My dad always disses on ol' Don Quixote and yet he has a lot in common with him. He says that Cervantes used the name Quixote like a play on words; playing off the idea of "Que Jote" which basically translates to "How ignorant / foolish". So the idea of this guy going out to defend chivalry with a name that basically translates to "gentleman fool" or "noble idiot" is satirical and ironic.
With my dad, I always wonder how he'll take things that aren't literal. It seems to be something different with deaf culture. I've noticed the deaf have their own nonliteral world which is difficult for the hearing to understand.
The funny thing is how much of the nuance of this world comes out of physical gestures and movements. I guess it makes sense, things like humor come out in this form. But what I've noticed is how well my dad picks up on facial expressions and body language and it's taught me how to recognize all sorts nonverbal clues which can be helpful when you speak a second language.
Humor seems to be the hardest thing to understand in another language and sign language is basically another language. You could say I grew up bilingual with Spanish and sign language as my first two languages. I think this has helped me to pick up English.
Luckily, I took some sign language classes when I first started high school in the U.S. and I knew sign language so well that the other students talked to me all the time in English asking for help. Sign language was like this bridge that I used to overcome what I didn't understand in English. It also helps that my dad has taught me how to pick up on physical cues from people.
So I've ended up learning a lot of English in my ASL (American Sign Language) class, P.E., Foods, and Art. In these elective classes I can visually understand what was going on at some level and this helped me bridge the language gaps with all the nonverbal cues. Soon, I started understanding more and more of the words in English in the way students my age communicate.
You'd be surprised the amount of slang needed to navigate communication in another language, especially with younger people. And slang is always changing, it changes faster than any textbook or anything my English teachers would use in class. So I soon figured out I learn "formal" English in my English class, and I actually learn how to understand and communicate with my peers in my elective courses.
The funny thing is, communicating with my peers seems to accelerate learning English more than anything, it just seems like I learn it faster. But understading young people is harder than with adults.
It's not just because of all the slang but also because young people don't slow down and don't articulate all the sounds. It seems like they're kind of oblivious if I understand something or not and this is so different from my dad. He's always hyper sensitive about being understood.
So when I think about improving my English, I try to remember a couple things that seem to help:
Humor - if I don't take myself too seriously, I seem to learn more and it's more fun.
Sin Verguenza - this is how I remember not to be afraid to make mistakes or look stupid, it seems like you learn another language by not being afraid to play around with it and make mistakes (even better if you have a "safe person" who will point out the mistakes).
Why be shy? - try to be social in English, it accelerates the learning.
Practice, practice, practice - it's the only way anyone gets good at anything.
In some ways everything I try to remember about
learning English is embodied in the personality of Don Quixote. He was just crazy enough to not care what people think, or maybe he didn't have the ability to perceive what other people thought. He had the "Sin Verguenza" attitude and stayed focused on his dreams. He never considered discouragement, in fact, it almost seemed to egg him on to prove others wrong. He believed in himself so much that he was able to accomplish things that were seemingly impossible. He became the most famous knight in history because he believed in it more, and he took this further than any other knight has.
With my English, it seems to help if I can possess some of that Quixote persona in my approach. There's even a word for a Quixote approach: Quixotic. First, throw off shame and the fear of judgment. Second, convince myself I speak English and then, I see if the people around me believe I speak English, and that's when it feels like when I'm really learning the language.
It happens naturally on the basketball court when I'm not even trying to learn English and I'm not even thinking about Quixote and I forget if I have an accent or not and I don't care what people think and I just need to communicate something like, "Throw me the ball."
Basically, that's what Quixote did, he believed without a doubt that he was a knight which got him to the action (the basketball game of life). Once he was out there doing his acts of chivalry, he started becoming a knight. He just kept on doing what he thought a knight would do (never giving up and never doubting it) and through his hundreds of thousands of chivalrous acts he gradually becomes a knight.
It's as if enough belief, can lead one to enough action, to transform or become what the belief had in mind in the first place; and yes, it does seem on many levels crazy or insane. Isn't believing in something which doesn't exist, one of the diagnostic indications that someone is clinically insane?
Yet, all great knights, artists, people who achieve beyond expectations, all of them (Quixote included) believe in something completely, 110%, even though it doesn't "yet" exist. Isn't that what a dream is? And how many times have dreamers been called crazy? I keep imagining MC Quixote, and in that name, there's the dreamer and the dream.
Stranger still, there's a book called "El Quijote" that was written after the publication of the first book of The Genius of Don Quixote de la Mancha (c 1605) but before the publication of the sequel by Cervantes titled The Genius of Don Quixote de la Mancha (c 1614).
The author of "El Quixote" appears as Alonso F. de Avellaneda; which to this day, no one is certain who this was. Hmm, another masked artist? Yes, there are many theories, and I'll present a couple.
The most obvious theory is that Alonso F. de Avellaneda is a pen namethat Miguel Cervantes used. There are a few holes in this theory, like why thenwould Cervantes publish a part two under his own name in 1614? Or why wouldn'the use his real name to make sure he was properly credited and compensated forthe book? We'll probably never know, but I do know this, Don Quixote is aliveand well today.
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MC Quixote
General FictionThis story is about a fifteen year old moving from Mexico to the United States with her deaf father. She experiences many challenges and turns to writing songs and creating music to overcome the difficulties of moving to a new culture while growing...
