Just inside the entrance to The National Museum of the American Indian in DC there's a large room with a circular space in the middle. The whole arena is earth-tone: wood, sand, and lots of light. The circular space at the center acts as a stage where the museum displays American Indian culture, crafts, and events.
A few years back I observed something really brilliant on that stage. A craftsman from Bolivia was making a boat of reeds. The reeds were long and green and flexible. He would gather them into a bunch and tie them really tightly. Then he'd carefully gather another bunch, and he would tie those too. When he had a bunch of bunches, he would bunch them together until he had a gorgeous green canoe with reeds bound up all along the hull. The craft was simple, elegant, and quite sturdy.
The other day I began thinking about how I learned Spanish. Looking back there seemed to be formative moments where a conversation synthesized all the little pieces of Spanish I'd been gathering. These milestone moments seemed to gel the reeds of a growing vocabulary, tying them together, making them fit.
My favorite reed boat moment came after my American classmates went home for winter break. I stayed behind to travel with my father. While in Bilbao, we stayed for about a week with a lovely Spanish/Basque family in Getxo. Every morning Rosa, la madre, would wake me up and demand that I tell her how I slept, what I wanted for breakfast, and what I wanted to do that day. She didn't give me a chance to think in English, just speak Spanish.
I'm writing about all this today because I just had my first French reed boat moment. After two weeks of staring at my French computer program and feeling embarrassed as I listened to my French friends tell each other what I can only assume are the most entertaining stories ever told, some of the small French pieces began to gel.
It happened as I managed to get a ride from Lyon to Chamonix with a French gent baring a delightful resemblance to Harrison Ford. Whereas I've found it difficult to get new people to speak slow, well-enunciated French to me the last few weeks, he obliged. Every new sentence seemed to unlock some hidden word I'd learned somewhere, waiting for confirmation in a real-world setting.
As I'll discuss in a later post, French presents challenges that don't exist in Spanish. But for now, at least, I've begun tying together the reeds of a simple, but sturdy French vocabulary.
My favorite reed boat moment came after my American classmates went home for winter break. I stayed behind to travel with my father. While in Bilbao, we stayed for about a week with a lovely Spanish/Basque family in Getxo. Every morning Rosa, la madre, would wake me up and demand that I tell her how I slept, what I wanted for breakfast, and what I wanted to do that day. She didn't give me a chance to think in English, just speak Spanish.
I'm writing about all this today because I just had my first French reed boat moment. After two weeks of staring at my French computer program and feeling embarrassed as I listened to my French friends tell each other what I can only assume are the most entertaining stories ever told, some of the small French pieces began to gel.
It happened as I managed to get a ride from Lyon to Chamonix with a French gent baring a delightful resemblance to Harrison Ford. Whereas I've found it difficult to get new people to speak slow, well-enunciated French to me the last few weeks, he obliged. Every new sentence seemed to unlock some hidden word I'd learned somewhere, waiting for confirmation in a real-world setting.
As I'll discuss in a later post, French presents challenges that don't exist in Spanish. But for now, at least, I've begun tying together the reeds of a simple, but sturdy French vocabulary.
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