Being Bilingual

I was inspired to write this after thinking back on my struggles to learn Spanish but how grateful I am to have the ability to speak and understand Spanish. I am very lucky that my tbi, brain surgeries and brain damage, have not affected my ability to speak and understand Spanish (even if my ability to make myself understood has been affected).

I took two years of required Spanish in high school. However, I learned basically nothing and retained basically nothing. Nine years after graduation, I would end up in Colombia (a native Spanish speaking country). I naively assumed that I could get by and live there only speaking English. 

My stupid assumption was proven very wrong. Almost no one spoke English. At first, I learned Spanish only to get my survival needs met. My Spanish started off very limited and I struggled a lot. However, I kept at it and I eventually grew to love the Spanish language and become fluent.

It took me about five years of studying in a mixture of street Spanish, with Jenny and my Spanish speaking friends and in formal Spanish language classes to become what I would consider truly fluent. I still make mistakes all the time and I still cannot get rid of my accent. You can tell immediately that Spanish is not my native language.

However, I can communicate 95% of what I want to say totally in Spanish. I am at the point in my language journey now, where I can talk about complicated and trivial things in Spanish. I don't use the language exclusively to get my basic survival needs met anymore. Jenny and I decided right from the beginning of her life, that we wanted our daughter Eliana Valentina to be bilingual. I try to speak to her exclusively in English and Jenny tries to speak to her exclusively in Spanish. 

I remember when Eliana Valentina was about 2.5 years old, she went through a phase of saying cacas or poop with everything. Because she got a reaction from Jenny and I, she kept on saying it. We told her that it was not polite to say it but she kept on anyway. I remember that I was telling my non Spanish speaking parents, via a WhatsApp video call what Eliana Valentina had been saying.

I assumed that she was either not listening to my conversation or that she could not understand what I was saying in English. Well, I was wrong. She marched up to me, hands on her hips, and she said to me in perfect Spanish (after I had just explained everything to my parents in English). "Daddy I am never going to stop saying cacas (poop) ever. It was from that moment on that I knew that my daughter was fully bilingual and that English was no longer my secret language. Fortunately, Eliana Valentina has had much less struggles becoming bilingual than I did. She doesn't realize it yet, but it will be a huge benefit to her in the future.

Being Bilingual (or multi lingual) has many benefits. It protects you against dementia and other brain related diseases. It allows you to have access to two or more languages, cultures, music etc. It also helps you to process things more effectively in your mind. The old wisdom was that being Bilingual (or multi lingual) would impede or slow down the learning of your native language. It was assumed thar your brain didn't have enough cognitive space to process two or more languages. That has been proven to be false. Becoming bilingual (or multi lingual) is only of benefit to you. 

Til next time, Tyler