Luca

I’ve been interested in languages for a long time, but I didn’t really have the opportunity to learn any other than English when I was a child growing up in South Elgin. Although I had family who spoke Polish and Spanish, I didn’t have the time and my parents didn’t know the languages or have the means for me to learn them. Polish wasn’t taught in any of the schools nearby and my parents had never learned it. Additionally, living an hour away from any family meant that any visits were too infrequent to pick up on any Polish or Spanish. This made those rare visits to family feel quite awkward. There was a clear disconnect between my cousins who had been learning and speaking Polish their whole lives and me. When we got together, they would sometimes switch into Polish mid-conversation which often made me feel excluded. This feeling was only exacerbated by the fact that I didn’t have a way to learn Polish and simply could not connect with them in that way as a result.

As a result of my lack of access to learning Polish, my first exposure to learning a second language was with a Usborne First French at Home Book that my parents got me after we found it in a secondhand shop after I had expressed interest in learning French. I couldn’t tell you why I was interested in learning French back then, but I am grateful that my parents supported me where they could. However, there was only so much that a book like that could teach me, and I quickly stopped learning and lost what little I had learnt.

Going into high school, there were three options for language courses I could take: Spanish, German, and French. I wasn’t interested in German at the time and I wasn’t seeing my Spanish-speaking family with enough frequency to really feel the need to learn Spanish, but I still had the desire to learn French that I gained as a child. Beginning in my first year of high school, I took French and had my first formal language class where, instead of picking up random words like I had been for several years, I learned how to actually put together a sentence and begin communicating.

I had a teacher who was passionate about what she did and was incredible at keeping people engaged. Her lessons brought us beyond just memorizing words and grammar and really started to connect us to the French-speaking world. Each year we made our Manie Musicale brackets and listened to each year's selection of music, we had penpals in France for a year, and read Le Petit Prince and parts of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo as a class. Occasionally, we would have a guest speaker in the class. Most commonly these would be native French speakers that my teacher knew or past students of hers who continued on in their French studies. Through those past students, I learned more about what I could do with French in the future as well as about studying abroad. I'd always heard good things about study abroad programs, but hearing those real stories from people who clearly had a great time and were passionate about it solidified my desire to study abroad when I got to college. After three years, I can now say I will be participating in a study abroad program in France during which I will get to continue my studies on sustainability, something I am incredibly passionate about. I'm excited to expand my experience in the field of sustainability and to connect it to my French studies which I will hopefully be able to use in my future career, wherever that brings me.

During high school, I started talking with friends in French when I could and continued to pick up what I could in other languages. Now, my everyday communication with friends is a lovely hodgepodge of bits of several languages (most commonly German, French, and ASL when not accounting for English) as we teach each other what we know and communicate in whatever way feels most comfortable at the time.

While I have experience in these few languages now, I still have not learned any substantial amount of Polish or Spanish. On the rare occasion that I am attending a large family event, it very quickly becomes obvious that I can’t communicate with the majority of my family. I remember a Chrstmas during dinner which my aunt’s family was visiting from Poland several years ago. It was the most quiet I have ever heard my family. There was a complete lack of conversation and any communication had to be translated by either my aunt or my grandfather. In the future, I would love to take the time to actually learn Polish. While I may not see my Polish-speaking family often, I still want to connect with that part of my culture that got lost after my family came to the United States. Although it may be difficult to make the time for, I'm determined to learn it and to maybe talk to my grandfather in his native tongue.