Teachers
and Terror Part 3
by
Meg Curtis, PhD
Fast
forward that initial experience with German to the next year, when I
studied Italian. Then, once again, I was lost without my GPS unit,
which hadn't even been invented yet. Once again, my Italian professor
outdid my linguistic knowledge, which is exactly the way it is
supposed to be for students. He smiled because he knew his
class was terrified to open their mouths and expose their ignorance.
This
time around, my experience was more devastating to my ego, if such a
calamity is possible—and it is. Now, with five years of Latin to my
credit, I kept speaking Italian with a Latin accent, as if I were singing in a church choir, instead of ordering an elegant meal
in Rome, where he took Italian majors, to test their mastery of the
spoken language. The Italian majors smiled; I wanted to cry.
Of
course, with a year of German under my achievement belt, my ego
thought it was prepared to be decimated, as I
struggled to announce my name, and utter, "Ciao!"--as if
six years of foreign language study rendered me a veteran of the
language wars. Instead, German had entered my subconscious with its
reverse word order. I thought in Latin, reversed in German, and
stuttered in Italian!
Somehow,
the music of Italian entranced me, nevertheless. I began to take
pride in developing the accent of Roman Italian. If I couldn't say
much, I could say it right nonetheless! I began to dream of visiting
the Sistine Chapel, of understanding what Michelangelo meant when he
said: "Those who love do not sleep." I researched his art, and discovered that he wrote
poetry, too!
By
the end of that second year of modern foreign language study, I had
not gotten German out of my head, but I had developed enough courage
to risk saying, "Buongiorno!"
I
had even begun to imagine that my mind could indeed master more than
one or even two code systems. What I had not even begun to guess was
that I had laid the foundation for research across literature from
Dante back to Beowulf.
I
could even sit in an Italian opera without keeping my eyes glued to
the translation screens. I could enter into the drama of the music,
and experience the glory of Italian tenors, as if they were singing
right to me! When I saw Placido Domingo in person years later at the
Metropolitan Opera, I wanted to race right up to him and declare:
"Buona sera!" Where had my terror gone?
My
terror was gone with my assumption that the human mind is shackled to
one language like a woolly mammoth frozen in ice. My mind had begun to
dance! If my feet could cha-cha, rumba, and mambo, so my brain could
follow any routine that a language system laid out. It was true, as
one English professor said: "Newborns can speak all the
languages in the world!" And there I was with every dictionary
before me.
