Speaking in Tongues: A Language Learner's Guide

Last Saturday I helped promote the French studies program to 8th graders
at my alma mater, Stagg High School.

        It is no secret that behind my exterior of a mild-mannered seminarian and college student lies an avid language lover. Whether they be written or spoken, words excite me, especially ones from different tongues. A language lover tends to speak a variety of languages, much to the envy of others who are amazed when the former can carry a conversation in French when he obviously is a Filipino, prompting them to question their own abilities to do the same. Language lovers recognize that they're a rare breed in this age of instant translating apps and lack of engaged students. Alas, ladies and gents, it's not a matter of genetic mutation or divine intervention that enables linguaphiles to excel in language acquisition. It's merely a matter of ... Well, read on and find out!

        Recently, a friend sent me a message on Facebook inquiring about languages. It went a little something like this:

"Jeremy! Well I was talking to some friends about how I want to major in Foreign Languages and then your name came up! One friend mentioned that you know seven languages!
So I was wondering... How do you do it?? do you have techniques? Or are you just a genius? ... Have you ever struggled? What would you do if you're learning a language but at some point it gets hard?"

        Well, dear Reader, who obviously shares my passion as well since you've managed to read this far, the trick is both luck and strategy and judging from my math grades in the past, I'm no intellectual prodigy.

        Growing up, I spoke English and Tagalog. To my eternal chagrin, my parents chose not to teach Ilokano to my brother and I, which would have made me trilingual early on! In high school, I took four years of French. For some unknown reason, I have always been interested in everything French, from fries to films. (It's no wonder I'm discerning with a French religious order!) Ergo, I took four years of French in high school and loved it. Before senior year, I also decided to learn Spanish since I did not want to waste a class in my schedule on an easy A, like being a teacher's assistant or on another course where I could sit there and vegetate. I purchased a Spanish guide and began studying conjugations, rules, and words over the summer. As a testament to my efforts, I jumped to third year Spanish at the honors level and passed with an A+. Qué chido!

        French essentially gave me a background in every Romance language. The Romance languages are great because they're all interrelated since they branched off from Vulgar Latin, the lingua franca of ancient Rome. Once you know one, the rest will be easy (or at least manageable). In addition to French, my natural Filipino-ness allowed Spanish to become a piece of cake because Tagalog is at least 40% Spanish.

        After French and Spanish, I took up Afrikaans which is an easy Dutch-related language from South Africa. Since I gave my Afrikaans book away to my friend, however, I've lost my grasp of the language. I also learned Brazilian Portuguese and Italian over the summer before college (my language learning abilities must be seasonally-inclined) but am slowly forgetting conjugations and rules in both of these.

        Ultimately, the languages I'm most comfortable with are English, Tagalog, French, and Spanish. Now that I've established my experience, let's get on with the tips and tricks!

        1.) Resources

        For self-study, purchase a good guide concerning the language you want to learn. Helpful features would be directions that emphasize conversation, verb charts, pronunciation guides, and vocabulary lists. Others may prefer taking classes, which help reinforce the material being learned. Self-study should be reserved for people who are self-motivated and have outlets where they can practice the language. In the case of Romance languages, once you learn verb conjugations, rules, and words in one, you'll have built a mental bridge to the others. After I learned French and Spanish, I was able to skip the boring preliminary introductions in guides on Portuguese and Italian because I already had a basic grasp of the fundamentals. Between reading about a language and speaking it, I prefer the latter and so once you understand the basics it's smooth sailing towards carrying a conversation. 

        2.) Repetition, repetition, repetition!
        I make sure to repeat out loud like a crazy person minus the foaming mouth conjugations, words, and rules. Studies have shown that seeing something and verbally expressing it helps in memory retention. Unfortunately, there is no use in repeating words incorrectly. I recommend listening to online radio in the language of your choice whenever you're wasting away at Facebook or reading someone's blog. You'll learn new words and expressions as well as gain better insight into imitating a native speaker's accent. Watching YouTube videos or foreign films also help. Register for sites like Livemocha or Interpals, which are social networks designed for language learners to practice with native speakers around the world.

        3.) Application 
        Try to apply what you've learned into your daily life. See a chair? Refer to it as "la chaise." See a table? Refer to it as "a tabela." See one of your buddies who told everyone in your third grade class that you wet the bed? Refer to her as "la chismosa." At a French café or a Mexican taco truck, try ordering en français or en español. Your friends and family might get annoyed at your little language immersion habits but you might end up teaching them a thing or two. After all, how can you learn a language that you never speak at home or anywhere else besides the classroom?

