I'm feeling pretty upset and off-balance, but it's not anything I can do anything about.  So I'm going to write about something that makes me happy, even if it is blowing my own horn a little bit.  If I seem too arrogant or self-serving, you don't have to read it - but this is not to show off or to make anyone else feel bad, it's just cheaper and has fewer calories than ice cream therapy!  Yourstruly's question about foreign languages got me thinking.

I am a language freak.  Or perhaps more accurately, a word freak.  There is just something about my brain that is geared for words and language, the same way that some people are geared for math and/or science.  I'm not too bad in math or science, and they both interest me, but nothing compares to language in my book - though I'm not a linguistic genius, either.

My mother says she remembers rolling up to a stop sign when I was three, and hearing me in my car seat saying, "Sssss...tuh...ah...puh..."  I read my first book (a children's book, of course; not "A Clockwork Orange" or anything) cover to cover, unassisted, when I was four.  I corrected my parents when they made mistakes in reading my bedtime stories!  In kindergarten, they tested our language and math skills.

My parents: "How'd she do?"
"In math, she tested at about the second-grade level."
"Wow!  That's incredible!  And in reading?"
"Well..."
"What is it?  Is something wrong?"
"Well, see...we only brought materials to test up to the sixth-grade level..."

They would have promoted me out of kindergarten, as I recall, except that I was so much smaller than my classmates as it was that they thought putting me with even older kids might not be a good idea.  I've always been small.  I was 5 lbs., 15 oz. when I was born, and I wasn't premature - I was ten days late!

So instead, they put me in a "gifted" or "enrichment" program, where, for a certain amount of time every day, I spent time in the hearing-impaired classroom.  I wasn't there specifically to learn sign language, but I did learn it, and fast.  My teachers told my parents that I became sort of a playground ambassador between the hearing kids and the hearing-impaired.

In first grade, I think it was, we had a reading period in the school library twice a week or so. I had read through all the books in the first-grade (i.e. "approved") section in a few months and would wander off, reshelving books in other sections of the library that hadn't been alphabetized properly.  In second grade, my teacher noticed that I was always bored during spelling tests because I finished fast and I always got perfect scores.  She told my parents, "She doesn't need spelling, and I hate to see her wasting her time that way."  I got to read "The Boxcar Children" during spelling class instead and make a little diorama of the boxcar in a shoebox.  I enjoyed it, but I finished faster than expected yet again.  Then they put me in the "gifted" program for a while.  We met in the janitor's closet - I'm not kidding.  And I was bored there too. 

So finally the school came to us and asked, "Is there something specific she'd like to do?" 
And I said, "Spanish!"
"We don't have any Spanish classes before the 4th grade."
My parents: "Well, second grade obviously isn't enough for her, and neither are your 'gifted' programs.  Maybe 4th grade will do the trick!"

So I took 4th-grade Spanish in the second grade.  I loved it, and I did great.

In third grade, I taught myself BASIC on a Commodore 64.  It was a programming language, not a spoken one, but a language nonetheless, a code of words and letters with its own vocabulary and syntax.  I was fascinated by it.  Also in third grade, my destiny as a writer was revealed.  My best friend and I would play out make-believe scenes from Star Trek, and we also invented our own sci-fi universe, our own ships, crews, and missions.  At dinnertime, we had to say goodnight to each other, but we both wanted to keep playing so badly that we would go home and novelize everything we'd played about, and the addiction was born.  There was Star Trek fan fiction. Our universe became a planned series of 10 novels - we only started a few of them and only finished one that I know of.  Every day we would bring each other copies of what we'd written the night before, compare ideas, play some more, and write it all down.  Then we created other universes, explored other ideas.  Struck off on our own, individually.  That was when I knew that this was what I wanted to do, forever.

In fourth grade, my family moved to Canada, which meant my public school curriculum now included French classes.  I was thrilled.  I loved learning about food, learning my numbers up to 20, listening to Roch Voisine and watching "Twister" for the first time in French (where I learned the word "Merde!" - my friend sitting next to me didn't hesitate to whisper in my ear what they had said in the English version!)  Meantime, my classmates affectionately nicknamed me "The Human Dictionary."  I still got perfect scores on my spelling tests, and all my language arts tests, and I could answer almost any question they had about spelling or definitions.  I loved being the expert at something, and being able to help out other people.

