Katharine Stackhouse

I poked my head through the door and found her rattling between German and English as she chatted with her parents. These are only two of the five languages with which Alexandra Traber '02 is familiar.

Traber is currently taking German tutorial in which she reads, writes, and discusses literature in German, her first language. She is also a German editor for Lingua Franca. Traber learned to speak English not at home where she grew up speaking German, but at a nursery school in New York. When she was about five, her family moved to Germany. "I attended a French school in Hamburg for first through fourth grades where all the classes were in French, but I spoke German with my friends and English at home."

By the time Traber moved back to New York for fifth grade, she was fluent in German, English, and French. She distinguishes German and English as her two "best" languages compared to French and Spanish, by stating, "I think you're really fluent in a language only when you can tell a joke in it." As for the languages she is "comfortable" with, Traber started studying Spanish at the Chapin School in New York in fifth grade before beginning to study Latin in the seventh and eighth grades.

Traber is not the only linguist in her family. Having lived both abroad and in the United States, her parents know many languages. Like both her parents, Traber is a frequent traveler, visiting Germany every summer since she was a young girl to see her friends. This summer she also lived and worked in Hamburg. "I had a wonderful time," she said. "I worked at a bank during the day learning all the relevant economic terms. After work, we would go out and I would have the opportunity to speak the kind of conversational German that I'm used to."

Although studying five languages comes naturally to Traber, she does occasionally get a bit confused when she has been talking or reading in one language and someone begins to talk to her in another language.

Traber, inspired by her mother, plans to pursue Spanish, French, and Italian in college and after. "Speaking two languages is just something I've grown up with and it's normal for me." It's doubtful that many students here at Deerfield are as articulate as Traber in so many languages, yet she doesn't see anything extraordinary about herself as she flips back to her five-hundred-page German novel.