The student side

The following is a letter from Heather Fairbee, ’07, a MOLA major with a concentration in French.  Heather is a student teacher this semester at Prince Edward County High School.  She sent this letter to the department last spring, when she was living and studying in Aix-en-Provence, France.

            Today, I had an Art History class. The professor is German so his accent is really thick and I can barely understand him. He said that if you did not understand anything he said that you needed to drop the class. If that is the case, then everyone should drop the class. Maybe that was the point. Next, I had French Women’s Lit in the late 20^th century. I loved my professor. She is so animated and although she gets excited and speaks very fast, I can follow her.

            After classes, my housemate and I met up to go buy crepes. There is a cheap place, whole in the wall really that makes crepes on a great big skillet right in front of you and you can choose that goes in it. I wanted lunch, seeing how we do not eat dinner until 8:30 sharp every night, so I got ham and goat cheese. The crepe is so big it wraps around 4 times, and then you eat it like a calzone. Next time though, I think I am going to get chocolate and bananas and strawberries in mine. That sounds much better.

            My host mother told me that I offended her this morning. Each time we eat, I put the dishes in the sink and let her put them in the dish washer. She always says to just leave and she will take care of it, but I say no. Well, this morning at breakfast, she told me that she would like to do it and that is what she is here for. See, my host parents are not like everyone else’s, just from what I hear from everyone else. My host parents are in their sixties, and they are retired. They are truly host parents because they love to be. They always get girls because my host mother misses her daughter who got married a couple of years back (although we can all walk to her apartment building). They ask our schedule and when we will get up and leave each morning. My schedule and my roommate’s are different. They wake up with the both of us and sit and eat breakfast and talk with us. Normally, I wake up at 6:45 and leave about 8. She always has the coffee, bread, and jams ready for me. She even fills my coffee cup back up and everything. She was not angry with me; she just wants to take care of me. So, she let me know. My host parents are great. They actually spend the money on us. Every day she goes to the market to buy dinner fresh and she cooks from scratch. Every day there is a new food for us to try. She buys things for us, because we paid the tuition I guess. She gets enjoyment from asking us the night before if we have ever had this or that, and the next day she makes it. She has a book full of recipes; I do not think she could get through them all in even two years. Their Italian decent adds to the mix also. They are both from Italy but have been here since she was 16 and he was 23, when they got married. He was in the Italian Military. So, I will let her clean my room and do my laundry. She wants to change and wash the bed sheets once a week. Who does that? Again, I lucked out with my host family.

            Here’s a bit of culture shock. I learned today the right way to cut certain cheeses. My host father pulled out the cheese tray of all of the different cheeses they have, and he taught me how to cut each one and how to “respect the cheese.” I had no idea. I guess he got sick of watching my butcher the cheese. My favorite cheese is now Cantal.

            Another piece of information, electricity is gold in France. In every building, the school, the apartments, the bathrooms, lights are motion censored or have to be turned on somehow and they do not come on unless someone is in the building. So here is what happened to me today. This morning when I left, I guess I was tired. I got into the elevator. My host family lives in the very top floor. Instead of pushing 0, I pushed 9, which is the top floor. I put my headphones in my ears getting ready to begin my 30 minute walk, and the lights go out because it thinks that nobody is in the elevator because nobody has pushed a button. I am freaking out. I am in an elevator and it is pitch black. Tears were in my eyes. I kept pushing what I thought the floor 9 button was, but it was the alarm. I did not know I was making the sound, and I though I was stuck due to the storm we had last night. My host mother came out of her door, opened it and there I was with tears in my eyes. I am so stupid. She could not believe how scared I was. Then, she laughed.

            One last bit of culture shock. I never realized how much I smile and make eye contact with people. You DO NOT do that in France, especially if you are a woman. It gives off the wrong impression. I never realized how much I do it. I am finding it difficult to not make eye contact with people. I have to look mean all of the time. I feel like I look mad or depressed when I do it. It also gives away the fact that I am American. I try not too look or act too American, but I know it is obvious.

            The word for room in French is “plein”. Last night, my roommate wanted to say “I am full”, so, she said to my host mother when she tried to force her to eat more “je suis plein”. Little did she know, “je suis plein” means “I am pregnant.” They tried to explain it to her in French what it meant and they were laughing because it is a mistake, probably common too, and she did not understand. She though they were laughing at her because she said she was too full to eat anything. When I told her what it meant in English her whole faced turned red. Tonight though, the talk will not be that story at the table, I am sure it will be my elevator experience.

Why should YOU take a Modern Language Class?
	By Naomi Pearson

“But I’m not majoring in Spanish/French/German (or other modern language), so why do I even have to take two years of it anyway?” you say. “I’ll NEVER use it!”

But how do you know?

One day you might have to scream, “ !Te paras!” to a three-year-old Ecuadorian child running into the street after a ball.

It happened to me.

Or you might help a Haitian woman you overhear futilely trying to ask anyone nearby where the emergency room entrance is, too exhausted and worried about her brother to carefully choose her words in English and therefore roundly ignored.

Something like that happened to my mother—and she’d only had high school French.

Or you might run into tourists from Germany who decide that you are the person to ask about the location of the restrooms.

Ok, maybe nothing that extreme would ever happen to you. But you’d be surprised at all the ways you could find yourself calling upon your training in a foreign language. Even though as soon as your language requirement is fulfilled, you probably will try your best to forget the two years you spent learning another language, many of the things you pick up will always be a part of you and will be useful to you.

For years afterward, you will find that people who speak heavily accented English aren’t as hard to understand as they used to be. You may be more patient with your students, coworkers or neighbors who are still learning English, because consciously or subconsciously, you remember how hard it was for you to learn another language. You might even find yourself picking up other languages more easily. You will be more confident about venturing out of the tourist areas on your honeymoon in Paris, San José, or Vienna.

In a more immediate timeframe, you might, perhaps during your second year of language studies, actually fall in love with the language and decide to take more classes just because you like it.

When I started college, I had no intention of pursuing study in a foreign language; I was a physics major and I just wanted to do my requirement and be done, even though I actually liked the language. Somehow, during my second semester of second-year Spanish, I fell truly, madly and deeply in love with it, and it whetted my interest in other languages, including English, to a sharp edge. So when I transferred to Longwood for my sophomore year and changed my major to English, even though I had completed my foreign language requirement, I decided to minor in Spanish. I finished my minor in two years, but that wasn’t enough, so this semester I’m taking FREN 105: Intensive French, which covers one year of French in one semester. I might take FREN 205 next semester, if there is such a thing.

Maybe I‘m just a glutton for punishment.

I have found, however, that having access to words and phrases in other languages has made me a better and more creative writer in English. I am now aware of more poetic and powerful sentence structures that are inherent in other languages than English. Because many of the words that English has borrowed from French and Spanish have broader or, sometimes, more precise meanings in their original language, I find it easier to select just the right word to express my thoughts. And that’s just how studying other languages has affected me academically.

As a Writing Center coach here at Longwood, I use some of the most basic principles of my first two years of language study every week, especially when coaching students whose first language is not English and even those who grew up using non-standard English. As I look over their writing assignments, I can recognize their use of sentence structures that, while perfect in, perhaps, Spanish or French, would be considered incorrect or at least unusual in English. I can see where they have been tricked by false cognates, just as I had in my first year of college-level Spanish.

So you see, aside from the national call for foreign-language teachers, the government’s recruitment of bilingual applicants and academia’s effort to produce more globally minded graduates, studying a language other than English can simply bring you personal enrichment in other ways that you may never have considered.

Especially when you want to impress your significant other or initiate a conversation with that international hottie.