A Japanese woman formed a circle with her index finger and thumb, raising her remaining digits in a spread formation. She was explaining to another student, a Colombian man, how to gesture that "Everything is OK." Though she performed the hand movement with no problems, she struggled to elucidate the instructions in English.

The task was made more difficult because the man was blindfolded with a thick scarf, wrapped around his head by the teacher.

"See. It's easy to do, but hard to describe," the teacher, Richard Farigua, said in a bass-heavy tone. He used the blindfold to force his class of 14 recent immigrants to be as explicit as they could be when speaking English.

The class shouted advice to the other students; their Spanish, Turkish and Korean accents coloring their English. The cacophany of international voices is a familiar sound at the New York Language Center, located in Woodside, Queens.

Noise in Queens is usually associated with the rumbling, elevated No. 7 train, blaring car horns and zooming airplanes arriving and departing from the borough's two airports. But the 2 million residents, 46.1 percent of whom were born outside the United States, according to the 2000 Census, speak 138 languages, representing almost every part of the globe. Thus, Queens is the nation's most ethnically diverse county and home to a non-stop linguistic circus.

Of the 1,120,455 people whom the census recorded as having English as a second language, 43.3 percent use Spanish. The rest is composed of other Indo-European languages, Asian and Pacific Island, African, Arabic and Hebrew.

The Woodside center is one of five locations throughout New York City. For over 15 years they have been teaching classes to the waves of immigrants that enter this city each day. Classes are offered every day of the week, ranging in difficulty from basic to conversational English. For 50 hours of instruction, the cost is $150.

Many newcomers to the United States believe it is crucial to speak and understand English for educational and economic advancement. Yet the challenges of learning English in a city where so many other languages are used often go unnoticed by those born and raised to speak only English.

"It's difficult in the beginning," Mariuxi Jaramillo, a native of Ecuador, said about communicating in New York City. "So many people don't speak the language." In addition to taking classes, Jaramillo, 26, said she learns English by watching television and conversing with friends.

Fellow Ecuadorian, Angel Zumba, who came to the United States knowing only Spanish, pratices with his sister-in-law, who only knows how to speak English. Zumba, 24, said, "If I make mistakes, she corrects me. And now she knows Spanish because I teach her."

Like Jaramillo, he watches television for extra instruction. "I put on the Bill Cosby Show, he said. "Their English is clear. I can understand that."

Farigua, a teacher at the center for four years, said his effectiveness stems from his cheerful classroom demeanor and booming, radio-announcer voice, which keeps students, "motivated and awake."

Farigua, who also taught English in Turkey and Colombia, said he tries to make the atmosphere as comfortable as possible. For example, with the blindfold exercise, he asked students to describe gestures particular to their native countries. "I do this in order to get them to relate language to their own lives."

A colleague of Farigua's, Scott Helfgotti, said, "In New York, not everybody speaks the same English," referring to the numerous variations used by the city's foreign-born population, as well as the distinct dialects often heard in Brooklyn and the Bronx by New York natives.

"I encourage students to make American friends, go to museums, talk about baseball," Helfgotti, who has taught English for 11 years, said. "That's how I try to get them assimilated to New York."

The two teachers disagreed on the difficulty of learning English in a linguistically diverse environment. Helfgotti said that newcomers do not always have the incentive to learn English because they can "close themselves off from English-speaking people by living in ethnic enclaves," such as Woodside and Jackson Heights in Queens.

Farigua's view was that "With so many languages, the only way to communicate is with the English language."

Teacher Richard Farigua blindfolds a student from Taiwan.

Photo: Sean Alfano

Teenage immigrants in Queens face another set of obstacles when learning English."The English you learn in the streets is different from what you learn in school," said Max Chan, a 17-year-old born in China, now living in Jackson Heights, Queens. Chan's friend, David Mercado, from Bolivia, agreed with this assessment.

Referring to U.S.-born teenagers he knows, Mercado said, "They called me 'Yo' or 'Dude,' but name is David." Shrugging his shoulders he said, "I didn't get it."

Eventually Mercado, also 17, understood the street slang and further bolstered his English skills through his delivery job with The New York Times. "If it's interesting, I read it," Mercado said of the articles.

Chan saw English as important to his livelihood in New York City, but seemed resigned to the idea that it was a language he would never master.

Smoothing his pensive-looking face with his hand, Chan concluded that, "I will never learn the whole English vocabulary. It will always be my second language."

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