"Aria" by Richard Rodriguez

Reflections:

This article is very interesting to me. It must be very hard for children who speak other languages to learn to speak English well enough to develop their own “public individuality”. When I was in elementary school, we started to learn Spanish right away. We started in kindergarten by having class once a week for an hour. We learned simple words like colors, family members, and furniture. In fourth grade, we began to have class every other day for an hour. We began to learn more words and how to say simple sentences and phrases. In high school, we were told to take Spanish for at least two years. It ran as a regular class that met for an hour every day. We began to learn more complex sentences and verbs so that we could actually say things in Spanish and be grammatically correct. However, there was never a real need to be good at Spanish because everyone in the school was English speaking. By not learning the language, there was no real loss. Everyone already had their own “public individuality”. We did not need to speak Spanish in any of our other classes, or in our homes, with our parents or friends. For us, learning Spanish was just a privilege, whereas for a Spanish speaking family, learning English seems to be a necessity in order to live in the United States.

My Grandmother must have gone through a similar experience as a child. Her mother and father both immigrated to the United States from Armenia, both orphaned after the Armenian Genocide, and they both spoke Turkish. When she was younger, my grandmother spoke Turkish in her family, but when she went to school, she was required to speak English. Now, my grandmother considers English to be the language she knows best, as her family began to try to speak English with her once she was required to learn it. It must’ve been important to them that their child do well in school, even if it meant learning to use a new language at home. I never really thought about how difficult it must be to have to live life in a different language. This article really opened my eyes up to the difficulties of learning in a different language.

Me and my beautiful Grandmother