For Mayor, A+ in Spanish Is Still on the Horizonte

Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg

BALTIMORE â€" Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s shaky, determined and unembarrassed stabs at the Spanish language have earned him the admiration of the city’s nonnative speakers and the mocking of a Twitter parody account, @ElBloombito.

But it turns out the mayor’s difficulties with foreign languages did not start behind a lectern at City Hall, where he insists on summarizing his public remarks in uneven, if well-intentioned Spanish.

They began, he said in an interview here at Johns Hopins University, at Medford High School in Massachusetts, when he took a course in French. “My first D in high school,” Mr. Bloomberg admitted during a discussion of his latest donation to the school, $350 million.

His infelicity with languages other than English did not cost him a spot at Johns Hopkins, where he was a member of the class of 1964. But it did follow him into his chosen major at the university â€" physics.

Hopkins required majors in the subject to take German classes. “After three days in German, I decided I was never going to learn German,” Mr. Bloomberg recalled. “And in those days, remember, 1960, it wasn’t that long - much after the period when everybody came from Germany in physics. Everything was written in German.”

So he became an engineer, a subject that no doubt assisted his creation! of a small computer terminal now known, universally and quite profitably, as the Bloomberg“.

The experience, though, has made him dead-set on mastering Spanish â€" through tutoring, practice and well-publicized trial and error.

The D in high school French, he said, “may tell you why I’m working so hard on Spanish. But I am determined. I will not die until I can speak Spanish like a quasi-native.”

He added, “I get better all the time.”