Hi guys, welcome to Speaking Canadian with Nick.
Today I'm interviewing the American polyglot, Silvia Gabriel, who's going to talk to us a little bit about her passions for language learning how to learn many different languages from many different language families at the same time.
You know if you're into that kind of thing and whether it's a good idea to do so or not.
We're also going to talk a little bit about her experience in language education, how languages are taught in the USA and the pros and cons of traditional language learning.
She is also very knowledgeable about the Middle East and is passionate about Middle Eastern languages, as well as South Asian languages such as Bengali.
Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Bangladesh and India, in case you didn't know.
Currently, Sylvia is learning Syrian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, or MSA, and some of the Moroccan dialect.
She's a native English speaker, but has naturally learned many different languages apart from English.
She also speaks German Bengal Syrian Arabic, Spanish and is a beginner in Darija, otherwise known as Moroccan Arabic.
Oh yeah, and she also knows American Sign Language.
Pretty amazing, eh?
She's interested in expanding access to signed languages, working with and teaching English to refugees.
I must say she's a very well-spoken, talented and dedicated person who I've had the pleasure to chat with and get to know a little bit over the last year or so.
We met on Instagram.
I'm recording this intro in advance and will base my questions around both what she's told me about herself and what I think to be most interesting for y'all to listen to.
I'll try to include as much as possible without taking too much of an, without taking up too much of her time, because I'm sure this is something both she and I could talk about for hours.
And also, I hope the audio isn't too shabby, meaning I hope it's not too bad of quality.
I have to call her as she lives in the USA, and I in Canada.
And if you didn't know at this stage, the US-Canadian border is still closed due to the coronavirus.
And another fun update, I still haven't received my microphone.
So I cancelled my order and bought one in store.
Long story short.
It wasn't compatible with my computer, so I'm still on the lookout for a microphone.
So better quality episodes will be coming at some point, it's just a matter of time.
If you happen to be good with technology and would recommend me a good microphone for podcasting that's compatible with Mac and Apple products, that would be amazing.
Greatly appreciate it.
Please let me know if you like this kind of interview style format.
Any suggestions are always encouraged.
I'm still a newbie and there's a lot, really a lot I could improve on.
The pre-intro thing is something I might do differently in the future, because it's hard to predict exactly how the conversation will go.
But nevertheless, I hope that it was at least somewhat informative and will give you an idea of who I'm talking with and in what direction I intend to lead this interview.
So without further ado, let's get into our chat.
Hello.
Hi, it's Sylvia.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you?
Oh, pretty good.
Today, my friends, we have the amazing Sylvia with us.
Thank you for consenting to this podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I'm kind of notorious for cutting people off while I do interviews, so I'll try to keep that to a minimum.
I know it's like the worst quality in an interviewer, but nevertheless.
I've done the intro before calling you here, so if you want to briefly introduce yourself, just like where you're from, what you do, and then we'll dive into the questions I've prepared from there,
Sound good?
Sure.
I'm Sylvia.
I'm from the U.S., from Michigan.
Um, I've lived here for most of my life.
Um, I was raised basically monolingually, with English, but um, now I'm super interested in languages and super passionate about learning them and about linguistics and yeah.
All right.
So I broke this interview up into like three sections.
Uh, first we're going to get into some foreign language related questions, because that's always a good topic, a good icebreaker to get the ball rolling.
So.
Yeah, so, um...
Me and two younger brothers were basically raised monolingually, although both of my parents are bilingual.
So my mom speaks basically functionally fluent Russian that she learned in college.
So everyone asks me if I'm Russian or not.
My mom just learned it.
And then my dad is German.
He was born in Germany, but has basically lived his whole life in the U.S.
So he also speaks fluent German, but he's much more comfortable in English.
And so he didn't speak German to us growing up, although there was, I mean, little bits of both of these languages in my life, although not a ton.
So
I mean with the German.
I would always hear my dad speaking German on the phone with my grandparents and say like, instead of saying You know, we would always say when we're having like dinner.
Mm-hmm.
Even blanking out on the French one that Americans use.
Bon appétit.
Yeah.
So we would always say, I mean, that's a little-time thing.
Yeah.
And my mom.
My mom says that she tried to teach us russian, but but she didn't know baby russian.
Since she has learned it herself as an adult, she didn't know how to talk to a baby in russian right, um.
So i always say you know, if you spoke, if i spoke medical russian, i would be fine with that but um oh wow, that's crazy, but i, i don't.
So um, But she would always.
Every time we would see like a squirrel or something, she would call it Belka.
So that's one word I know in Russian.
And she would still like read us these children's books and stuff in Russian.
So even though I was raised pretty much with English, I feel like I got these little tastes of these other languages which maybe sort of set the stage for me later.
Wow, that is really interesting too.
And you think that, like growing up with these languages, Even if it wasn't like a fundamental pillar in your life, do you think that it kind of changed your rapport with languages, or those languages in particular?
I think it just made me aware, I guess, of, you know, the existence of other languages.
And I do think I thought it was cool that, like my parents, could speak these other languages, even though I couldn't completely understand them.
Yeah, and especially with German.
So I went to a Waldorf school where we learned German and Spanish from first to eighth grade.
So growing up, I always had German and Spanish classes.
And Spanish.
I was kind of just before I was into languages, so I wasn't really so into my Spanish class.
But German, I always sort of felt an extra connection to.
I was like, okay, I enjoy German class, and I felt like I was good at it.
I think it was mostly just a psychological thing of I was good at it.
Because I thought I was good at it?
