Learning anything often involves an initial ascent that likens to the start of an arduous hike. It just feels so hard after just the first ten minutes, and many of us, especially not experienced in the general area of what we are learning, can hear loud and clear that defeatist voice inside our heads. Fortunately, most of us would still move on, for there will be many other kinds of obstacles, more fearsome, awaiting us later.
But that initial hopelessness was what I saw in the eye of the husband sitting there next to his wife, trying to learn English. I tried to remind him that in many ways, English was easier than Spanish, his native language. I tried to tell him that in the beginning it was the hardest.
But his sighs, his frowns, and just the look of being lost, all made me feel very sorry for him. This man, big, tall, well-built man, sitting like a child in his own home, at his own kitchen table, next to a wife who knew a little better English. His goatee, his stature when greeting me, his smoothness in speaking his native tongue, all suggest a very confident man if he were a character on some Hollywood movie. I don't know him well at all, just through our weekly tutoring session. He is warm, like his wife, and funny, when speaking Spanish. But that's all I know.
I pointed the words, basic words, on the sheet of paper I scribbled the words on, and he had the hardest time remembering their meaning. He held his pen with frustration, as if he were writing out in the air all the frustrations with his slowness in learning the language. I sympathize with him; I know how hard it is to learn a new language, or more precisely, to learn one in order to survive in the country of that language. It's not like learning some foreign language in school to get through some language requirement. As long as their English stay the way it is now, they can't get far in life.
Three fingers. That's what he showed me when I asked how long they had lived here; he showed me the number of years. They reminded me of my parents, whose English, though better than theirs by a little, have lived here for over twenty years. How can I not sympathize with them? They are refugees. They came to this country on a little raft, escaping Cuba to join one of the twenty thousand and change people to be granted asylum by this country, the country whose language they still have yet to master.
He rested his temples on the hands of those fingers as he tried very hard to remember the four different interrogative pronouns I had written out (the only one missing is "when" and "which", as four was already too many). I had randomly picked one for him to translate into Spanish. He stumbles. First on the meaning, then, after being told the meaning, he stumbles on the pronunciation. All these words seemed the same, sounded the same, yet to everyone who spoke English they were all different. He couldn't understand why they were spelled in such a way that didn't make sense.
"Makes sense?" I asked.
And the next minute or two I tried and failed to explain what that question means, and so in the end I had to reveal the Spanish equivalent. That's when I saw a smile on his face.
His wife was patient with him. She knew a little more English, but had to struggle too. Yet, she wasn't as frustrated as he was. Why? Maybe he's the man? Maybe he doesn't believe he has the so-called talent for languages? Doesn't matter. She was there for him. I realized to help them both I had to recruit her. They had to learn this together when I wasn't there. And perhaps in my absence he would be more relaxed.
And the lesson continued, and his frustration didn't subside. Nearly every task was like stepping on yet incline. When your legs feel like a bag of lactic acid, you just want to see an descent, just a little. But you don't stop because you're too proud. You have turned your head to see that you haven't accomplished much yet, that the trail head is clearly within sight, that the watch tells you to draw the same conclusion that you haven't walked that much yet, and so you can't just rest yet. And the most you can do is curse yourself for being a weakling, and perhaps smooth the edges of self-demeaning by saying that you haven't been to the gym lately, or that you should have warmed up, so it's really not something innately weak on your part. Not really.
His eyes looked at these simple words, then looked at the group of conjugations of "to be", then the group of pronouns. All he had to do was linked members of these three groups together to make a coherent question. His tongue slurs as he tried to string up three beads in a grammatical way. His eyes haven't blinked.
I wonder, as I patiently waited for him, how this was harder than being on a raft with no certainty awaiting you in US waters. Courage comes in different forms and is fulminated from your heart in different ways. Here he is swinging between the need to learn the damned language and the frustration with his slow accomplishments. But courage? There's no room for that here. There are no storms, no sharks, no Cuban naval patrol boats, just words he had to string up in a sensible way. He gently dropped the pen that had anchored his emotions, sat back against his chair, and sighed in frustration, murmuring in Spanish how he wouldn't get this right. In the background he heard his wife explain to him things he probably understood. But to have his mouth say the words, to have his ears understand their sounds, that, he knew, with augmented frustration, required practice. That was the only way up.
You just keep walking. You just have to swallow the frustration, ignore the muscle pain, the dripping sweat, and go on. You don't even notice the scenery around you. You're just walking up the mountain for the sake of walking.
He leaned back towards the pieces of paper, picked up his pen that he hardly used for writing, and tried again.
