Monolingual

I have never thought of myself as someone interested in languages. I took German in high school, and didn't really enjoy it, and only remember enough to say hello and how are you. When I came to college in the fall, I signed up to take French, determined that it would be different with this language and that I would focus better on it. However, I still had difficulty with the vocabulary, grammar, and general fundamental learning. (Okay, so that pretty much just makes it sound like I am bad at learning languages overall, which is kind of true) It was strange because I thought that because I find all other humanities— literature, art, politics, religion— really interesting, but I just couldn't find myself invested in learning other languages. 

However, that changed when I was in Spain. I was surrounded by different languages from my first flight (look back to my first blog), and my monolingualism smacked me in the face. If only I knew Spanish, or Russian, or Hindi, I would have been able to connect maybe on a deeper level with so many people. I met people from all over the world, and luckily, many of them spoke a bit of English. But, I loved all of the little instances with foreign language, and with each one I found myself wanting to learn more. My first day in Madrid, I stopped at a little candy shop, and the woman took me around it, pointing at different candies, telling me what they were, all in Spanish. When I went to pay, I handed her some euros and accidentally a quarter. She looked at it surprised, and I, embarrassed, apologized and went to take it back, but she kept looking at it, and then pointed at it and said, "It's a moo! And a cheese!" It must have been from Wisconsin. She was so delighted with it, but couldn't really express her excitement to me. When a man came in, I'm assuming her husband, she showed him too and he found it almost as equally interesting. He pointed to the face of the coin so I said, "George Washington!" and they both exclaimed some sort of "Ooh!" I wish I had known Spanish so that I could have talked to them more (and know what kind of candy I was buying). Moments like these make me want to invest more time into learning languages and getting past the necessary beginning parts so I can get to what really matters— communication with other people.