Betty was born in the USA and has lived there her whole life. She started her language-learning journey with Spanish and later tried her hand at French, German, and Russian. Speaking a different language was a big challenge for her, but she never gave up. We asked her how she overcame her mental block speaking Russian, and how Glossika helped her along the way.
Ok, this is stupid:
I was driving and crying so hard I couldn’t see the road. It was yet another meeting with a community of Russian-speaking immigrants where I couldn’t say anything despite having learned Russian for so long.
Everybody was socializing after the meeting. I was sitting there mute and dumb. The feeling was so overwhelming I drove away crying. And then the voice of sanity in my head reached out and said, OK, this is stupid. You either have to make up your mind to go and deal with it how it is and how you are, or stop.
I have voluntarily subjected myself to the immigrant experience in America for just one hour a week. For one hour a week, I am the one with the funny name and the funny accent who can't speak properly. They have to walk into the room and grope for words all the time and they can't drive away from it. That was my wake-up moment when my inner voice told me to stop feeling sorry for myself and just work with what I have.
I turned around and drove back to the meeting. Of course, I was met with total kindness and empathy. I started to work harder, and eventually, things got much better with my speaking. But let me first tell you how I got to that point.
It all started with Spanish
I grew up in an exclusively monolingual environment and personally I knew people who spoke only English. The whole idea of people speaking in a foreign language wasn't completely clear to me.
Early in school, I chose Spanish as my second language. Our school Spanish program seemed to consist of singing. It worked in a way because the words of that song still come back to me even now. But I liked Spanish and I did a lot of studying after school.
When I was in my senior class, a guy sat down next to me once and he was answering the teacher in perfect Spanish. I was stunned by how well he spoke because he was a regular so-called American with a regular American name. And I was like, where did that come from? He told me that he had gone on a sister city exchange program for students. That summer, I applied for it and went to stay with a Mexican family.
It was an amazing experience because I showed up there not understanding spoken Spanish at all and left understanding almost everything. I knew the grammar by that point and had a decent passive vocabulary, but I'd never spoken Spanish with anybody outside of a classroom. After two weeks there things started rapidly improving. It was like when you turn the dial across the radio and it hits and the sound is suddenly clear. That exact experience happened to me with a language.
I was in Mexico for only six weeks, but it changed my life. I began the summer only being able to do uno, dos, tres and came back truly understanding Spanish.
Taking on Russian
When I was at college, I wanted to use my Spanish skills somewhere, and I applied to become a bilingual tour guide at Disneyland. I passed the test but I needed to wait another year before they could find a place for me. When I started working there I asked another guide how long she waited to get her job. I assumed everybody signed up and waited anxiously until they got the call for quite a while. She goes, oh, they took me right away. And she was the one with the Russian language.
It was another turning point for me because I realized that in Southern California a lot of people speak Spanish to some extent. But who speaks Russian? It was back during the Soviet times, and we didn’t have a lot of Russian speakers around. So I applied to the University of California right away to study Russian.
I had no idea what was in store for me.
My class was composed of people whose parents were immigrants living in California. So they already spoke Russian or at least were used to how it sounds. I was in for a really big shock because I had taken a conversational Russian class when my vocabulary consisted of words like vodka and sputnik. I got the fastest set of poor grades I'd ever gotten in my whole life. I realized I had to apply myself.
I put in a lot of effort and I ended up graduating with decent grades, but I didn't understand spoken Russian despite all my efforts. I understood the teacher, but he was speaking in really slow, distinct Russian. However, a couple of times when I tried to talk in Russian with the local shopkeeper, they would just stare at me. In the real world, I couldn’t communicate in Russian at all. I hated this feeling and eventually stopped trying.
Breakthrough in Speaking
I didn’t pursue languages after my graduation. I just kept reading in all my languages, but I didn't have any outlet to talk to anybody for a long time.
At one point, I started going to a community spiritual meeting that was held by immigrants who spoke Russian. I don't think they understood why I was going but they were kind and tolerated me. I went there once a week for six months. At around the six-month mark, the same thing as in Mexico started happening: the dial turned and I started getting them more and more!
I started wanting to speak but I had a block. So I would ask one guy there, how do you say this thing? And he would tell me and I would write it down and memorize it. So little by little, a sentence at a time, I memorized how to say things, but the progress was slow.
Around this time, I stumbled upon Glossika on the web. I saw the interview with Michael Campbell (founder of Glossika) where he was telling a story about riding around in a bus and recording what people said in Chinese. He came to Taiwan as a very young man and he didn't speak Chinese. So he would get on the bus and just ride around all day and take notes about what people were saying to each other. Things like when is the next stop? Can I get a transfer? I have to go shopping etc. Glossika does the same kind of thing for me. After doing that for a while, I got used to hearing the structure of the language, which is critical. I thought it was incredible to get this kind of random exposure to a foreign language.
I can feel like it made a difference. When I’m doing a Glossika session, I feel like I'm sitting on a bus and people are randomly talking about everyday life. Hearing random sentences over and over is what happens to you in life.
I run the app on my way to my Russian-language meeting, and that's enormously helpful. I was at the meeting last Saturday and I was talking and I suddenly realized that I had uttered things I had never said before, and without any second thought! It was the first time in my whole life I said something like this spontaneously. And I know that's Glossika because weird things float around in my head all day long which is great. Things like “these bags are heavy” - I realized that I own that sentence now.
There’s no substitute for speaking
Over the years, it's become clear to me that if you want to speak, you just have to speak. There's no substitute. I used to think that if I just kept studying more grammar I eventually would be good at speaking too. However, I realized that's never going to happen.
One of my friends who is a PhD from Harvard said he learned Russian by reading Anna Karenina. Isn't that crazy? Early on, after I graduated, I copied him and read Anna Karenina in Russian. I was on the first page for hours. However, eventually, I realized that knowing the word for haystacks in Russian is not going to get me anywhere speaking-wise. By reading classical literature you just acquire words that do not come up in conversation. So reading isn't going to cut it if you want to speak. You have to find a way to actually speak.
My outlet for speaking has been the spiritual meeting which I've gone to for many years at this point. I love the people and what happens there. But speaking up there didn’t come easy. My friends think that I’m crazy because I spend so much time on languages. They assume it's easy for me, but the truth is I study all the time. It makes me happy and lights up my brain. It’s an activity I enjoy the same way some people enjoy running or playing an instrument.
Now I’m back at university again, 10 years past the normal retirement age, studying to become a teacher of English as a second language. Now I got a glimpse of how hard English is. I have never understood it before. So I plan to connect my life with languages even more in the future and get an opportunity to travel and teach.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
