As if reaching the third year of college at age 18 wasn't enough, Jordan B. Eason has also written and published a book, "Spanish Made As Easy As 1-2-3!"
      Eason has lived in Savannah all his life, but his parents, Brenda Pearsall Eason and Michael Eason, were originally from Statesboro. Eason also has relatives around Statesboro, such as his cousin Gary Pearsall and great-aunt Agnes Pearsall.
       Now a junior in the nursing program at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Eason completed his first year of college at AASU while jointly enrolled as a senior at Savannah's Jenkins High School. He also skipped the 11th grade.
     An obviously motivated young man, Eason said he started teaching himself Spanish as a second language at the age of 9 after receiving encouragement in that direction from his father. However, nobody in his family was fluent in Spanish.
      "I began to teach myself Spanish and worked on that project for probably about two and a half years, and then I actually started finding people to speak the language with and develop friendships," Eason said.
      He did take formal Spanish classes in middle and high school, but found that he had already progressed beyond what was being taught.
      "Needless to say, I still got something from it, but I would credit most of it to self-teaching and then practicing in the real world," Eason added.
      Seeing some strengths and weaknesses in the self-study guides he had used as a pre-teen, Eason decided as a teenager to write his own Spanish self-study book for beginners.
      "Granted, I was 9, 10, 11 and 12, but looking back on it ... I kind of had a little bit of a difficulty at that particular time understanding some of the complexities of the rules about grammar, so that's why in my particular book I make everything as simple as eating a pie," he said. "All of these grammar things are thoroughly explained."
      Two special features of Spanish Made As Easy As 1-2-3 are its second chapter, entitled "You Already Know a Lot of Spanish," and the way that all verbs introduced are reviewed periodically with simplified conjugation tables.
      With that second chapter, readers learn to form "literally thousands of words by capitalizing on the similarities between Spanish and English," Eason said.
      The 140-page book was released in August by CreateSpace, an on-demand, self-publishing arm of Amazon.com. The book is available not just through Amazon, where a description and reviews can be viewed, but also through Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and 17 other retailers, Eason said.
      The on-demand aspect of CreateSpace means that books are printed when individual orders are placed, but bookstores can also order multiple copies for their shelves.
      Eason also has a website just for the book: www.spanishmadeeasyas123.com.
      The book has no direct connection to Eason's college studies. He is on track to graduate from AASU with a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing two months after his 20th birthday and plans to go on for a master's degree to become a nurse practitioner.
     He does hope to use his Spanish skills by working as a nurse practitioner in an area where many of his patients will be Spanish speakers, he said.
      Eason hopes his accomplishments will inspire other young people. He tried several other publishers before finding a route to publication, and says that avoiding discouragement is key.
      "Whether or not they would like to write or anything else, I would just like to tell other young people to pursue whatever it is that they want to do and not just give up if after the first couple of times they don't get it," he said. "It's something that they've got to keep going after constantly and put everything they have into it."
      He is planning a second book, a novel with a teenage protagonist.