Spanish, Anyone?
“Living in another language means growing another self.”
— Alastair Reed
A few of the Spanish grammar books we brought with us to Mexico.
A not-insignificant consequence of our decision, seven years ago, to explore the idea of living in Latin America was that we would need to learn some Spanish. I had no intention of being a gated community ex-pat, insulated from everyday life in the place I had chosen to be. Nor did I hold in high regard the foreigners we had met on our travels who held that it is up to the locals to learn English instead. So before we undertook Phase 1 of our plan (Remember Phase 1—a month in Ecuador?) we bought some books and started teaching ourselves Spanish.
Martha had taken a year of Spanish in college, and throughout her adult life made several game attempts to revisit it. In my case it was basically starting from scratch. From fifth grade on, my mother had committed us to studying French, convinced as she was that it was the International Language of Culture—perhaps inspired by her own travels in post-war Europe, or perhaps by Jackie Kennedy’s elegant, effortless fluency. The culmination of my 7 years of school French was to spend 2 weeks in France during the summer of my 17th year—during which time I took pains to display my erudition on the grand themes of Balzac, Sartre and Camus. After that trip I barely ever spoke it again.
Some 40 years later, having briefly flirted with Japanese while living in Hawaii, I set out to learn a new language. Through books, audio, and Skype I applied myself to the basics of Spanish for the better part of a year. After all that—and after three weeks of intensive classes in Cuenca, I was pleased to find myself able to conduct a perfectly intelligent conversation in Spanish, as long as it was with a six-year-old. My high opinion of my own abilities quickly began to fade after our return to the U.S., when everything I had learned began to disappear from my brain, slipping through my fingers like water from a cupped hand. It seemed that in order to hold my ground in a new language I actually had to use it regularly, ideally in the presence of native speakers.
During our initial 2-week visit to Oaxaca we again devoted ourselves to Spanish classes, and I was heartened to discover that at least some of what I had thought forgotten was actually still there, hidden away deep within my cranial folds, needing only some stern coaxing to emerge once again from the shadows. This encouraged me to think that once we embarked upon Phase 2 of our plan—our “year abroad”—constant daily exposure would cement everything I had learned into a firm foundation on which to erect a splendid edifice of fluency and nuance.
Starting almost immediately upon our arrival in Oaxaca in late June of last year, we returned to group classes at the Oaxaca International Language School, where we had studied during our earlier trip.
Four hours a day, five days a week—we continued at this blistering pace for a month. True, we were covering the same things I had studied at least 5 times before, but I didn’t mind—I could feel the concrete hardening in the subfloor of my Spanish casita. Or so I thought.
Feeling held back by the group-class format at Oaxaca International, I moved to a different school—Spanish Immersion—where the focus is on one-on-one instruction, and where I took classes every day for nearly 3 months. I was moving not only into more esoteric realms of grammar (e.g., the future perfect conjectural), but also into more conversational colloquialisms: the kinds of expressions I was hearing every day—though not understanding—from the people around me.
Academic linguists talk a lot about the process of language acquisition, as distinct from language learning. In my case, it soon became apparent that while I was learning a great deal about Spanish, I was not acquiring it—in that I was practically unable to apply any of that knowledge in a meaningful way to my daily encounters. There were only so many details that my brain could hold at one time; the more instruction my teachers poured down my throat, like a fatted French goose, the less I was able to actually remember or use any of it. I had hit a wall.
As I mentioned in an earlier post (see Gut Check), I had decided to switch teachers again after a two-week hiatus during Día de Los Muertos. This new initiative was preempted in short order by the arrival of the Christmas holiday—and with it, our children—followed by a seemingly endless stream of visitors (thanks for coming, everyone!). At that point we were smack in the middle of the high tourist season (see The High Season), and were discouraged to find that “our” school could no longer fit us into their weekly schedule—so many other newly-arrived foreigners were clamoring for all-day, every-day classes that they had no slots left for part-time students like Martha and me. Fine, I said—now we’ll see what’s really in my toolbox after 6 months of hard work.
Of all the languages I could have chosen to learn at my age, I can’t think of a better choice than Spanish. For one thing, the United States is currently the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world by population (the signage at my Home Depot in Seattle is bilingual). And while French may lay claim to European cultural dominance in recent centuries, it is a fact that Cervantes’s Don Quixote—the absurdist account of one of fiction’s most celebrated blunderers, and the source of the term “quixotic”—was a founding work of modern Western literature and is one of the most translated books in history.
Over my years of study, I have fallen in love with the Spanish language. I love its sounds, its cadences, its startlingly consistent rules of pronunciation and relative paucity of irregular verbs—at least as compared to English. I also love the way that words are combined to create other words in a reasonably predictable manner. For example, an empanada is something that was encased in bread, or pan; hence: em + pan + ada. And unlike French, which uses a variety of diacritical marks, Spanish has but one: the accent which indicates on which syllable the emphasis should fall: “Speak louder here.” Thanks, Spanish!
Obscure linguistic disclaimer: the diacritical “~” is also used in Spanish with “n” to indicate a “ny” sound, as in “baños”—but “ñ” is actually considered to be a separate letter from “n” in the Spanish alphabet.
Learning local colloquialisms the fun way: raisin is pasa, pumpkin is calabasa. Thus, “¿Qué te pasa, calabasa?” means “What’s up, pumpkin?” (Not a phrase I use very often.)
