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Language Learning Autobiography

David Chavez
Introduction to TEFL, Fall 2019

I was born in a small oil company town in northeast Venezuela, where my father worked as a

mechanical engineer and where I lived until we moved to the US when I was 4. I may have acquired

some Spanish during that time, but if I had it was certainly lost by time my memories begin. After a four

year stint in the US where I completed kindergarten and first grade my family moved to Tibu, a tiny oil

camp on the eastern border of Colombia, and that is where my story begins at age 8.

The ColPet company school was an L-shaped building with Colombian students in one arm and

the Americans in the other. I don’t know much about the Colombian side, but on ours there were roughly

20 students. Grades K-2 were taught in one room, 3-5 in another and 6-8 (the big kids!) in a third. Once

a day we’d would troop over to the Colombian side for history lessons, taught in Spanish. My American

classmates had all lived in Colombia for years (most since birth) and were fully bilingual. I was not.

I have just one memory from the first day of class, but it is seared into my being. We all lined up

to wait for the teacher to lead us to her classroom on the Colombian side. I recall a tall woman, with dark,

shoulder length hair and a friendly face. She greeted us and explained what supplies we would need to

bring when we came for our lessons. I understood none of this but all my classmates were nodding in

comprehension while I stood there, absolutely terrified in my ignorance. What if she talks to me? Do I

reply in English? Will I get in trouble for not understanding? And what in the world is she even saying?

That helpless feeling of being alone in a bubble of incomprehension is something I have never forgotten.

Fast forward to tales of the conquistadors and the heroic exploits of Simon Bolivar. To playing

with Bernado Mejilla, the dentist’s son, while chattering away in Spanish. Somewhere in between I had

become completely fluent, but I honestly have no recollection of any of the steps along the way. What a

gift, and one I appreciated even then.

By 7th grade I had worked my way up to the big kids classroom when my father decided that he

had reached his career peak in Colombia and took a job with Aramco in Saudi Arabia. I was excited

about this move because I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was about to be gifted Arabic.
I was wrong. Unlike Colombia, where the expat and local families lived together, the foreigners

in Arabia were kept in tightly segregated communities with a main gate and guards. Guantanamo, if you

will. The school curriculum was fully US centric and the sole foreign language taught in school was

French. The only Arabs I was exposed to were the service workers at “the Club” and the shop keepers in

al-Khobar, all of whom spoke English. Nobody in my community cared nor needed to know Arabic and

consequently none of us did. Sigh.

I took a year of French in 9th grade, and that is the only time I have attempted to learn a foreign

language from scratch in a classroom setting. The class consisted of two students, myself and Jennifer

Rader. About a week after school began my family was forced to leave Arabia to deal with a series of

tragedies. When I returned a few months later Jennifer was well along in her studies and I was still at

Chapter 1. Our teacher, a bespectacled, cigarette smoking, French woman with a strong accent gave me

intense, accelerated lessons while Jennifer continued with the normal curriculum. I really enjoyed that

time, particularly the grammar lessons. It made sense and it was fun. After several weeks I caught up to

Jennifer and our teacher resumed teaching us together at the normal pace. And I got bored. Very bored.

To this day I regret not asking to keep the same fast pace, who knows what may have transpired? But I

didn’t and I have retained absolutely nothing from those lessons. I don’t know French. Quel dommage!

The Aramco school system was K-9, after which we were all sent abroad to continue our studies.

Some went to schools in Lebanon, some to Greece or Italy, many to Switzerland. As for me, I went to

Kemper Military School and College in Boonville, Missouri. KMS had a junior college component and I

took two years of college Spanish. I don’t recall a lot about those classes and don’t think I really learned

anything new. My Tibu days had been not so long ago, and my Spanish was only slightly creaky.

Merely knowing what “sounded right” was enough for me to get some college credit without having to

work too hard.

I didn’t take any language classes in college, my Kemper credits satisfying any requirements.

One summer, between my freshman and sophomore years, I attempted an Arabic class at the Aramco

training department. It was just my buddy Brian Bowman and I in that class, taught by an unenthusiastic

American. The bored teacher, coupled with the lack of any real need for Arabic, made it difficult to

maintain interest. Brian and I convinced ourselves to quit after having mastered little beyond “Where’s
the hammer? Maybe it’s under the car.” and “No thank you, I don’t smoke.” and proceeded to spend the

rest of the summer hanging out at the Teen Canteen, smoking.

