Personal Narrative: What I Learned While Speaking Spanish

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I have always considered myself to be a fluent Spanish speaker. My mother, an immigrant from Colombia, taught me everything I needed to know to communicate with my grandma, who only spoke Spanish. Being able to speak Spanish was a gateway for me to be able to connect with my mom’s side of the family. I never thought I would be a “bad” Spanish speaker, this notion quickly changed once I entered high school. Sitting in Spanish class I had never felt more uneducated, all my classmates knew all these different tenses to use when it came to speaking Spanish, and yet there I was, sitting, hoping for the period to quickly end. My first Spanish test of the school year failed. I failed so badly that my teacher allowed me to retake the test. Yes, I was …show more content…

Then started my journal entry journey, everyday I would write about my day in Spanish. After I finished my entry, I would take out my Spanish notes and correct my writing. In this process, I realized that when I spoke out my journal entries while writing, I managed to always write in a correctly structured way. I finally cracked the code. My next Spanish test came, my palms were sweaty, but I felt like after all my practice I knew that I had earned a 100. Whether i got that grade or not, I was still proud of how far my spanish writing skills had come, i was no longer a failure.I got my test grade back, and I did not in fact get a 100, i got a 91, and i felt like i was on top of the world. I no longer saw myself as someone who had a false hispanic identity, I no longer saw myself as a product of disappointment to my culture, but instead as an adaptation to my cultural struggle. A grade did not validate my sense of identity, my passion did. Every time I put my pencil to paper and I wrote in my native language, I felt astonished at how expressive my writing could

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