Bonzer Words!: How I Learnt English
...The very first minute of the course, Miss Tubino stood up in front of the class and said: 'Este es un curso de inglés y sólo se usará este idioma. Esta es la única y última vez que hablaremos en castellano, que no está permitido.' This means: 'This is an English course and we will only use this language. This is the last and only time that we speak Spanish, that is not allowed.' Then she started....
Argentinian José Miyara tells how he came to speak and read English.
I was born at the foot of the Andes but live by the Paraná River. I am a retired Electrical Engineer, in my eighties and fond of literature, music, chess, carpentry. All of my life was spent in Argentina, but I have travelled on business and pleasure to the US and Britain.
The very first minute of the course, Miss Tubino stood up in front of the class and said: 'Este es un curso de inglés y sólo se usará este idioma. Esta es la única y última vez que hablaremos en castellano, que no está permitido.' This means: 'This is an English course and we will only use this language. This is the last and only time that we speak Spanish, that is not allowed.' Then she started.
She showed us a pencil. 'This is a pencil,' she said. We looked bewildered, but she went on. 'Repeat,' she said to one of us, who finally did repeat as well as he could. 'This is the blackboard, this is a table,' etc., etc. She wrote what she said on the blackboard, using only the International Phonetic Alphabet.
I was curious and eventually I bought the English Pronouncing Dictionary, by Daniel Jones. Only after half of the first year did we start writing in current English, with its vagaries, to correlate the sounds with the letters. However, we kept using the phonetic alphabet on the side.
The rule not to speak Spanish was strictly enforced, with only one exception, that I will tell later. 'Say it in English,' she would say, even referring to chat among us. We were thirteen year-old, boys and girls. Our course was extracurricular, and of secondary level. It was intended for the benefit of students in the university career of English teacher, so they would have actual pupils for their teaching practice.
All were starting at the same time, and Miss Tubino was a luxury teacher for us: she was to teach to prospective teachers. We had a tertiary professor where a secondary one was enough, but at the time there were none available.
The National University of Cuyo was beginning with the English courses at the time of these events. I'm now 81, so you can easily work out what was the year.
Miss Tubino was very young, perhaps not more than 21 or 22, very pretty, very capable. She was Argentinian, but being a blonde, many of us who were secretly more or less in an impossible love for her, thought that she looked exactly like a beautiful English lady.
Such as the course was delivered, for us it was a do or die job. Some could not follow it and left. But those who stayed, learned a reasonable level of English in just two years, one hour Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The teachers would use all available resources. We sang a lot of folk songs, such as Yankee Doodle, Auld Lang Syne, Clementine, Molly Malone, Old Black Joe, My Bonnie, Tipperary, and so on.
However, I couldn't say I knew English until I could read a complete novel. I had used the language extensively for my profession as an engineer, even to write reports, but literature was something else. Too many checks in the dictionary distracted me and would not allow me to enjoy what I read.
Then at a time in my job I worked with a British engineer, Mr. McElwee. Not only did he teach me many interesting things in English, such as a word with two apostrophes inside, but he gave me a charming book: Trustee from the Tool Room, by Nevil Shute and some sound advice: not to stop for dictionary checks unless completely unavoidable, but rather to try to guess from the context.
So I did and succeeded. Soon I was enjoying the book and understanding it all. From then on I would say that around half of my readings were in English, ranging from Jane Austen to Rex Stout, among many others, but to mention only two paradigmatic authors that I have enjoyed deeply.
Before ending, I owe you an explanation of the only time that we had to speak in Spanish to be able to clarify a doubt. 'I was born' is in the passive voice, which is not the case in Spanish: 'yo nací' or simply 'nací', the pronoun not being mandatory, is in the active voice. It is I who came to this world, thanks to my mother of course, but it is I. I couldn't understand the passive there.
As a matter of fact, I still see it as a breach of logic. My mother bore me for the full 9 months, not only the instant I came out. But in languages, custom and use are far stronger than logic.
© José Miyara
This article first appeared in Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
