The Writer’s Coin

Brip Blap has a great series going on right now about the best financial decisions he ever made in college. I really don’t know what financial move (if any) I made in college besides opening a credit card and never really using it. I always paid my balance in full when I did and thus begun to establish my credit (which is great, if I may say so myself). But I really didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t start learning about money, finance, and investing until a few years ago. So there.

But learning a language has been a very important part of my life and it’s helped me get jobs many a times, including my first freelance job ever. Besides work-related benefits, it also allowed me to have one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had: traveling to Paris and living there a couple of times to learn French.

I was lucky—my father is a native Spanish speaker and my mother an English speaker, so my sister and I grew up in a house where both languages were being spoken. And fluently, too. So that was a huge advantage because I don’t even remember learning either language. To me, both languages are my “first,” even though I probably feel more comfortable writing in English at this point. But this was huge because right off the bat I knew two languages fluently and that’s a big advantage.

My parents, though, always wanted us to learn a third language. We resisted as kids, of course, until we realized that we could place ourselves way ahead of our peers if we knew one more language. So my sister learned Italian and I attacked French. She went to Italy for a summer and I went to Paris two separate times, where I lived and took French classes. Being a student in Paris and hanging out with other young people from around the world was an incredible experience. From 9–1 I would take my classes and after that I was wander around Paris to areas I hadn’t been to before. Then I would have a beer with some of my classmates and maybe see a movie. I’d come home and write in a tiny, cramped apartment that I loved, where I would write more than I’ve ever written in my life. No Internet, no TV, only a little radio. It was incredible.

Living the “writer’s life” in Paris while I read A Moveable Feast and The Great Gatsby was just surreal. I read Hemingway and then I walked to his house and took a picture. I still can’t believe it. The more I think about it, the more excited and nostalgic I get. I’m going to have to write a whole post about that time.

But anyway, amongst all that stuff, I learned French. I could speak it and write it a little bit. Throw me into the streets of France or Senegal or French Guyana and I could probably hold me own, lo these many years later.

So now I know three languages. But the big advantage of having learned French was knowing how hard it is to learn a new language when you’re grown up. It made me pay attention to certain rules, both grammatically and phonetically, that I never knew before about all the languages I know.

I didn’t meet my wife in France (like Brip Blap did), but I got my head thinking in a different way, expanded my horizons, and got to travel to a place notorious for being extremely unforgiving on tourists (as long as you try to speak French, it’s all they ask) and had an incredible time.

When it comes time for me to have kids, you can bet I’ll be pushing for at least two languages, maybe three. Now I just hope they get some sort of scholarship or something that’ll pay for their trips.

Tags: English, Freelance job, French, learning a language, Paris, Spanish, third language, translation