As mentioned in a previous post, I’ll come back to this
topic from time to time. Sadly, I’m still
not fluent but give me some credit for
the creative strategies I’ve developed to overcome my learning disability (as
an American). It appears that once you
attain a certain proficiency level, courses are surprisingly difficult to find, especially
if your schedule is not infinitely flexible (i.e. you’re employed). Several years ago, I paid a neighbor kid to speak with
me once or twice a week. He’s now a law student at the Uni Basel and
has partially paid his way by teaching German.
I like to think that I kick started this for him. More recently, as part of an effort to
improve my Swiss German, I joined the “Tandem Partner” program at the
university. This is a program through
which you get together with people who are native in your language of interest and
you split the time, speaking your mother tongue half the time and theirs the
other half. It’s not very time
efficient but has led to my meeting some interesting people. One of
them was Jonathan, a terrifically nice young man who had just finished medical school and was applying for a fellowship in
the US. In order to do this he had to pass
the US Medical Licensing Exam so he wanted to polish his English. For him, I was the mother lode. Not only could I help him with his English, which
was already very good, but I could hook him up with Erica (daughter #2 who just
graduated from Columbia P&S), who had just taken the exam herself. The only thing I couldn’t do was imitate a
strong African American accent, which he’d heard was something he might be
faced with in the simulated patient interviews.
I could offer Boston, more Brahmin than Southie, but that wasn’t likely
something he’d need to deal with. Over
Christmas, when Erica was here, they discussed the exam and this past Spring he passed it. Another success story.
The one tool that people most often suggest is the one that I
haven’t used, intentionally so. This is,
of course, Paige. Speaking with Paige in
either German or Swiss German would be a sure fire means to accelerate the
process. The problem is, Lisa and I are
Paige’s only opportunity to speak English and that's clearly more important than
my German language hobby. When you speak with her she sounds like a
normal American kid but sometimes her phrases come out a bit “translated”. We’re
together at most a few hours in the evening each day so need to make this
time count. When we visit the US, we don’t want Paige to
sound like an immigrant in her own country. I'll keep plugging away but not at the expense of my daughter's future.
