Turd Furgeson
When I was very little, I caught the travel bug. It started after my grandparents first brought me to their
home in France and I have now been to twenty-nine different countries. Each has given me a unique
learning experience.
At five, I marveled at the Eiffel Tower in the City of Lights. When I was eight, I stood in the heart of
Piazza San Marco feeding hordes of pigeons, then glided down Venetian waterways on sleek gondolas.
At thirteen, I saw the ancient, megalithic structure of Stonehenge and walked along the Great Wall of
China, amazed that the thousand-year-old stones were still in place.
It was through exploring cultures around the world that I first became interested in language.
It began with French, which taught me the importance of pronunciation. I remember once asking a store
owner in Paris where Rue des Pyramides was. But when I pronounced it PYR–a–mides instead of pyr–A–
mides, with more accent on the A, she looked at me bewildered.
In the eighth grade, I became fascinated with Spanish and aware of its similarities with English through
cognates. Baseball in Spanish, for example, is béisbol, which looks different but sounds nearly the same.
This was incredible to me as it made speech and comprehension more fluid, and even today I find that
cognates come to the rescue when I forget how to say something in Spanish.
Then, in high school, I developed an enthusiasm for Chinese. As I studied Chinese at my school, I
marveled how if just one stroke was missing from a character, the meaning is lost. I loved how long
