What was your first language?

[EFerrari]

Poll question: What was your first language?

We've a very diverse group of people in there so far! Let's find out how diverse.

If you can, tell how and when you learned your first language -- who was your earliest "teacher"? My grandmother was stuck with me while everyone worked, so I learned Spanish first and she taught me to write and read a little in Spanish, too. I don't think I was fluent in ingles until I hit preschool but can't really remember that well.

Almost lost all my Spanish at around 12. Later, studied it and was able to pass Advanced testing in my college program but, that was 'way back in the last century.

What about you?

[GRLMGC]

1. I learned Spanish first

My mom taught me how to read and write in Spanish and I learned English in school. I was in bilingual education and :GASP:, I wasn't damaged as some people would insist, haha.

[EFerrari]

2. Lol! I read and wrote Spanish, so my kindergarten teacher

put me with the kids who had trouble reading. For about three years. lol

[RagingInMiami]

3. I am told that I learned Spanish before English

But I quickly learned to prefer English over Spanish.

[EFerrari]

4. Interesting. My brother is 8 years younger than I am. By that time

there was a lot more English floating around our home -- even though the two women who cared for him spoke only Spanish. My mom knew more English (she worked) and I spoke English well. His first words were Spanish but within months, he was a mostly English speaking kid.

Did you ever stop speaking Spanish?

[RagingInMiami]

5. When I went to school in the 1970s, I only spoke English with my friends

Even though we were all mostly Hispanic. But we always heard Spanish at home, so it wasn't like we didn't understand it or could not speak it. We just preferred English.

It's all about assimilation and it's happened countless times over the centuries, which is why I can't comprehend this fear of immigration and this drive to make English the official language. There is no need to pass a law because the children of immigrants will be Americanized.

My mom learned to speak English -- with a heavy accent that she never lost -- so I would speak to her in English and she would speak to me in Spanish or in English. And we would fly down to Colombia every summer when I was growing up, so I always spoke Spanish down there.

In 1980, the Mariel boat lift brought 125,000 Cuban refugees to Miami in a two-month period, changing Miami overnight. Where before, the Hispanic kids were Americanized, all of a sudden, all the Cubans kids in school did not speak English.

My school was impacted tremendously because I grew up in a Cuban neighborhood where many of the refugees settled. So where before, Spanish was only spoken inside the homes of Miami, it suddenly became spoken on the streets. Everywhere.

So even though I prefer to speak English, I never lost Spanish because it was always around me, and many times, I would be forced to speak Spanish because the other person could not speak English. This is just something I took for granted growing up down here.

It wasn't until I moved to the Southwest that I realized what a benefit it is to know Spanish because there were many Hispanic people there that did not know a single word of Spanish.

[EFerrari]

10. In my generation, there are 16 cousins born here. Only 3

aren't fluent in Spanish. Three that I know of have worked in translation.

Yet, four have degrees in theater and two work "on air" in teevee, 1 in regular public speaking, -- all in English -- so there is no problem with a Spanish "accent" -- although if you listen closely you hear a something. When we speak Spanish to each other, that's when the accents come out because some of us have never spent time in El Salvador, some of us have visited, some have lived there for a period of years. It's very funny, actually, to listen to us because we all sound so different.

To mix it up even more, my mom's generation spent four years in Mexico DF when my grandfather sought political asylum there. So, that generation mixes up slang from El Salvador and Mexico which we kids then learned. Our Spanish is a casamiento in that way.

The way assimilation worked in our family was that all my uncles married Latinas and all my aunts (and my mother) married Chelitos so, the three cousins who aren't fluent all had "American" dads.

Assimilation is a patriarchal plot. :evilgrin:

[Xipe Totec]

6. El Castellano es mi lengua madre

What most people outside Spain call Spanish.

I don't speak Gallego, Catalan, Euskadi, French, Italian, or Portuguese.

Though I can fake it for a while... :evilgrin:

I learned English from watching TV and reading science fiction. I guess my English teachers were Ray bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Walter Cronkite.

I'm working on Russian now, and I want to learn five major languages before I die. After Russian I want to learn Arabic and Chinese in either order.

[Bombero1956]

7. spanish

up until I went to school. I'm self taught as far as reading spanish but my spelling is weak to say the least.

[EFerrari]

9. I have to check the spelling every single time. Especially now.

At one point, I'd mastered enough ortografia (?)to write a decent letter or transcribe a DEA tape. :evilgrin: But lately, with so little usage, I have to look up even "a/ha".

[demosincebirth]

14. there was a period of my life that a spent in the south and when

I got back to California, I hard time immersing myself into the spanish speaking culture of my parents home and of my relatives.

[EFerrari]

18. That must have been great. South where, augie?

:hi:

[demosincebirth]

29. Georgia.

On edit: Mind you, this was in the late fifties.

[EFerrari]

8. French is so wierd for me because I can read it all right, and

when my ear "tunes up", I can understand it. But I sound like I have a mouthful of square marbles when I speak it! My accent in Spaneeeeeeeeesh is okay. But French, olvidate!

[Cleita]

13. Mi tambien.

Yo puedo leer (sp.?) la francais, pero cuando ellos hablan no puedo entender la lengua.

(Feel free to correct my Spanish.)

[flordehinojos]

11. yo aprendí los dos idiomas al mismo tiempo.

nací en santiago de cuba, mi padre es cubano (tiene 97 años), my mother was american. she spoke in english to me, todas las demás gente a mi alrededor hablaban español!