After college came graduate school and fortuitous sequence of connections which led me to

CICESE, the Center for Scientific Studies and Higher Education in Ensenada, Mexico. CICESE was a

newly established institution and a master’s degree plus zero experience was all one needed to get a

research and teaching position, so I was fully qualified. By this time my Spanish had receded. I could

speak smoothly enough, and had sufficient vocabulary to pass for proficient, but had a very difficult time

understanding most of what I heard. It took many weeks of complete immersion before I had developed

my ear and became truly fluent. I taught seismology at CICESE by essentially copying my own lessons

which I had taken two years previous. I started out preparing the lecture notes in English but at some

point I switched to Spanish, probably when I started thinking in it, however it may have been the other

way around.

The collapse of the peso in 1983 motivated me to leave Mexico and take a job with an oil

company in Houston, where I quickly learned that I didn’t like Houston, didn’t like Texas and didn’t like

the oil business. I escaped by returning to graduate school in 1984. That was right about the time the

personal computer appeared and I turned out to be a rather good programmer. That skill, plus being in the

right place at the right time, got me an invitation to participate in a project to install seismometers around

the Soviet nuclear test site in Kazakhstan and beginning in 1986 I started making frequent trips to the dark

side of the moon.

Russian is a language I never expected to hear, much less speak. Little by little, trip after trip, I

started to collect words and phrases, mostly while drunk. In the waning days of the USSR and for a few

subsequent years, the caricature of the vodka swilling Russian was very true. I recall many, many

evenings sitting around a table with a group of Russians, drinking vodka and swapping stories through an

interpreter. After the vodka kicked in my inhibitions would vanish and I had great fun trying out my tiny

vocabulary. Grammar was learned through mimicry, often to humorous effect as I would typically get my

own gender wrong while mimicking female speakers. That’s how I learned about declensions.

I never formally studied Russian, and didn’t achieve conversational proficiency until I moved

there in 1990. By then I had taken a job at UCSD and was helping to build and maintain a global
seismographic network. Our stations in the USSR were not performing well because our colleagues

lacked experience with American technology and were further burdened by the Soviet ethic of “they

pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”. I eagerly accepted an offer to live in Russia in order to keep

things running and in 1990 moved to Obninsk, 100 km south of Moscow. At the time it was a closed city

and I was the only foreigner in town. Most of my colleagues spoke little to no English and I picked up a

lot of vocabulary via hand gestures. The interpreter would give me informal grammar and vocabulary

lessons in the mornings, and I would practice them with my colleagues. This proved to be very effective

and after about 6 months I had attained a level of proficient confidence to where I was no longer tense

while out and about on my own. One happy memory is when I was asked for directions from a stranger,

he noticed my accent and assumed I was from Soviet Georgia, refusing to believe I was American.

I never learned to read or write in Russian. At one point I had memorized the Cyrillic alphabet

through rote repetition, which simplified navigating my Russian-English dictionary but I never got

beyond sounding out words. It is pointless try to write when you can’t read, so I made no attempt at that.

I stopped speaking Russian regularly when I returned to San Diego in 1993, and my proficiency has

suffered. I’ve returned to the Russian speaking world several times in subsequent years and each time it

recovers after a few days of continual practice, so I think the basic language is there permanently.

I’ve observed something interesting about how my brain processes language. I can switch

between English and Spanish or English and Russian easily (e.g. while acting as an interpreter), but what

I absolutely cannot do is toggle between Spanish and Russian. I once visited a seismic station in

Tajikistan whose resident operator had spent several years in Cuba while in the navy and spoke good

Spanish. I found it impossible to talk to him in Spanish and then to the others in Russian. I would

stumble and struggle and often mixed or confused the two. Similarly, on a trip to Ensenada with some

friends from Obninsk I found myself speaking in Russian to the Mexicans and Spanish to the Russians

and it was only their bemused expressions which made me realize something was wrong. I feel like I

have one spot for processing foreign language and have to move the grammar and vocabulary over there

each time I want to use it. I think my stumbling comes from having to continually swap one for the other

while true polyglots have multiple processors or can do the swap instantly. Or something like that.
Afterword

My feeble efforts at Arabic were not a complete waste. I returned to Saudi Arabia a few times as an adult

to service the UCSD seismic station outside of Riyadh. In 2014, on what was to be my last trip there, I

needed a hammer but the toolbox was nowhere to be found. “Where’s the hammer?” I called out to

Mohammed, standing by the truck. And then with a grin stretching from ear to ear, I offered “Maybe it’s

under the car!”.

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