Mingle With The Trilingual: East teacher Ms.Halksworth shares her experience with learning French, Spanish, Japanese and German

As language teacher Gina Halksworth’s full Spanish 2 class listened to her explain how to conjugate irregular verbs, they suddenly heard her blurt out the word “ou.” The students look at each other confused as to why she just said a French word in Spanish class.

Halksworth is trilingual, and teaches both French and Spanish at East. In college, she majored in French and received a teaching degree in Spanish.

In addition to being fluent in Spanish and French, she took two semesters of Japanese in college, and also knows a little bit of German because of her family’s ethnic background.

“I barely remember Japanese, I can recognize the symbols and I can say a few sentences,” Halksworth said. 

She describes Japanese as the hardest class she’s taken in her life because it’s not the Roman alphabet like the other languages she speaks. Although she doesn’t know much in German, she’s gained a few skills from her German-speaking grandmother.

 “I can recognize and speak a little bit of German and I can also count,” Halksworth said.

While Halksworth understands several languages in addition to her first language, English, she is the strongest in French. Halksworth gained most of her knowledge in French by studying in Les Mauges, France in college. 

“French is the easiest to teach for me because I have cultural experience from studying abroad,” Halksworth said.

She also shares the first time she realized she was strong in French when she had a dream that was fully spoken in French. 

“I watched ‘Gilligan’s Island’ in French, and in my dream I was a part of the cast,” Halksworth said. “Not one word was spoken in English and I remember waking up  ‘what just happened?'”

Halksworth grew up in Garden City, Kansas, which has a high population of Hispanic people. 

“Spanish wasn’t anything new,” Halksworth said. “Since I knew Spanish already, I took French in high school.” Halksworth didn’t begin taking formal Spanish classes until she was 28 years old. Along with her time in France, she has studied in Spanish-speaking countries as well. She studied in La Jara, Mexico for one summer and did a four-week study in Vigo, Spain.