Because, you know, I was like my dad's German and my dad speaks this, so and my grandparents speak it.
Exactly.
Yeah, it does almost like for me anyway, in my case, when I was learning French, because my last name is French, even if my family is very like distantly French it's funny because I kind of had this like snobbist mentality or like like oh, I should know French because I am French, and then other people would be like
Oh, that's why he speaks French decently well at the time.
It's because he's French, but really I didn't speak it at all at home.
It was just because I was more interested in it.
So I was doing more French in my free time.
So German was the first foreign language that you learned, if I'm not mistaken, right?
But you did have Spanish as well in school?
Yeah, so I had yeah, spanish and german for, i guess, actually for seven years, starting from first grade, which i mean pretty much meant that i i feel pretty confident in my accent in both of those languages since i started so little um, i mean, of course it's not 100 perfect but um, that's not something i struggle with too much in spanish or german.
Yeah um, and then, but i was always, You know, the Spanish classes were kind of just an extra class I had to take
I was always a little more interested in the German classes and I would maybe practice it a little bit more at home or with my grandparents.
Yeah, so I would say, on the most part, German was the first foreign language I learned.
Very interesting.
And you kind of had a different rapport with the Spanish language.
Like, a lot of people say, like, oh, Spanish is way more, you know, beautiful than German.
Like a lot of people think that because it's a romance language, that like everyone should learn it, because it just sounds so nice.
But you know really, you know, it's like wine, in the sense that everyone has their own taste for uh, certain languages.
I find too, because it really does vary a lot within the language learning community what languages people learn and why.
Right yeah, so what got you interested in german and what made you decide that knowing just one foreign language wasn't enough?
So in eighth grade at my school, we could decide if we wanted to continue.
In eighth grade, we had to pick either Spanish or German.
So up until that point, it was every other month.
So I'd have a month of German classes and then a month of Spanish classes.
Then in eighth grade, we just picked one.
So I was obviously felt more confident in German and was more motivated to learn it.
So I picked German.
And then after eighth grade, when I was choosing my high school, the high school I ended up going to didn't have German classes.
But I knew I wanted to continue with that.
That sort of made me sort of take charge with my own language learning more, which I think is the first.
I think that was the very first step in me sort of becoming more interested in languages.
Later,
So I basically took an independent study through my high school, where I was just studying German on my own.
I had like a tutor.
I actually went to some German Saturday school classes.
Because of that, yeah, I really just had to figure out myself how I was going to learn German.
Once I started doing that, I guess it just opened up the door to.
You know, I can learn a language on my own and I can find the resources myself sort of led into me learning other languages.
You know another funny thing people ask me like oh, why do you speak German?
Or how do you speak German so well?
I mean, I'm not fluent still, but and you know, one thing I'll say is I'll be like oh, my dad's German.
And they'll be like oh okay, so now I get it.
And then I want to be like no, no wait, like it's not just because my dad is German, like I put so much work into this, you know, because I've, I feel like saying that sort of means like oh, I just grew up with it.
But I want to be like no, I put in so much work into learning this.
Speak a few words and that's basically it.
Yeah, just in then, how that sort of led me into other languages, I guess you know I never really decided like oh, I'm interested in languages, I want to learn a lot.
They sort of just, these individual languages slowly came to me.
Right after German, the next language I started was American Sign Language and my high school actually offered an ASL class, which I didn't take, but it just made me sort of more aware of it.
And then i also so cliche but i started watching the tv show switch to birth and just from that i got to know a lot about like, deaf culture.
It was sort of just like the gateway into learning about deaf culture and more about american sign language.
And you know, i just thought oh, this is super cool that you can communicate without your voice, just with your hands.
So i thought, being really interested in learning it, And I found an American Sign Language tutor and I just started working with her.
And I got more into that.
And sort of around the same time also.
So one of my best friends from middle school her family is Bengali
I started spending lots of time at her house.
She would take me to these different schools.
Indian festivals that the diaspora was sort of having, like Durga, Puja and different, like theater festivals.
So I would just I had so much Bengali around me all the time that I thought hey, I want to actually understand what's going on, so that I just started to learn.
So there was sort of just this time, sort of right around when I finished ninth grade, where all of a sudden I'm learning German ASL, Bengali at the same time And I was like I guess I like this.
I guess I like languages.
So, yeah, that's sort of how that happened.
Yeah, just flooding your brain with all of these new curiosities.
I know what you mean.
And too, I think that, just to go back to the German comment that you made about your dad speaking German and people assuming that you grew up with the language, is like it's so frustrating because I feel like So many people nowadays just want to see the end result.
They want to see you speak fluent German, but they don't really appreciate the time that you put in to be able to get to that level of fluency.
They're just like, you either speak it or you don't.
There's no middle ground.
Or if there is, I'm not interested in hearing about it.
But I think we need to talk more, as language learners, about the process and how to make it not only more enjoyable but also more rewarding.
This will mark the end of part one of this interview with the great polyglot Sylvia Gabriel.
Please stay tuned for the following episodes that will be coming out shortly.
I hope you enjoyed this segment.
And, as always, please leave me some feedback at speakingcanadianathotmailcom and give me a rate on Apple Podcasts.
That's always appreciated, so that more people can find Speaking Canadian with Nick and ultimately help this project grow and help more people around the world to learn English in a natural and stress-free way through authentic content.
There will also be a partial transcription provided in the description of this episode, highlighting the key expressions used in this episode, just as there will be for the following segments of this interview.
See you guys in the next one.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
