Entry #6 - Language Paranoia
I have a vague discomfort, not quite a phobia, when it comes to spending time in places where I don’t know the language. I think it comes from my childhood experience of being dropped into kindergarten and first grade with very limited English. I remember my kindergarten with horror. Then my family went back to Denmark for several months over the summer - which I remember with pure pleasure - and then I was dropped into first grade back in the US. In first grade however, I had a great teacher. Each recess for three months she kept a Mexican boy and me in class, teaching us English. She was a real teacher. Still, I suffered a bit on the playground from bullies who enjoyed mocking kids with limited understanding of what was happening around them.
I was lucky to learn Spanish at a relatively early age. The family two houses down from us in San Diego was a Mexican-Danish couple with two boys. So we all spoke Danish/English/Spanish together. The father was Nicolas Grijalva, a Physicist at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. He went on to co-found CICESE down in Ensenada, BC. Dr. Grijalva spoke seven languages fluently. Besides Spanish, English, and Danish, he spoke Russian and Esperanto. I can’t remember what the other two were. But he was one of my first mentors. In seventh grade, when I was not doing so well in my Spanish class, he offered to tutor me twice a week in the afternoons. Of course he was able to help me with Spanish, but what I remember far more is that he taught me how to take notes, to organize my studies, and how to approach assignments in a thoughtful and planned manner. After six weeks the grades in all my subjects were elevated and we stopped the sessions. It didn’t occur to me then that he was being anything more than a nice man, but now, as an adult, I wonder how this amazing scientist, who must have been so busy… managed to find time to good-humoredly assist a 7th grader?
The Spanish took. The next year my father and I drove to Mexico City (during school!) to enjoy the 1968 Olympics. We slept in the station wagon along the way and stayed with some acquaintences in an apartment downtown for three weeks. That was a lifetime experience. About six men from all over Mexico joined us in the apartment and we were all out hustling tickets for the events each day. At night what I remember was the wine and the debates. Since only one of the men spoke English (the youngest guy) and my father did not speak Spanish, I was often in the middle. My father was an ardent anti-communist and one of the Mexicans was a leftist schoolteacher with a soft spot for Castro. And I was the 13 year-old translator. The first week was great. I was exposed to street kids for the first time in my life and immediately made friends. But during the second week the host’s wife announced that she was going to visit her mother and took off with the little daughter until the Olympics were over. Then my life became hell. Breakfast was dinner leftovers. And after the second day, we ran out of toilet paper. The spoiled little American boy was going to have to get used to newspaper. At least I could ask in Spanish for yesterday’s copy 
Later, in school in Denmark, I had a year of German… and now I am about to begin my fifth language, Hebrew. Tomorrow is my first day at Ulpan Beit Ha’am. It is not quite true that I am about to begin Hebrew… I’ve been “beginning it” for ten years, so I understand about 300 spoken words. But the reading and writing is impossible, thanks to an utterly different alphabet… and the fact that written Hebrew normally omits most of the vowel characters, so you have to know the word before you can read it or hope to sound it out. Furthermore, as with English, there is a printed alphabet that is completely different from the written or cursive alphabet. And since the teacher will write in one alphabet but the books will be in another alphabet, both must be learned.
When they hear that I have decided to begin Ulpan (the word for “Hebrew Language Course”) many Israelis are surprised, “but why?” everyone here speaks English as does your wife! No, not everyone speaks English in Israel, probably over a million don’t. The ones who went through the school system here do, but since it is an immigrant country, most of the immigrants don’t speak English, they speak Hebrew and their native tongue. And since I ride the bus or train many days per week, go shopping, get haircuts, buy tickets, get asked security questions, and have a phobia… I want to learn Hebrew.
