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By April Young

East Tennessee State University student Lia Lerner and her mother Carmen Vaquer lived in Colombia until Lerner was 12 years old. Moving to the United States has helped them to perfect their fluency in both Spanish and English.  In Colombia, Lia went to a trilingual school that taught Spanish, English and Hebrew.

“English was my worst subject though,” Lerner said.

In Lerner’s classes in Colombia students would sit in a circle. One person would begin by saying something in English and the next person would begin where the first left off. “It was a good way to teach children another language,” Lerner said.

All of her schooling in English did not help her to speak it well, she realized, when the family moved to the United States eight years ago. Now the family lives in Johnson City, close to ETSU.

“When I came here everything became practice—so it became easier to learn to speak,” the Lerner said. “It took until high school to be able to read aloud well and write a composition [in English].”

Vaquer, Lerner’s mother, said that she never taught her two daughters or her son to speak English, and they mostly speak Spanish at home. But the daughters learned English at school.

“I was quiet and I would listen to how people used words,” Lerner said.

Learning English was a little more difficult for Carmen Vaquer. In Colombia, she did not get to learn the language in high school like her children. Instead, she carried around a tattered old book of irregular English verbs with a missing cover and torn pages.

“I have a photographic memory,” Vaquer said. “I used to keep a little notebook; I would write down words that I heard and did not know and I would ask people about them.”

Vaquer would also watch television shows in English and take classes.

“I know I have broken English, but I do not care because I have worked really hard,” Vaquer said.

When Lerner was in middle school in the U. S. and trying to learn English, she would find books that she knew in Spanish, and read the English translations. “Gabriel García Márquez is amazing, and Isabel Allende,” Lerner said, and then showed a visitor her copy of Allende’s House of the Spirits.

That is what is good about knowing both languages now, Lerner said. Now she has the privilege of really understanding the original copies of books in whichever language they were written in. To Lerner, knowing more than one language makes a person more cultured and more aware. It gives people a larger vocabulary in both because some words have the same root in both languages, but are common in one language and not common in the other. This is helpful to Lerner now that she is in college at ETSU.

“It makes you look very educated,” Lerner said. “It is all about will in learning another language.”

Language by the Numbers, 2000

Total Population in Sullivan County        153,048
Number of Hispanics in Sullivan County    1,090
Number who speak Spanish at home             391*          (Sullivan County)
Number who speak a language
other than English at home                          3,341*            (Sullivan County)

Total Population in Kingsport                    44,905
Number of Hispanics in Kingsport                 471
Number who speak Spanish at home             215 (Kingsport)
Number who speak a language                   1,218 (Kingsport)
other than English at home

Source: 2000 U.S. Census
*population over 5 years old