Loss of Communication

July 23, 2010

Many a day I wonder if I am still able to communicate with the world in any language -- be it English or Spanish. Today was one of those days. I was trying to help a nine year old with her English homework. Sadly at this moment she is so far behind that all we are doing is playing catch up which consists of filling in her workbook and never really taking the time to learn nor to understand the material. This afternoon she had to answer some questions about simple machines and one question was to identify the machine that records television shows. As I tried to help her with the question, I realized that I could not remember the word in English, nor did I know it in Spanish. I proceeded to ask one of the older girls if she knew the word since she is pretty fluent in English and her thought was video cassette. Knowing that was not the answer I was looking for, I went into one of the offices to ask a fellow American girl for the right word. Her thought was "VHS", which also was not what I wanted. About that time I went back into the study area and the children's tutor (a native Spanish speaker who knows some English) called out "VCR". And that was the word I had wanted. It is rather sad that two native Engilish speakers cannot come up with the word in their own language (It is very probable that the tutor found the word on the internet but still...). And yet so often I am at a loss for words in both English and Spanish. I feel that in some ways my communication with people in English has deteriorated over the past few months because so many times I have discovered that I have not communicated well the question or idea that I had. I guess that is a price to pay for filling one's mind with another language, but my goal is to communicate well in two languages.