French teacher’s experience studying abroad brings appreciation to language

When Elaine Haggerty was hired as the school’s only French teacher last year, she was known to have taught French for eight years, as well as geometry for more than a decade at Castillero Middle School in San Jose.

Yet her students soon discovered that she has a deeper understanding of world languages. Besides English and French, she also speaks the somewhat obscure language of Norwegian.

In addition, she also studied a year of Japanese at West Valley College, took a semester of Italian in night school at a community center and has managed to pick up some German and New Testament Greek as well.

Haggerty credits her fluency in French and Norwegian to studying abroad and fully immersing herself in those cultures.

“I’m one of those people that only knows a language if I go live in that country,” Haggerty said. “I’ve spent more than a year living in France and Norway, which contributed a lot to my ability to speak the respective languages.”

Haggerty was born in San Jose and moved to Norway at age 6. She said her transition to Norwegian worked because she had already developed linguistic skills from being a native English speaker.

During the four years spent in elementary school in Norway, Haggerty became fluent in Norwegian, spoke without an accent and was able to read and write in the language.

However, despite her immersion in the Norwegian culture for so long, she largely forgot the language in her teenage years after moving back to the U.S. in fourth grade. Later, she took two semesters of Norwegian at West Valley College in her early 20s, attended a Scandinavian school in San Jose and drove to San Francisco weekly to find a classroom environment where she could relearn the language.

But speaking for only an hour and half of Norwegian a week and attending a school with students who were still on the basic levels of Norwegian wasn’t enough.

“I completely forgot all of my Norwegian, and I’ve been spending the rest of my life trying to get it back,” Haggerty said.

Then came  the release of “The Fox” in 2013 by Ylvis, a Norwegian comedy duo consisting of brothers Vegard and Bård Ylvisåker. The EDM music video went viral and received more than 630 million views as of October.

The result: By watching the videos daily, she was able to relearn much of the Norwegian she had forgotten.

The path toward learning French

After high school, Haggerty began studying French in college and studied abroad in Aix-en-Provence for a year.

Since she was a novice in French at the time, Haggerty’s misunderstanding of the language resulted in several amusing incidents. One time, when Haggerty and her friend bought laundry detergent, the salesperson told them in French, “Javel is used for laundry, but be careful when using it!”

They soon discovered that “javel” actually means bleach in French, but unfortunately, not before Haggerty’s friend’s black dress was turned an irreversible shade of green.

She said that after returning to France after 21 years later in life, she was able to understand and talk to everybody fluently. Best of all, she was understood by the natives too.

Through her rich experiences of exploring outside of her comfort zone in diverse countries and cultures, Haggerty enjoys translating languages to break down the language barrier that often divides communities.

“The greatest part of learning a language is to teach it to someone,” Haggerty said. “I love being able to use my languages to help people from distinct parts of the world understand each other.”