Becoming Bilingual

When I was 24 I spent four months in Los Angeles, playing in various bands and ensembles and volunteering full-time at a community centre for at-risk youth in South Central. Mostly I was just hiding from the Canadian winter and postponing the day I'd have to grow up and fully abandon my dream of a career in music.

Having nearly exhausted my savings and without much earning power, I booked a return flight to Toronto. I was standing dejectedly in the security line when the pretty young lady behind me attempted to ask me a question in Spanish. Despite having taken Spanish 101 in university, I was woefully incapable of either understanding or responding. Her English was laughably bad as well. We smiled and shrugged at one another.

The gate for my flight was evidently near to hers, as she found me in the waiting area and sat next to me, once again attempting to strike up a conversation. There were almost certainly many bilingual people in the vicinity and I'm sure our halting Spanglish communication was utterly hilarious to them. I must have told her my surname at some point because when I got home she had sent me a message on Facebook in broken English (presumably courtesy of Google Translate) asking me to add her on Skype and offering to teach me Spanish in exchange for help with her English. We began talking every day for 30-90 minutes, relying heavily on online resources for assistance.

After about a month we had become a long distance couple. It quickly became clear that my Spanish was improving much faster than her English, so we began to converse almost exclusively in her mother tongue. She came to visit me a few months later, and a couple months after that I went to live with her in Mexico for seven weeks. She was attending university in a rather provincial part of the country where almost no one spoke anything but Spanish, so I basically spoke zero English throughout the entire duration of my trip. Being forced to sink or swim allowed me to achieve basic fluency, albeit frequently augmented with Spanglish and gestures.

At the end of my trip we decided to just be friends and I returned to Canada to get on with my life. Finding work as a personal trainer, I was lucky enough to add three Latin American clients to my roster, two from Mexico and the third from Costa Rica. In addition to completing those sessions in Spanish, I began to tutor a young boy whose family had recently relocated to my hometown from Monterrey, Mexico. He didn't speak a word of English prior to arrival and also had a speech impediment. Tutoring him helped me immensely in a number of ways, principally in that it exposed me to childish and esoteric words which I would otherwise have been unlikely to encounter in my day-to-day life. I miss the little guy immensely.

After about a year I relocated to Toronto and found myself without anybody with whom to practice speaking, so I started reading books and watching movies and TV shows in Spanish. This rapidly improved my comprehension, and to this day I use Spanish subtitles (if they're available) any time I watch programming in a foreign language.

I was eventually lucky enough to meet a number of Venezuelan immigrants through random happenstance, and they invited me to a party. I began to spend many of my weekends at the house they shared in East York, immersed in heavily accented rapid-fire Spanish. I also stumbled upon an app called Tandem which connects people who are looking to learn one another's languages. I used it to make a couple of new friends and began to have phone conversations with them a few times per week, in addition to still occasionally communicating with my ex-girlfriend and other Hispanophone friends of mine.

I still have a ways to go before I'll consider myself to have totally achieved bilingualism. My grammar is less than perfect and there are many words and phrases which escape me (eg. "The grout isn't flush with the backsplash") but for all intents and purposes I'm already fluent. I had never enjoyed French in school or displayed any particular aptitude for foreign language acquisition, but have willed myself to competency because I love the sound of Spanish and appreciate its ever-increasing utility. I think I'll learn Portuguese next, it seems the most logical choice.