While I spent my school days learning to write and read in Spanish in the first grade, I spent my afternoons learning to speak it.
Have you read or seen the play Pygmalion, or the film My Fair Lady ? I had to deal with a phonetician of sorts. If you English speakers out there have ever tried learning Spanish, you have most likely endured the challenge that is the double-r. It, too, was my enemy.
My mother would take me once a week to a phonetician. A lady in her thirties, maybe forties. She would sit me down and begin by making me speak in English. She made me speak a language I already knew. She wasted my hours and my days saying words and sounds I already knew. How I wanted to yell at her, tell her to teach me to speak Spanish. I was tired of being mute in this new country. I was tired of being unable to communicate with children my own age. I was tired of being abandoned in the playground during recess because I couldn’t distinguish between the words “hurt” and “smell” (duele and huele).
I would argue with my mother, telling her I hated going to those classes. She told me I needed them, I said I didn’t. That woman was not helping me. Only later did my mother learn that the phonetician wasn’t teaching me Spanish.
Eventually, by myself, without help, all alone, abandoned, isolated on the school playground, I learned to pronounce the double-r correctly. No thanks to that phonetician.
Tags: double-r, english, erre, Language, phonetician, rr, spanish