The school I attended in Canada was so small that they didn't have any extra programs, but the principal and my parents agreed that I needed more of a challenge.  The only option was to move me up a grade, which I opposed vehemently, but my parents insisted.  I walked into my first 6th-grade French class, and the kids were using complete sentences, asking questions and using words I'd never heard before - not to mention my first experience with written French (and if you've only ever dealt with spoken French, seeing it written down for the first time is a bit traumatic!  When something like Qu'est-ce que c'est? sounds like keskasay ... where the hell do all the syllables go??).  I told my parents there was no way.  The other kids had an entire year of French on me now, not to mention they'd been studying French their entire LIVES and I'd only moved here a year ago.  My parents insisted I stay in the 6th grade, and hired a neighborhood teenager to come tutor me in French in the afternoons until I caught up.

She came over for her first afternoon with me, and we worked on all the question phrases that had spooked me so much.  When my parents came by to see how we were doing, she looked up and said, "I really don't have anything else to teach her.  She's caught up.  And her accent - she sounds like she's lived here all her life."

In my 9th grade year, we moved back to the states.  In 10th grade, I signed up for a year (two semesters) of Latin - it would help me with my SATs and give me a better foundation to further my study of French.  My Latin teacher was a joke.  On the first day of class, she announced that we were going to learn the first declension.  The first what now??  And that was only the beginning.  I quickly realized that the only way I was going to survive this class was to stop relying on the teacher, take the book home every night, and teach it to myself.  Which is exactly what I did.  I aced the class, and the other students always wanted me for a study partner, because I was the only one that understood a thing our teacher said.

At about the same time, I was teaching myself QBASIC from nothing but the onboard help files.  In 11th grade we moved again, and I refused to start any more new schools, so I taught myself my last two years.  I continued to teach myself Latin, along with brushing up on my French and Spanish.  In college, I learned ZZT-OOP (the programming language for an old-school ASCII-based game called ZZT) and I took classes in French and American Sign Language.

I have one particular memory from college about languages that makes me smile.  I worked at the university's writing center, helping other students improve their writing at any stage of the process, and more specifically helping them to improve their papers and assignments.  There were things to hate about it, as with any job, but for the most part I was extremely happy there and adored the work I did.  The specific memory has to do with one specific student/client, an ESL student from Haiti, with French as her first language.  I remember that several of my coworkers were uncomfortable with her, and felt that she had an attitude that made her difficult to work with.  One day, she was scheduled with me.  During the appointment, she struggled to express herself at times, and her writing needed lots of grammar and syntax help.  I recognized a lot of her constructions as coming from French, and I was able to draw her out by telling her often, "I see what you mean here.  And in French, this would make perfect sense; that's how it's written.  But in English, to say the same thing, we write it this way - I know it doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's the way it's written."  After her appointment, she thanked me profusely, and a couple of my coworkers asked me how it went, expecting one of our horror stories (we had more than a few, at that job!).  I shrugged and said, "I don't see what the big deal is; it went great."  At our next staff meeting, even my boss asked me about it!  I told her how I had approached the client, and that it had gone really well.  She said, "Well...how about we make a note in the schedule out front, that whenever that particular client comes in, we assign her to Nytquill?"  I could not have been more pleased with myself!

After college, I got married to a Quebecois and moved to Quebec to be with him - and got a priceless opportunity to feed my passion for Canadian French.  In 6 months I was fumbling, but fluent.  It's been 1 1/2 years now, and I'm getting better every day.  It has been a true joy for me to watch my mind fully learning a language instead of merely studying it, to observe all the different levels and phases of fluency.  Just today, I was reading some information written in French on a sheet of paper, and when I put the paper down, I had to go back and look at it to check what language I had been reading.  I had understood it so thoroughly I honestly thought, afterwards, that I had read it in English!

There is so much more I could say about my journey learning a second language.  And there are still so many more languages I want to study!  But I have achieved my original purpose, which was to cheer myself up, and I'm starting to feel like I need to apologize for having such a pride-fest.  So I think that means it's time to sign off, for now!  Thanks for reading, as always.