by Christine Gilbert (Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2016)
Christine Gilbert must have the most accommodating husband in the history of the world. When she decided she wanted to take a few years learning Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish, he went right along with the plan. Gilbert read a lot about bilingualism and language acquisition (her sources are listed in the Notes) and interviewed some of the researchers, and then set off to try and learn some of the most difficult languages for an English-speaking American to learn: Chinese first. Chinese, according to what I have heard, does not have a complicated grammar, but the four tones are very difficult for an English speaker to grasp, and reading and writing require years of memorizing characters. Arabic is one of the most complex of all languages, and the writing system, while easier than Chinese, is very challenging for an English speaker. Compared to these, the third and final target language, Spanish, is a piece of cake. Besides which, Gilbert had already studied Spanish and spent some time in Guatemala.
The family started out in Beijing as winter set in, not realizing that the infamous air pollution is at its worst during the winter. Gilbert, her husband Drew, and their toddler, Cole, immediately got sick and stayed that way. Gilbert found an apartment and a tutor, but not a class, so her opportunities to use the language were actually quite limited. To avoid breathing the horrible air, the family sequestered themselves in the apartment. In the end, they gave up and left. Gilbert did not achieve fluency in Mandarin–far from it.
Next, the family repaired to Thailand, where they had friends, to decide where to go so Gilbert could learn Arabic, and they ended up in Beirut (maybe everything had to begin with Bei-), where they rented a house and Gilbert joined an actual class, which was better, although the Lebanese dialect she set out to learn would not serve her very well in other Arab countries. They loved Beirut, but eventually it got a little too risky to remain there, so they left again, and this time ended up in Mexico, in a little town on the Pacific coast in the state of Jalisco (Bucerias–Bu- instead of Bei. Close!). By this time, Gilbert was pregnant with their second child, a baby girl. Little Stella was born in Puerto Vallarta, a Mexican citizen. And Gilbert’s Spanish did come back and get better. Little Cole also learned Spanish (he had picked up a few Chinese words despite the family’s pollution-induced isolation, and more Lebanese Arabic). For some reason I never fully understood, the Gilberts chose not to remain in Mexico, where Stella’s birth would have enabled them to acquire citizenship, and which they seemed to love, but instead they settled in Barcelona, a diglossic (Spanish/Catalan) city close enough to the Middle East to afford visits to Beirut.
I found Gilbert’s plan to be kind of wacky but intriguing and marveled at the circumstances that allow this couple to live anywhere they want in the world and enabled her to spend eight hours a day learning foreign languages. I was not surprised at the failure of the plan in Beijing and was impressed by Gilbert’s persistence to carry on with her plan despite that failure. I agree with her conclusion that the key to learning languages is to deeply appreciate and learn the culture of the country where the language is spoken. And I am mostly amazed that her husband went along with it all, even though he did not intend to study the languages (and I wonder just how he is getting on in Barcelona–still monolingual?).
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