[EFerrari]

19. I'm so jealous of all of you who have spent more than a vacation

week in a Spanish speaking country. That would be amazing.

[flordehinojos]

20. and now, many of us, especially those of us who came from cuba

and have never returned in the 40+ years that we left, we would love to spend at least one week basking in the graces of the spanish speaking caribbean ... that, i think, is one of the things that i miss the most: the warmth and grace of the caribbean.

the rest of it (cuban culture: food/people/theater/music, etc. it all seems to have followed me here)!

Hi sfexpat (isn't it nice that you at least have those weeklong vacations to be part of your recuerdos?!)

;-)

[EFerrari]

27. Como no. My husband is bound to the patch of space we occupy

because of his work. Maybe -- but he thinks so.

Me, I'm portable. I do all my work in my home and ship it over the net.

And more and more, my thoughts turn to other places. :evilgrin:

[Cleita]

12. Spanish was my first language.

My parents brought me to the USA on vacation to meet my anglo abuelita when I was two. Pearl Harbor happened a week after we got here, so my mother and I had to remain here until after WWII ended. My dad was flown back to his job in Chile on military transport.

So mama and I had to learn English in a hurry. I was a much better learner and although I don't remember relatives told me that I was the one who had to help my mother understand what was going on around her, how to use the ration coupons and other things. I was bi-lingual in speech, but I never learned written Spanish that well.

When I was eighteen my mother and father moved up to the states when he retired and I never really spoke much Spanish after that and so my skills are really rusty, although they come back pretty quickly at times that I get immersed in it.

[EFerrari]

16. Wow, that's quite a story,Cleita!

That must have been incredibly hard for your mother.

I used to translate for my grandmother everywhere starting from the time i was four. You haven't been embarrassed until you translate for your gramma at the doctor's office. :)

[scarlet_owl]

15. English. I only ever heard Spanish at my grandparent's house.

I still don't speak Spanish that well.

[EFerrari]

17. Hey, scarelet owl. My brother doesn't speak much Spanish

but he seems to pick it up very quickly when he needs to.

Good to see you. :)

[scarlet_owl]

21. Good to see you too!

My Spanish is really terrible, but I still speak more than my mother does. When she was growing up, there was no Hispanic community around her. They were the only ones in their neighborhood. At that time, my grandfather had been in this country so long, that English was primarily used in their household. When I was a kid, my great-grandmother moved in with my grandparents, and she didn't speak English. So the only Spanish I heard growing up was when my grandfather would talk to his mother.

[calico1]

22. I learned both at the same time pretty much...

at least the talking part. My dad came to the US when he was around 18 and settled in Ohio. This was late 1940's so there were not too many Latinos there at the time! My mom on the other hand came to the US later. She was in her twenties. She went to NYC. Then as now you can get by without ever speaking English. My dad learned English much better than my mom did. Hers was very broken. I grew up in NYC. My mom spoke Spanish to us all the time. My Dad usually spoke to us in English. When I was around 15 my parents decided they wanted to move back to the "old country"...Puerto Rico. I lived there for around 12 years before moving back here. Because I had never read or written in Spanish I memorized all the spelling/grammar rules and actually did pretty well. By the time I was in college I was reading and enjoying Spanish literature and understanding it well. I speak perfect English and I "think" in English but I feel very fortunate that I had more exposure to Spanish as far as speaking, reading and writing it and just conversing often with friends I had in PR.

[malta blue]

23. I think I learned English first, but since my granparents

only spoke spanish, it was probably a good mox of the two to start. My Spanish really took off when we moved to the Dominican Republic when I was and lived with my 83 year old great-grandmother for a year. I had no choice but to speak spanish if I wanted to eat.

[EFerrari]

24. That would be some major motivation!

Hi there, malta blue :hi:

[malta blue]

25. It sure was.

:hi:

[EFerrari]

26. So good to read you, malta.

I'm a painter and have been trying to figure out what that blue is.

lol

:)

[imlost]

28. Spanish, was spoken until I started kindergarten.

I had no problem learning English once I started school. I still speak Spanish to my parents.

I will teach my children Spanish as their first language. My husband speaks Fukaneese(?).

[Cybergata]

30. What is Fukaneese(?)? N/T

[Popol Vuh]

31. I only know english

Since my mother is white and only speaks english, and at the time when I was a young kid, many Mexican American families spoke little or no Spanish to their kids because they wanted them to be fully integrated into American society. That was back then. And I wish it wasn't that way.

I have several friends my age here in SoCal just like me, and it doesn't matter if one or both parents are Mexican.

I don't fault the parents who didn't teach us Spanish. I am sure back then they felt they were doing the right thing. But I wish I had been taught Spanish when I was a kid.

Believe me, with a last name like Chávez and not being able to speak Spanish today, it sucks.

Because of my love for my Mexican culture I will be taking a language course. However, because of what the Spaniards did to our people and our culture, I'd rather not learn how to speak that European language and would much rather learn Náhuatl. But at the same time not very many people know how to speak an indigenous language.

A sample of our real Mexican language: Náhuatl song

[Swamp Rat]

32. Inglés... L'anglais avec un peu du Français.

:D

Can't remember much French, though after years of português e español I can read Catalan, French and Italian (and some Romanian) with relative ease. :)