancestral curiosity because my paternal lineage goes back to Nantes, France. I feel I’m cheating a bit because French and Spanish share common Latin roots and the vocabulary and grammar are somewhat similar. However, I find French pronunciation, a tongue-twisting mix of throaty grrs and nasal honks nearly impossible to understand let alone emulate. But in two weeks I plan to join a weekly group of French speakers that meets weekly at the San Miguel biblioteca (bibliotheque), and which will be a test of whether at 77 years old I can still summon enough chutzpah to learn a third language.