On Spanish Time

Bringing a third language (and culture) into our family’s linguistic mix

Anna turned to wave at her brothers and me. Then, she lifted her suitcase off the security belt and disappeared with the other travelers into Prague’s Terminal 2. It was Anna’s first solo international flight, and my stomach did a flip flop as I watched her stride off. She looked confident and self-assured. A few minutes later, she texted a picture of Gate C11 with a sign saying the departure time to Bilbao.

To help our children see the benefits of learning a third language, we had initiated a summer swap with close friends who lived in Spain. Our friends were a Czech/Spanish family whose 12-year-old daughter had been Anna’s first friend in her Czech preschool years ago. Neither girl had known that the other was also from a bilingual family, but they had lined up together on the first day of preschool and had stayed friends in the years to come.

This summer, nearly a decade after the girls met, our friend’s daughter joined us for two weeks of our US vacation. The girls spoke English together, made slime at my parents’ house, and watched the fireworks at a baseball game on the 4^th of July. They checked out Nancy Drew books from the library and ate my father’s garden vegetables. My mother delighted in introducing both girls to her friends by saying, “This is our friend from Spain, and this is my granddaughter from the Czech Republic.”

Now, Anna was flying to the Basque region in the north of Spain. She would spend the first week on her own with our Czech/Spanish friends and their extended family. The rest of our family would join her for the final two weeks. Anna (and her younger brother Oliver) had been taking private lessons in Spanish for a few years. However, until this year, neither child had been able to put his or her language skills into practice beyond the weekly lessons.

In Prague, Anna attended a public Czech school called a “jazykova skola,” (language school), a distinction which meant that the school offered additional lessons in the children’s first and second foreign languages. For Czech students, mandatory English lessons are taught three times a week starting in 3^rd grade. A second foreign language is mandatory from the 7^th grade, but often taught as early as 6^th grade. Anna’s school started its second foreign language in the 6^th grade, offering German, French, Spanish and Russian. Anna chose Spanish because she knew the basics.

This spring, Anna’s first ever trip to Spain had been a 10-day school trip with her Spanish teachers and 40 classmates ranging from 6^th-9^th grades. The trip wasn’t mandatory, and parents were required to pay circa 650 USD for the plane tickets, language instruction, and home stay. Still, most of the parents of Anna’s classmates agreed, the experience was an opportunity worth funding.

Anna and her classmates lived with Spanish families, attended morning language school, and took afternoon sightseeing trips through the Andalusian region of Spain. Anna returned from Spain with a better command of the Spanish language. She was also full of enthusiasm for the lively late-night culture. When we spoke on the phone at night, she talked about Spanish tortillas, visiting an arboretum, and swimming in the sea.

As both Radek and I have learned from years of living in a foreign country, attaining fluency in a second (or third) language comes faster when you need to use the language – to order food, to communicate with locals, and to express your preferences. Immersion isn’t easy.

Yet, years of speaking Czech in my daily life have shown me that having patience (and a good sense of humor) are as important as being able to perfectly roll my “r” or make the authentic Czech “r with a hacek” sound. If I were as shy speaking Czech as I had been in my high school French lessons, I would have never learned as much or gotten as far as I have living in Prague.

For our children, adding Spanish to the Czech and English they already speak seemed logical. Our friends’ bilingual children were already learning English and French in school, in addition to the Spanish and Czech they speak at home. Years ago, it would have seemed unthinkable that I’d be parenting children who speak three or four languages. Now, it seemed normal.

In Basque country, Anna would take surfing lessons, taste “txistorra” (spicy traditional local sausages) and homemade flan, stay up far later and sleep far longer than she ever had in her life. She’d communicate in Spanish with our friends and their cousins, order ice cream on the boardwalk, and shop in the local supermarket.

When we joined Anna, we would swim in the Bay of Biscay’s clear waters and walk to a local historical landmark, San Juan Gaztelugatxe on the day of the patron saint of Biscay, the Virgin Begona’s birthday.  We would run from a “galerna” (sea storm) when white clouds and strong winds appeared at the edge of the beach, eat mussels, and drink red wine from the Rioja region just south of us. Oliver would try to surf, and all three of our children would practice saying, “agur” (goodbye in Basque), when we left a shop or a cafe.

We’d learn that Basque culture should not to be confused with Spanish culture and that “El Ratoncito Perez” (a rat) is the Spanish tooth fairy. When we biked up the winding hills, I’d learn to shout “coche” to warn bikers ahead of me of approaching cars. Oliver and Sam would fish with a Basque fisherman who showed them how to bait a many-legged worm, and they’d see their surf teacher carrying a basket of freshly caught octopus.

The green hillsides, blue waters, and rocky cliffs of Basque country would be the backdrop for our family’s first experience in Spain. As we sat in the outdoor cafes, shared tapas with our friends’ family, and watched our children fly past us on scooters, I listened to the languages at our table – Spanish, Czech and English – the words rolling over me and wrapping around me, seeping under my skin like the sand from “la playa” that was everywhere.

When Anna waved goodbye to us that day at the Prague airport, I couldn’t have imagined the experiences that awaited her (and the rest of our family) in Spain. But, a part of me must have known, because once upon a time, many years ago, I had been a similar girl who waved goodbye.