In 1967, I obtained a scholarship from Rotary Club International. I was working at the Public Relations Office of the University of Chile. I was doing an exiting job interviewing scientists at different Schools such as Engineering, Medicine, Veterinary, and Architecture, and publishing articles in newspapers and magazines about their latest research.

However, I longed to learn more. I was accepted at the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia in Athens.

It was quite an experience.

I took courses that required me to spend hours and hours going from a book to a dictionary, and sometimes back to an English-Spanish dictionary, to better understand a concept.

I used to turn on the TV or radio news in Spanish and then in English so I could understand the difference in the language structure. Definitely English is backwards from Spanish. In Spanish we say “Estoy yendo a la casa blanca” Which is “I’m (in the process of) going to the house (that is) white”. In English you say “I’m going to the white house”. “Estados Unidos”, not United States.

It was extremely laborious to write my papers because I had to consult the spelling of the past tense of every verb.
I went to a special class for foreign students to learn to pronounce the 44 word-sounds or phonemes. English contains 19 vowel sounds—5 short vowels, 6 long vowels, 3 diphthongs, 2 ‘oo’ sounds, and 3 r-controlled vowel sounds—and 25 consonant sounds. Wow.

However, I still cannot pronounce well. I think if you learn a language after a certain age your mouth and tongue muscles don’t obey you well. However many linguist will not accept this theory. “Tie yuh mout” (in Gullah, tie your mouth for “hush, stop talking”.

I was fortunate to find some girls in my dorm who would check my papers before I turned them in. This “kindness” required me to retype the paper (sometime several times) using my “electric typewriter” (what an improvement over a manual). Through that process, I learned a lot, but I knew that I had no future doing in English what I had done relatively easily in Spanish, that is, write for radio and newspapers.

I would read the headlines in newspapers and I couldn’t understand them. It is not only the language but the daily usage of it. The street jargon was unrecognizable to me, let alone the Gullah language from the islands in Georgia which most of the janitors and cleaning ladies at the University spoke. I was totally lost.

I have big debt to Carol Burnet. I knew enough English to read for my assignments, but it was almost impossible to understand regular conversations, so I found the Carol Burnet Show on TV. I had my best colloquial English classes from that show.

In spite of the language difficulties, and because of my good grades, I managed to obtain another semester of scholarship. In 1968, through effort and sweat, I received my Master of Arts in Journalism and went back to Chile.