I spent my first seven years in college, 1969 - 1976, as a foreign language major, earning an AA Liberal Arts -- Foreign Languages and a BA German. During that time, I studied German, French, Spanish, Russian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Old English, Welsh, Dutch, Serbo-Croat, and Japanese. I even met my wife, who was a French major, in the language lab at Cal-State Fullerton. In 1976, I turned to more technical studies by enlisting in the Air Force and becoming a Computer Science major, for which my foreign language training had prepared me. Although I haven't been able to do much with my languages since 1976, except now for surfing the Web, I still treasure the experience and what I had learned about history and culture through my foreign language studies.
My first experience nearly turned out to be my last. In seventh grade, I enrolled in an after-school conversational Spanish class, which I did not enjoy nor learn much from and out of which I arrived at the conclusion that I could not learn Spanish. Then for my junior year in high school, I decided that I should try to learn a foreign language. I decided against Latin because it was dead, against French because I didn't like the sound of it, and against Spanish because I already "knew" that I couldn't learn it. I picked German, not so much because it was all that was left, but rather because I had a German ancestor four generations back and because I wanted to know what the German soldiers were saying in the movies and on "Combat" (hey, I was still a kid at the time).
As it turned out, my choice of German was the right one. All the other language classes used the ALM (Audio-Lingual Method) textbooks and so were basically conversational-type classes, like my previous Spanish class. But our German teacher, Frau Richardson, was instead something of an old-school grammarian. Instead of the ALM textbooks, she chose to use an older series of textbooks, long out of print. They were printed in Fraktur, the old "Gothic" font, which is why she still used them; she wanted us to learn to read Fraktur, something that many young Germans have never learned. Once she also taught us how to write Fraktur, but did not require it.
Well, after a few minutes of confusion the second week over the term "conjugation", I picked up on the grammar right away and earned straight A's after the first quarter (up to this point, I had skated through high school in a lack-luster manner, getting passing grades without ever studying). Then in my senior year, I discovered that I had learned a lot more about English grammar in my two years of high school German than I ever had in 12 years of English classes (eg, I first learned of the subjunctive in German and could never keep passive voice straight until I learned it in German). Eventually, I came to realize that I had not done well in that Spanish class because I don't really have an ear for language, but rather my analytic mind draws me to the structure of a language, to its grammar, in order to learn how that language works. Since all the other language classes were conversational, if I had taken one of them instead, I probably would have never tried to learn another language again.
When I started at Santa Ana College in 1969, I didn't know what to do with my life, so I just continued with what I knew I liked and was good at, German. Again, as luck would have it, I had Herr Schulz, another old-school grammarian, for German -- so old-school that we learned all the grammatical terms in German instead of in Latin as even the Germans do nowadays. At the same time, I took two years of French, which I have retained fairly well, but for which I never really had any love. However, while I was current with it, French really helped my English spelling, since I could sound out the spelling of certain words ending in -ance, -ence, -able, -ible, etc.
In my fifth semester at junior college, while waiting to transfer to Cal State Fullerton, I had already taken all of the German and French classes offered, so I took another chance with Spanish. That one semester in 1971 is the only Spanish class that I would have had for nearly three decades, until 1999. Ironically, that is the one language that I have a real need to learn, since that is what my wife's family speaks. I've been learning Spanish OJT for the past 20-odd years, but that doesn't mean that I've been making much progress, since again I'm having to learn it conversationally.
At Cal-State Fullerton, I completed my German degree while also studying other languages. I took two years of Russian, one year each of Latin, Hebrew, and Greek (Koine), and one semester of Old English. In addition, I attended a short-lived seminar on Welsh and did independent research on Dutch, Serbo-Croat, and Japanese. At the time, there was almost nothing published on Dutch, since it was going through a language reform. Ironically, the only grammar book on Dutch that I could find was an old book in the university library printed in Spanish.
In the early 70's, a West German government office, die Zentralstelle für Arbeitsvermittlung, helped to place students with German companies for summer and winter employment. I don't know what the inducement was for the companies, but for the students in the German universities it offered a means of earning enough money tax-free to see them through the next semester. German workers would take two long vacations each year, which would coincide with the semester breaks. Basically, half the work-force would leave for three weeks and then return so that the other half could leave. The companies planned for lessened production at this time and would hire the students to fill in for the vacationing workers, with the remaining workers acting as trainers and supervisors.
Lufthansa acted as a liaison between the Zentralstelle für Arbeitsvermittlung and American colleges and universities and one Cal-State Fullerton German professor, Herr Dr. Swanson, acted as our liaison with Lufthansa. Thus in 1973, I got a summer job with a Black Forest construction company, Firma A. Briegel, in Villingen-Schwenningen, and again in 1974 with Daimler-Benz AG in Sindelfingen-Böblingen.
Between these summers, I met my future wife in the language lab at Cal State Fullerton. Most of the language classes at Cal State Fullerton were on the third floor of the Humanities building. So between classes, rather than walk half-way across campus to a lounge area only to turn back around in a few minutes to return, we would sit and study at a couple tables set up for that purpose in the language lab. She was a French major who had also taken a few classes in German and Russian. Later, as a kind of a date, we took the Russian linguistics class together. She graduated with a BA French, then earned degrees in Spanish (of which she is a native speaker) and Elementary Education along with a teaching credential while I was in the Air Force in North Dakota.
She was to graduate one year after me, so I enrolled in the graduate program in German for that year, which was the last formal language training I was to have to decades. After she graduated in 1976, we married and I enlisted in the Air Force as an electronic computer systems repairman (305x4). Then at my permanent duty assignment, Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, I earned my degrees in Computer Science and in Applied Math at the University of North Dakota.
Since then, I have not had much time nor opportunity for language study. Every once in a while, I would pick something up and try to work with it. Of course, when the books on the Klingon language came out, I went through them. I've even picked up a book on Scottish Gaelic, following that part of my heritage. But since I got onto the Web a year and a half ago, I have made increasing use of my language training.
Finally in 1999, I found myself back at the beginning, trying to learn Spanish. I completed the second and third semester classes, but the fourth semester class was cancelled. So now I'm back to OJT.
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