Natalya
From the time I was a toddler, my mother instilled in me a love for languages. My early childhood was full of Romance language flashcards, Rosetta Stone, Cyrillic alphabet stamps, and “Hebrew Hopscotch,” a game I can’t help but think she made up herself. Ever since, I have maintained an insatiable interest in linguistics. My mom is half-Ukrainian and grew up speaking Ukrainian with her paternal grandmother. Though she is not fluent, she thought it important that I learn to read Cyrillic to connect with my heritage and expand my mental horizons. Last semester, I opted to take Elementary Russian, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Knowing the Cyrillic alphabet going into it was indispensable, as reading is half the battle when learning Russian as a second language. My dad’s side is Ashkenazi Jewish, and his grandparents came to America in the 1900s from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Their native tongue was Yiddish, but they also all spoke Russian. Though my father grew up hearing his grandparents speak Yiddish, he never learned it conversationally. In the large Jewish community I grew up in, everyone peppers Yiddish into their speech, and I definitely picked up that tendency.
French has definitely been the most constant foreign language in my life, as I learned the basics from my mom, who has studied it independently over the years and has been to France several times. My mom’s love for French sparked from her mother, whose family line in Québec goes back centuries. I started taking French in school in seventh grade, but stopped freshman year of high school when the pandemic hit and we went online. I continued studying French pretty diligently on my own until I started college and decided to take French 211. I am currently undeclared, but my career goal is to become a screenwriter, though I would love to do some opinion writing for journalistic publications as well. I have loved French film and music since I began learning the language and would love to work with Francophone actors and even write scripts in French in the future.
Ultimately, I strive to become fluent in French. I also want to be at least conversational in Ukrainian and Yiddish because they are my main ancestral languages and have both faced erasure due to political persecution. Ideally, I want to study as many languages as possible, so I guess I have a lot of work ahead of me!