My experience as a language learner started fairly early on – my mother always wanted my sister and I to speak English, because she believed it would be a useful, maybe even essential skill. When I was born in Brazil, bilingual or American schools were even less common than they are nowadays, and they were of course, private. Nonetheless, my parents put me in a bilingual school when I was only four years old. Therefore, I do not actually remember the start of my experience learning a second language. I recall stories from my mother: The baby-sitter would offer me an apple, and I would ask for a maçã (the Portuguese word for apple) instead. So, I guess that there was some confusion between the two languages and the world in my young mind. However, even though I started to study English as an infant, I would not say I became fluent until I came to college in the United States and was “forced” actually communicate only in English.
I have friends who had English speaking parents, so they would speak it at home, but that was not my case. Thus, I lived the first eighteen years of my life only speaking in English when I was in school. Looking back at my experience in Middle and High School, I see how my classmates and I cheated ourselves – we spoke Portuguese even when we were supposed to speak in English. But I have a theory that it was not because we did not know English or because we were lazy, but rather because children are less likely to take a conscious effort to speak in their second language and teenagers are prone to self-consciousness. At least I know it took me “not having an option” (in regard to which language I could use, when I was abroad) to lose my fear of being wrong – funny pronunciation here, maybe a grammatical mistake there, or plainly not making any sense at first. I still have a noticeable accent and I learned to be in peace with it, even proud.
After getting some confidence on my English and having the opportunity of teaching both English to Brazilians and Portuguese (or about Brazilian culture) to Americans, I have come to enjoying the process of “making sense” out of the languages and finding (or not) relationships between both. And I found that helping people learn the languages I know has been an intense (and lovely) learning experience for myself as well. I feel like I have a better understanding both about how English and Portuguese “work” and about how different learning a language at an older age is from my personal experience. I think it was good preparation for my present venture into independent learning of Catalan.
In regard to learning style and approaches, the assessments pointed that my learning style is mostly tactile (55%), which did not surprise me at all – I had already noticed that I absorb whatever I write down more efficiently than what I read or hear, so much that I am usually the girl with the notes and summaries in the classes I take. However, I need to beware of falling too comfortably into writing when I need to learn how to speak as well. I have never tried the one-on-one conversational style approach that SDLC110 takes, so it will be a completely different and new learning experience for me. One that I am very much looking forward to embrace.
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