Getting To Know Me

     
      As this is the first of many language logs, I would like to start this log entry by introducing myself and my relationship to languages, cultures and language learning. I was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala on July 10th1999, soon after that, I was adopted by my wonderful but EXTREMELY (white) and monolingual family. With that being said, I faced many an identity crisis before the age of 18!! I mean, I am a Hispanic male named Nathaniel Joseph Worthman, living in Long Island, New York, being raised by two white parents. 
     From an early age my parents tried to keep me in touch with my heritage by sending both me and my twin to Spanish school but like most kids, we didn’t want to stop playing with our toys to go to a boring Spanish class. Luckily, down the line I realized how important it was for my to keep in touch with my roots so once I started middle school and had to pick a language to study I chose Spanish! This one choice led me down a path that changed my life. During this first year of middle school I was devoted to my Spanish class because not only did I have the coolest teacher Sra. Perez but I had made a promise to myself that by the time summer came around I would be able to translate all of my adoption papers without any outside help. 
      Due to this extremely lofty goal, I was motivated to translate my life into Spanish. I changed the languages of all of electronic devices to Spanish, I only watched TV in Spanish, and I would try to only have Hispanic friends, so I would speak in Spanish in school! This approach actually worked for me and the summer after 7th grade I was able to translate my adoption papers all by myself. While obviously this wasn’t a perfect translation it was 1) pretty good (looking back now) and 2) I was able to learn about who I am and where I came from. From this point onward, this fire that was visible in my eyes anytime someone talked about the study of languages or cultures or if I ever heard someone speaking another language could never be put out!
       In fact, when I introduce myself to people and get to sharing my interests I have since said, “Well, I like to think of languages as my sport.” This is because in high school while all of my friends and siblings were at baseball and soccer games, I was extremely busy with my language classes. In high school I took Spanish, Italian and French in school as well as went to Chinese school every Sunday and Italian school on Saturdays! In addition to all of that, I took college courses in Russian and Chinese through a local community college before also getting a private Russian tutor. My junior year of highschool I applied to STARTALK (A language programme through there US government) and when I got in I studied for free one summer at Hunter College in NYC’s flagship Chinese (Mandarin) programme! After this, I applied to a NSLI-Y scholarship senior year of high school to study Russian. When I got in I lived in Latvia where I spoke only Russian in school, with my host family and all my friends. To this day, I maintain a close relationship with all of my friends and family in Latvia and have even become conversational in Latvian! Languages have shaped me and the path that I have chosen to embark on thought my life’s journey.


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