        4.) LOVE 
        My last trick is to make sure that I love the language I'm studying (which isn't even a trick really...) I make sure to study its history, its culture, and its people, all in the hope of grasping the essence of the language. If you love your languages, you'll never forget them. This may be the most difficult step to master since if your heart is not into German, I don't believe you'll ever truly get far in it.

        Language learning is definitely not for the faint of heart. It takes courage, motivation, and an ability to get up after taking a fall. I've struggled in each language I currently speak, English included. In first grade I was in an ESL class, where the teacher would test me on how to say the word "apple," and look at me now, years later with an AP English Literature score of 5 and a passion for student journalism under my belt. Taking college-level French has at times frustrated me as well since I struggled with difficult grammatical concepts and rules but after some rigorous studying, I survived and am currently set for spring semester to take a sophomore-level French class as a freshman! C'est cool, n'est-ce pas?

        Don't get discouraged by the difficulties you encounter because the only way to grow is to overcome, which is a lesson one can coincidentally apply to his life outside of languages. Ultimately, the world needs more language lovers. I mean who else will interpret for world leaders, translate award-winning literature, or help someone order ice cream in Québéc?

Happy National Vocations Awareness Week!

"We heard a summons to give over our lives in a more explicit way. It was a call to serve all people, believers and unbelievers alike. We would serve them out of our own faith that the Lord had loved us and died for us and risen for us and that He offers us a share in his life, a life more powerful and enduring than any sin or death. It was a call that came to us from without, but also one that arose up within us, as from His Spirit."

Constitutions of the Congregation of Holy Cross (1:3-4)

Please pray for more vocations to the priesthood, to religious life, 

to consecrated single life, and to married life.

Praying with Purpose

        Ever since the beginning of the second week of break, my sleep schedule has been a bit off. Last night I managed to climb into bed at 9:45 PM only to get up again since I had forgotten to say compline and matins. After an hour or so, I went back to bed, slept for three hours and woke up. Since I couldn’t revert back to sleep, I resolved to stay up and pray lauds and prime at 6 AM, which was quite a feat for someone who had been waking up recently as late as 5 PM…

        Alas, besides a few more snoozes before breakfast, all was not lost. As I was praying lauds, I happened across particular verses of today’s canticle that struck me as spiritually beneficial. One can say it was an epiphany (wink wink to those liturgical feast enthusiasts). As it so happens, it was contained in the opening stanza and the second stanza’s first two verses so I didn’t need to look far:

“Give ear, O heavens, while I speak;let the earth hearken to the words of my mouth!May my instruction soak in like the rain,and my discourse permeate like the dew,Like a downpour upon the grass,Like a shower upon the crops.For I will sing the Lord’s renown.Oh, proclaim the greatness of our God!”

(Deuteronomy 32:1-3)

        Those noble words of Moses embodied to me why I pray the Divine Office out loud when I’m on my own. I began doing so during the early weeks of seminary life in fall semester when the new guys were introduced to praying the Liturgy of the Hours. As a community, we pray the Major Hours out loud and I decided to pray out loud the Little Hours as well by myself. I did this at first because I felt like I was able to better enter into a spirit of prayerful conversation with the Lord more so than when I simply read the words on the pages.

        Praying the Office out loud allows me to visualize myself proclaiming the psalms to the world and to God in a confident manner. It also helps me wake up during the semester when we rise early to pray lauds…

        After reading Chapter IV of the appendix of The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an edition I purchased from Fraternity Publications, I was happy to note that several great men of Holy Mother Church had also engaged in this verbal practice. Sts. Charles Borromeo, Philip Neri, and Vincent de Paul prayed each line of the Office out loud in order to avoid the temptation of rushing for as St. Francis de Sales puts it, “Haste is the destroyer of devotion.” I feel there’s always the looming temptation to “speed read” when praying the Office, especially if one is tired or busy. Unfortunately when this occurs, prayer loses all meaning and becomes relegated to mindless lip-service.

