I want this poster.
When I was little, I lived in the US for about two years and a half. First, when I was 3 months old, we moved to El Paso, TX, because my dad was doing his Master’s degree. Then, when I was 4, we moved to Nashville, TN, for a year and a half, because he was doing his PhD. I don’t know, I guess English kind of stuck with me since then, because I never really needed classes, and apparently I learned to read in English first. I am Mexican, so Spanish is my mother tongue, even if I can’t stop mixing it up with English. Also, I have this thing where I don’t really enjoy reading books in Spanish, but then I’ll read the same one in English, and it’ll be much more interesting. My friend Georgina thinks that it’s because I learned English first, so that is the language I associate with reading. On the other hand, speeches somehow sound better to me in Spanish. It’s weird how different languages can communicate different things with similar words.
A few years later, when I started high school (in 2005), I started taking French. Three and a half years later, I wouldn’t say I know French per se… More like I guess I could communicate properly if I went to France or Québec, but I doubt I could get into a discussion and actually speak my mind. I quit French this semester, so I’m at that stage where I can read a book and infer the meanings I don’t know by context. I am really shy about speaking it, though. My “I kind of learned French in school but not quite” accent is way too obvious. During high school, I also took some brief classes in German and Italian. None of it stuck, because I didn’t stick with the classes, but it was an interesting experience. Finally, I started taking Chinese (Mandarin) last semester, and it’s pretty cool. It is the first time in my life where I am totally blank on a language. The grammar and pronounciation are pretty easy, but writing is damn hard. It takes a lot of practice and memorizing. The point of this post was pretty much that I wanted to complain about how freakin hard my Chinese homework has been lately. Like, whoa, it takes hours and hours of study to actually understand it. Makes me wonder why I am doing it… My dad wants me to consider studying in China for a while, which would be pretty cool, but I am keeping my options open for a while. Taking this class is my way of doing that. Okay, back to doing homework. 再见 (good bye)！
