Colombian kid as: A American boy

My family emigrated from Colombia about 25 years ago. Since I’m 20 years old my parents had about 5 years of time to catch up and learn the English language. I won’t include my father since he was only part of the conception part of my life. My mother came to the United States as a young woman in her early 20’s. She knew a very limited amount of English; she was a smart girl and a social one at that. She can admit that most of her English developed because of the media. She listened to Artists like Cat Stevens, and Billy Joel, that helped develop her accent. Newspapers and friends helped her with the rest.

So my story starts as me speaking English, as my first language. My mom tried her best to speak to me appropriately in English. She gave lectures and sent me to classes at the neighborhood library to develop my English. This was a priority for my family to teach my generation the native tongue of the USA. The only difference for me compared to my cousins, I spoke not a word of Spanish. I could understand it only because when I was disciplined, my mother couldn’t hold back and the Spanish in her raged out.

Growing up, that was my main priority, to learn Spanish. Unlike my cousins my mother was a single parent that had no real time to practice Spanish with me. So on this new journey of mine, I used any resource I could, to learn my mother’s tongue. I watched the Spanish channels (plenty of noticias or news,) I listened to music and repeated the words a million times till I got the accent right. This wasn’t hard because I already understood Spanish, so the meanings of the words and lyrics didn’t confuse me. To develop my reading skills, I had to get a little creative. When I went to Spanish neighborhoods, I would pay attention to the names and signs hanging of bodegas (Spanish convenient stores) and read the words in the form of English, then repeat the word aloud in a Spanish accent. Little by little over the years I became fluent in Spanish. This so called journey of mine taught me many things, and it gave me some life skills too, but one thing I can say I did, was learn Spanish.