        Abbé Bacquez recommends praying the Office out loud “for by this means the words, striking the eye and the ear at the same time, are less exposed to pass underneath, and the care taken to discover the word we pronounce is one more safeguard against the tendency to routine” (Little Office of the B.V.M. 195). Having heard from old priests who have been praying the Office for decades, I can understand how the same psalms can become mundane. We should, however, never lose purpose in prayer, which is above all to demonstrate our dependence and love for the Lord.

        When praying the Office, we stand together as a united Church, as an assembly before God, praying the same psalms which have praised and celebrated Him for centuries, by Jew and Christian alike. The FSSP edition of the Little Office puts it nicely when it reasons that since the psalms are biblical poetry what better way to give glory to God than by using His own words!

        During break, I try to keep in mind that my brothers in community are praying the Office in their respective locales, spiritually alongside contemplative religious residing in hallowed monasteries and convents, clergy within churches both simple and magnificent, and laymen and women inside homes across the world, all of our praises and petitions rising to God as one through liturgical prayer. The Liturgy of the Hours is beautiful for its ability to bring together people from every country under one distinct form of worship.

        Of course, I haven’t always said my Hours during break but I hope that in time, I can rise to a level of spiritual maturity that will help me enter into a deeper relationship with God via prayer. Regardless of whether one prays the Office or not, let us all strive to pray with purpose whenever we are before God.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

St. Joseph, pray for us.

St. Josemaría Escrivá, pray for us.

(Written 07 January 2012, which explains the canticle, but published today since I just got back from San Francisco.)

Today's Canticle from Lauds

"Give ear, O heavens, while I speak;

let the earth hearken to the words of my mouth!

May my instruction soak in like the rain,

and my discourse permeate like the dew,

Like a downpour upon the grass,

Like a shower upon the crops.

For I will sing the Lord's renown.

Oh, proclaim the greatness of our God!"

- Moses, (Deuteronomy 32:1-3)  

Un ami. Un frère. Un saint.

Un ami. Un frère. Un saint.

St. André Bessette, the first saint of the Congregation of Holy Cross, was all these things and then some. He was a friend to the poor, a brother to his fellow Holy Cross religious, and as of October 17, 2010, a saint within Holy Mother Church.

It’s truly a testament to God’s sense of humor and purpose when he called St. André, a poorly educated man, to be a saint in lieu of one of the many scholars that composed the rest of the Congregation in the 20^th century. I view it as a call to humility for Holy Cross, an order of educators in the faith, which initially rejected God’s doorkeeper for lacking academic prowess. Who would have thought that a simple porter at College Notre-Dame would have been able to bring people closer to the Lord and eventually build an oratory to his beloved patron, St. Joseph?

I encourage everyone to learn about St. André’slife. His humility and willingness to accept his daily sufferings are worthy of envy and emulation. Rather than be corrupted by pride when many hailed him as the “Miracle Man of Montréal,” St. André always reminded the faithful that it was the Lord, through St. Joseph’s intercession, who was performing the healings that brought thousands of pilgrims to his doorstep. His warm presence brought solace to the ailing yet he certainly was no pushover. St. André would gladly rebuke others for expecting God to heal them as if the Almighty owed them anything.

At his death, St. André proved that even a holy man could pierce the fabric of popular culture and inspire many to have faith, depicted by the million or so people who filed past his coffin, giving homage not so much to the man who lay within but to the ideals he represented. He touched the lives of hundreds of men and women in an age before televangelists, Twitter, and Facebook. It was through word of mouth that his story spread and brought many to his side. After all, people can’t keep something good to themselves. They have to share it.

From my experience as a Holy Cross seminarian, I’ve realized that a central aspect of the Congregation’s spirituality centers on finding the silver-lining during times of suffering, a mentality embodied in the motto “Ave Crux, Spes Unica.”  Hail the Cross, Our Only Hope! Suffering always engenders spiritual fruits. Just as Christ willingly accepted his death on the cross, so to must we carry the burdens of life with love and humble assent. St. André was the most fragile of his siblings, had lost his parents at an early age, and was mocked for his austere devotion to St. Joseph. Yet he bore all of his trials with inner strength born from trust in Divine Providence and therefore was able to share his hope with the less fortunate and those who suffered physically.

