Boy with fortress behind

2015 Alumni Scholarship Winner

My Love for Language

Emilio Luna is the recipient of the 2015 Xperitas Alumni Scholarship. The following post is the essay Emilio wrote in his scholarship application about how the travel experience inspired him. It has been edited for length.

It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for the privilege to be immersed in a culture like the Xperitas trip to France. From the freedom given throughout the trip to the unique family stay, the trip was a new experience that showed me what it was like to be immersed in a culture completely foreign to me. I was able to form lasting relationships with my French family and the friends I met at my French brother’s school; not one of them failed to ask me to return to stay with each of them at one point. However, the trip as a whole was both a reward for and a test of my commitment to and endurance for language, learning and cultural engagement.

Learning languages has always played an integral role in my life. Born in Ecuador, my family came to the United States when I was ten months old. My parents never taught me English; we only spoke Spanish in the house. For the first four years of my life, our neighbors thought that I had a mental handicap due to the fact that I never talked or reacted to other people’s words – I simply stared at them. Though I don’t remember it, my parents said I still did not speak a word of English until I began preschool. My parents say after no more than two days of English-only exposure, English had become my dominant language. The ease I felt in learning English is archetypal of my general language learning abilities.

Thereafter, I began my bilingual journey. I taught my second and third grade classes one word in Spanish every week, making a list on a poster. This time between learning English and beginning French, I began to think about the differences I could find in the languages: phrases that did not exist in both, jokes that made sense only in one, and grammar that only made sense in one language. I remember in third grade when I was confused and curious as to why English won’t let me say “pencil red” like Spanish does. I consulted my mother as to how silly it seemed to have an adjective before the noun. I saw no use in knowing the color of an object before you know what the object is.

However, beginning in sixth grade, my view of language changed; I began learning French. I then saw that there exist even more frustrations between the languages. How can I tell someone that I miss them as beautifully as telling them that they are missing from me (tu me manques)?

Then came the Xperitas trip, in which my French passions and skills skyrocketed. Every word I heard fascinated me. I instinctively interrupted my very first conversation with my French brother because he had said “J’avait pas” (I hadn’t), without the grammatically required “ne” before the verb. I stopped him mid sentence and asked him, in French, why he didn’t say “ne”. It was then I learned that spoken, informal French almost always drops the first half of the negative. My French then changed. By the end of the first day of the family stay, I felt as though I hadn’t gone through a single conversation without stopping the person to ask them “pourquoi est-ce que tu l’as dit comme…?” (why did you say it like…?). I asked my French family to correct every single word and sound that came out of my mouth. They felt bad, but I persisted. I was finding out that more than half of the ways I was speaking were wrong – I couldn’t have been having more fun.

For me, the trip culminated at the security checkpoint at the Paris airport. A kind agent called me to her booth and asked me a few questions in French: why are you here, where did you stay, how long, etc. I responded, and finally handed her my passport. She frowned at what was in my hand. “You are not French?” she asked. I said no. She asked, still frowning, “then one of your parents is French”. She listened incredulously as I told her that no, I had been learning French for about six years. She told me that she didn’t believe me, that my accent sounded not just like a French native, but a Paris native in particular. It was then that I realized what the Xperitas experience showed me.

In that moment I realized I never wanted to stop learning languages. I never wanted to come down from the wave of excitement I had been riding throughout the trip. Returning to the U.S., I began pestering my French teacher in the same way I had the French natives. I began taking online Duolingo courses in Italian and practicing nonstop with my friend’s mother, an Italian native. I can proudly say that I can now fluidly converse in my fourth language, Italian. With Italian came new discoveries of nuance that I miss when speaking in other languages. Italian grammar calls for an article to come before any possessive adjective. For example, “my purse” translates to “la mia borsa” or literally “the mine purse”. However, when referring to something personal or intimate, the article is dropped, instantly communicating close ties to a family member, a special connection to a certain place, or a friend one holds dearly. For example, “mio fratello” (my brother), rather than “Il mio fratello”. Italian can express with the presence or absence of just one word what English, Spanish or French must do with whole sentences.

The trip sparked a drive to seek a larger challenge. I then spoke to the head of the language department at my school to see about taking a Spanish class, as I had never learned to read or write in my first language. Taking AP Spanish this year has been a jaw-dropping experience for me, and has changed the way I approach my Spanish. I have learned to speak and write formally, and that the present perfect of “I have written” is, in fact, not written “e scrito”, as pronounced, but “hescrito”! I did everything I could to keep on feeling as I was on that trip to France.

Looking forward, I don’t ever plan to stop exploring languages.

One of my best friends and her entire family speak Greek natively; I have my sights set. My friend has taught me words, phrases, and conjugations here and there. However, I am in an awkward space in which they tell me that the few sentences I can form sound like a native, but I am extraordinarily limited in speaking. Nevertheless, nothing excited me more than to find out that, in the present tense, the verb agrees to both the subject and its direct object! I am still giddy about it. However, I currently cannot seem to find a reliable outlet through which to further learn Greek alongside Spanish, French, and Italian. Yet, I know that college will be my next step in learning languages. I can definitively say that this experience inspired me to constantly appreciate the beauty and nuance of every language and to forever pursue all languages for the rest of my life.

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