12 May 2026: Spanish LLA Mathew writes about how he fell in love with learning and teaching languages
12 May 2026: Spanish LLA Mathew writes about how he fell in love with learning and teaching languages
About 6 years ago, during the shutdown for the pandemic, I was working at my local Jewel-Osco. In jobs like those, it is only natural to interact with people, and in my area especially it was common for every maybe 10th person to not speak any English, be they Spanish or Russian speaking (those two being the most common in my area). I had some experience learning Spanish, so with those who spoke it I tried my best to communicate, but in my time learning the language in school, I had never built up much confidence or been especially proficient. I switched jobs a few years after, and there I found myself interacting more and more with Spanish speakers, to the point where I was forcing myself to acclimate and speak more proficiently, asking for assistance from my coworkers on grammatical concepts and common ways to speak. I decided at that point that I needed a guide for my language journey, so I got back into contact with an old tutor of mine who helped me through the tough high school Spanish classes, and it was with her that something clicked in my head. I realised I loved Spanish, languages, and linguistics.
Though I accelerated my Spanish learning in order to communicate with clients at those old jobs, I eventually began hearing language used in so many different ways that I had never considered. I became interested in studying the structure of language, the history of it, and the differences between dialects in order to grasp why people spoke a certain way. I started to wonder seriously about questions like “What does the subjunctive really mean?” and “Why is this past imperfect instead of perfect?” My fascination with these topics extended further than just communication: I started my university career as a music major, but later switched to Spanish linguistics once I took an introductory linguistics class. Learning about phonology, morphology, and language structure was incredible and it made me think about a topic I’d been interested in but never truly invested in until that moment. Since transferring to UIC, I have taken other linguistics and Spanish courses with professors whose own passions for languages amplified my own.
For the past 2 or 3 years now, I’ve also been learning Portuguese, a language that I would say I’m pretty proficient at now, enough that I’ve assisted in a small capacity with teaching it. Its similarities to Spanish made it an optimal choice for my third language acquisition and I could not be happier. Learning other languages has given me reasons to visit places I had never considered before, like the Island of Madeira or Lisbon, and I’ve learnt so much about different cultures and histories. From here, I plan on trying to relearn French and diving into Japanese!
Falling in love with language is possibly the best thing that’s ever happened to me, so if you hear the calling, don’t resist it. It will open myriad possibilities.