After visiting l’Oratoire Saint-Joseph in Montréal last November with other pilgrims from Notre Dame, St. Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College, I truly received a greater understanding and appreciation for our amazing Québécois saint. The atmosphere of the oratory was quiet and reserved, a spiritual haven amidst the hustle and bustle of the city. After kneeling before and touching St. André’s tomb, I was overcome with emotion. Here was a man who laid down his life for the Lord through his ministry of service to those in need. Here was a man who experienced the same trials as those who succeed him today. Here was a saint.

The Church will always have her triumphant body of saints that now praise the Lord unceasingly in heaven and I thank God for that. With their lives they proclaimed the Gospel and they continue to do so as their stories are passed on. It’s amazing to think that anyone, regardless of his station in life, can be a saint. We are all indeed called to holiness so let us ask God for the strength to fulfill it.

On this feast day of St. André, join the Congregation of Holy Cross in celebrating a man whose life exemplified how one should carry his cross with hope and charity and whose story should inspire all of us to remember the poor and suffering and render them assistance.

St. André Bessette, pray for us!

Patron Porter: St. André at Holy Cross College

            Although the Congregation of Holy Cross prides itself in being an academic society of educators in the faith, it was no scholar that earned the honorable position of the order’s first saint. On October 17, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI canonized St. André Bessette, the “Miracle Man of Montréal,” a Holy Cross brother who was schooled only in the ways of hospitality. Marking the beginning of the Congregation’s Year of the Brother, Prinz Jeremy Llanes Dela Cruz, a Holy Cross College freshman from the Old College Undergraduate Seminary at Notre Dame, provides a reflection on the palpable presence of St. André at HCC.

            The mere spiritual presence of a person is enough to enhance one’s surroundings. The new class of seminarians from Old College has come to know and appreciate the contributions of the beloved St. André Bessette, C.S.C. Although deceased, he continues to greet Holy Cross College students via the warmth and vibrancy of the Congregation’s brothers. St. André has become a favored saint, a holy man one can encounter whenever walking through the halls of Notre Dame’s and St. Mary’s College’s younger and somewhat underappreciated brother. He may not be physically present, but his virtues of modesty, humility, and piety are embodied by HCC students and made concrete by campus architecture.

            The Congregation of Holy Cross espouses a French spirituality, one enriched by St. André’s devotion to St. Joseph and expressed by the HCC chapel dedicated to our Lord’s faithful foster father. Within the Midwestern mecca of South Bend, a crossroads of the Holy Cross family, posters celebrating St. André’s canonization are plastered onto any available wall space. Wherever his image is seen, his story is heard. The tale of the humble porter whose welcoming nature allowed the poor and sick to pass through the door of faith is an inspiring one. Incoming Old Collegians are regaled with anecdotes of St. André and are encouraged to seek his intercession during the Divine Office, allowing the Québécois brother to be as very much a part of their formation as the vocation staff. Consequently, an admiration of Holy Cross’ first saint directly leads to a devotion to St. Joseph, whose constant guidance the former sought throughout his healing ministry. Gazing at the students who attend Mass at St. Joseph’s Chapel at HCC allows one to witness St. André as if he were sitting in the pews himself.

            The oldest branch of the Congregation of Holy Cross lies in the ministry of its  brothers, the great band of men who currently conduct Holy Cross College as an institution that continues the legacy of Fr. James Dujarié’s Brothers of Saint Joseph. Much like St. André, Holy Cross College is often overshadowed by seemingly stronger and more intelligent schools like the University of Notre Dame. Yet, as in the life of this humble porter, a silent devotion pervades the campus of the brothers’ school. Without the flash of sacerdotal songs and priestly powers, the brothers who operate HCC quietly toil in offices and in classrooms, enabling their work to become a prayer. Alas, it is not simply a random brother one encounters at HCC instructing courses, but a representative of Christ and a confrère of the same fraternal spirit that dwelt in St. André. The simple structures and unassuming brothers of HCC reflect the same austerity and fervor of Québéc’s greatest son.

            St. André’s invisible presence at HCC cannot be overlooked. He continues to receive succeeding generations of students through mundane mediums like the thoughtful glance of a brother professor at a pupil confused with a problem or the friendly handshake of a campus ministry member greeting newcomers. St. André may no longer be living, but as long as his inspiring story is passed on he will remain the college’s very own patron porter.

(As featured on Issue 1 of the Brilliance Bureau Creative Journal of Holy Cross College.)

Bessette Blog Posts

Check out more reflections and musings about our beloved St. André Bessette on the Congregation of Holy Cross' vocation blog!