Public speaking – be prepared!

My two college language courses are a constant source of amusement, challenge, and beneficial stress for me. Today I was to give a 15-minute presentation in Spanish class (in Spanish, of course!) on a topic of my choice – anything of interest in recent headlines from a Spanish-speaking country. I chose to discuss censorship in Cuba, which has been in the news recently as Raúl Castro, filling in for his ailing brother Fidel, has invited discussion about the societal problems of the country. Despite this new openness, censorship is nevertheless an ongoing occurrence. I planned to give an overview of what has been in the news on this topic during the last month, and then to discuss the lyrics of a recently censored song, Mala Leche, by the group Moneda Dura. I would conclude by showing a video of the band performing this song.

Last semester I started preparing for the required oral Spanish presentation weeks in advance. Now I am much more relaxed and since today’s effort was solo, I didn’t have to worry about coordinating with other students. So, I started preparations this past weekend. Before long a perfectly swell PowerPoint presentation (strongly encouraged by our professora) was taking shape, and by last night all was in order.

The best-laid plans of course went immediately awry this morning, as the computer in the classroom was not allowing us to log on to the college network so I couldn’t access my PowerPoint slides. Several people got up to try to access the file; I gave them about 30 seconds and then walked away from the podium and gave as compelling a presentation as I could without any visual aids, and without notes. As a veteran of many many biology lectures and conference talks, I learned early in my career (and fortunately not the hard way!) to prepare for the worst, and I always make sure that whenever I have to speak publicly I can do it with nothing but my voice if the other equipment isn’t working. It’s excruciating to be a member of an audience where a speaker is having technical difficulties – nobody wants to see it and no speaker should ever stand helplessly by while a technician attempts to save the day. I think one of the benefits of being without slides is that the audience pays closer attention to the spoken words, since they aren’t distracted by pretty pictures or by trying to figure out what the graphs are about. Fortunately, we were able to get onto the internet in time to access the video, and I had already distributed copies of the words to the song. Thus, my hope is that if my fellow students remember this talk at all, they will remember interesting ideas about Cuba, rather than a hapless speaker who wasted 15 minutes of class time trying to get their slides onto the screen. I would admonish anyone preparing to give any kind of talk – technology is wonderful, but don’t depend on it, and you will never have to worry about what you’re going to find when you get to the podium.

German Voice-over at MCM Voices!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I love languages and that I’ve been taking Spanish for a while with the goal of being able to offer voice-over in Spanish. The language I’ve studied the longest besides English, however, is actually German. I started taking it in 7th or 8th grade, continued through high school and college, and the last German course I took was when I was a university faculty member back in the not-even-gonna say when-ties! I audited a course at that time, since I was considering spending some time at the University of Vienna working with a colleague in developmental evolutionary biology and wanted to brush up (I ended up working at the National Science Foundation instead). Because I started relatively young, my accent is close to perfect. I could get along just fine if you dropped me off in a Spanish-speaking country, but my German still sounds better than my Spanish right now. Still, I expected to be offering Spanish voice-over in the near future, not German. Last month, a German narration job dropped into my lap.

Okay, I actually moved my lap so that the job would fall in the right place. My friend Liz de Nesnera, who does voice-over in English and French, has a client who was looking for native German voice talent. I told her that if her client was desperate she could let him know that my German was very good. Apparently, he was, because he hired me. Not only that, he made the same mistake a few weeks later, and it looks like I’ll be working with him on a regular basis. I am really quite thrilled. It was a little scary at first, but I’m here to tell you, it is very good for us to stretch our wings and get out of the place where we’re comfortable.

So, it is back to school again for me. I took a one-week course in medical Spanish during interterm at the local college, and now am in Contemporary Culture (in Spanish) AND “high intermediate” German. I’ve survived the first week unscathed and am in linguistic heaven.

A link to a snippet of that first German narration job is here.

Una cosa rara.

A strange thing.

Lately I’ve been investing a fair bit of over-achieving energy in a presentation I was giving today on the geography, climate and natural history of the “Southern Cone” countries of South America - Chile, Argentina and Uruguay - in my Spanish class. I planned very carefully what I would say, and fretted because the words didn’t always come out perfectly in my rehearsals, making me worry endlessly about the future of my Spanish voice-over aspirations. I really enjoyed the preparation, though, because I was learning a lot about the region, which is a fascinating one, and the language is beautiful and I loved learning how to say things like “temperate rain forest” (bosque pluvial templado) and to describe the habits, in Spanish, of birds that I already knew well.

So, today was the day. I had my notes carefully typed up with cues to tell me when to change the slides. The time came to start my talk, and I set those notes down and never even looked at them except to double-check the name of a certain volcano. It was as if “the smell of the grease-paint” took over and I forgot all about mispronouncing words and just tried to make the subject as interesting as possible for my fellow students. It was more fun than I’ve had in quite a while and the words flowed effortlessly. I was so pleased when my professor told me afterwards that my experience as a teacher and public speaker showed!

So, there’s a lesson here – when you have an audience, whether they are right there in front of you or just in your imagination in the voice-over booth - get out of your own way and try to speak to them the way they would like to be spoken to. The strange thing is that I was not really conscious of doing this today – only in hindsight do I realise that it happened. Speaking to a live audience is a great way to remember how to do this. So many of you do it on a regular basis but it has been a while for me and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it. I recommend it!

Las focas de Patagonia

Back to College and Studying Spanish!

It has been some years since I began studying Spanish. I was thrown into it one summer after graduating from college, when I went to Costa Rica to help with a study of bat foraging behavior. I took along a book by Charles Duff called Spanish for Beginners, which was a lifesaver, and was given a worn copy of the University of Chicago Spanish-English dictionary. The staff at Santa Rosa National Park were natives of Costa Rica, so I had plenty of practise speaking the language. Also, there was this revolution going on in Nicaragua, 40 km away and it wasn’t long before the park was populated by large numbers of Costa Rica’s Civil Guard, deployed there to protect the border. So I had even more people to talk to. By the end of the summer I was doing pretty well. In graduate school that fall I took an intensive introductory Spanish course and the following semester took a conversation and composition course (I still have my paper on which my professor wrote “Su estilo es elegante!”). So, I have a good foundation, but I’m not fluent and since my goal is to do voice-over in Spanish as well as English, I decided to go back to school.

The college in my town allows non-students to audit classes, when space is available, at no cost. This is an absolutely outstanding resource. Taking a college course years after graduation is something I would recommend to everyone. When you sit at home alone in front of a computer for much of the day, your perceptions can get a bit whacky. You get very dependent on the internet for information and it’s really good to get away from it, back to people and books and writing with a pencil on paper. Sitting in a room full of 19 and 20 year olds can be a pretty humbling experience too. They certainly know a lot!

So, along with my voice-over work and family responsibilities I’m reading stories in Spanish, studying grammar, and writing compositions once again. I also try to tune in to Telemundo for a half an hour each day to listen to Spanish commercials and programs, and I pay attention to the Spanish pop culture that is available to me – which, thanks to the internet, is abundant. I’ve got a song running through my head right now called Mala Leche by the Cuban band Moneda Dura – following the lyrics is definitely a challenge. I’ve even been thinking in Spanish. I am so grateful for the opportunity to do this, and hope to do it each semester for a long time to come.