This is not to say that I don’t have some major peeves with the language. There are more than a few things I would gladly change to make Spanish an even better language than it already is:
Gender. The Romance languages are plagued with this feature, so it’s hats-off to Latin for saddling us with this vestigial annoyance. (As my high school French teacher used to say, Brigitte Bardot may be feminine, but her orange juice—son jus d’orange—is still masculine.) By contrast, English—despite being a Frankenstein’s monster accreted from bits and pieces of languages from across Europe and beyond—has demonstrated once and for all the utter non-necessity of assigning gender to non-personal nouns. Spanish makes a token effort to rein in this nonsense by at least having many masculine nouns end in “o” and feminine ones in “a”—but of course there are frustrating exceptions such as el día, el systema, el clima, etc. On top of that, adjectives must agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify. My point here is that it’s hard enough to remember that “eggplant” is berenjena; but I must also remember that, because it is feminine, a purple eggplant must be una berenjena morada and not un berenjena morado.
Preterite vs. Imperfect. We use verb tenses to describe when things happen along the timeline of present, past, and future; otherwise, as physicists are fond of saying, everything would happen at once. Long ago, someone in Spain decided that having a single, simple past-tense verb form was not enough; Spanish must have two. The Preterite, or simple past, is identical to our past tense, and refers to a specific event in time; for example, I went becomes Yo fui. The Imperfect deals more with habitual occurrences, or actions that take place over time. “When I was young I walked to school” is translated using the imperfect form caminaba rather than the preterite form caminé. In effect, the preterite is a snapshot; the imperfect is a video. Accordingly, when talking about the past one must, each time before speaking, (1) first assess what kind of story you’re telling; (2) try to decide which verb tense is more appropriate; and (3) dive deep inside your Mind Palace for the appropriate conjugation of the verb in question. More mental steps mean more opportunities for egregious blunders—which I still do constantly when trying to sort out these tenses.
To Be, or Not To Be. In another strange twist of linguistic evolution, sometime in the dim recesses of history Spanish sprouted a second form of the verb “to be.” It’s a bit like seeing simultaneously through two sets of eyes, because one form—Ser—refers to things that are permanent, immutable characteristics, while the other—Estar—is about transient attributes and location. I am from the United States: Soy de los Estados Unidos; but I am in Oaxaca for a year: Estoy en Oaxaca por un año. Maddeningly, sometimes an adjective will change its meaning depending on whether Ser or Estar is being used: I am clever (Soy listo), but I am also ready (Estoy listo). Again, in English we have managed to get along quite well without these distinctions, but my main source of irritation is that after seven years I still haven’t mastered this.
Subjunctive. The subjunctive mood is enormously more important in Spanish than in English, and is used for expressing ideas that are hypothetical or conjectural, or that deal with emotion. (This is a VAST oversimplification; entire chapters in Spanish grammars are devoted to the different uses of the subjunctive.) Suffice to say that for every Spanish verb there are two completely different sets of conjugations: one in the everyday, Indicative mood (something happens to someone), and the other in the Subjunctive (something may happen sometime to someone). I have beaten my brains out for years trying to figure out when it is appropriate—nay, necessary—to use the subjunctive, yet it continues to elude me.
False Cognates. Europe’s languages, like its different ethnic groups, have exchanged a lot of DNA over the millennia, thanks to marauding tribes and the Roman Empire. One result of this is that you constantly run into words in Spanish that look very similar to a word in English, such as “organization” and “organización.” Many of these so-called cognates have nearly identical meanings, and as a newcomer to a language they are like life-rings thrown to a drowning swimmer. The problem is that sometimes, while they may look the same, they can have very different meanings. For example, you would think that “excited” and “excitado” mean exactly the same thing. But no: here in Mexico, telling someone that you are excitado is to reveal that you are sexually aroused—which may occasionally be true, but not something you would necessarily share with a casual acquaintance (or your female teacher). Similarly, a woman who is embarazada isn’t “embarrassed”—unless it is embarrassing to be pregnant.
I could go on at length, and indeed I already have. Every language has its peculiarities, but learning about them reveals important things about the mindset of its speakers. To learn a language is to acquire a new world-view, an empathic understanding of how our global roommates see things differently from us—a critical skill if we are to coexist and survive on this planet.
Four months after putting my Spanish lessons on hold, I find that despite some erosion of my skills, the basic tools—hammer, saw, screwdriver, wrench—are all still there in my toolbox. My vocabulary—nuts, bolts, screws, nails—has expanded considerably by virtue of being continually exposed to new words and phrases. I am able to spontaneously build the basic furniture of conversation—table, chair, bench, bookshelf—without too much effort (although the product resembles something made in high school Wood Shop class). While I also possess a lot of the more sophisticated tools—drill press, lathe, router, table saw—they lie largely unused in grammars and notebooks collected over the years, now piled up around our apartment. True conversational fluency continues to elude me, and to speak without first having to translate the intended sentence in my head remains a distant dream.
Everywhere you go in Mexico, opportunities abound to practice your reading and listening skills. And the Internet is teeming with helpful, if occasionally dangerous, suggestions for how to blend right in with the locals!
I no longer hesitate to initiate conversations in Spanish anywhere, at any time, with anyone, but the outcomes of those conversations can be wildly different depending upon the person with whom I’m speaking. I can have a terrific two-hour chat with one of my intercambio* buddies, only to step into a cab and have no clue what the driver just said to me. I find myself eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations just to see what I can pick up—sometimes a word or two, sometimes an expression that I learned from a friend—¡Qué chido!—and, every so often, an entire sentence. These daily miracles—and face-plant failures—are part and parcel of living in a non-English-speaking country, and I have learned to accept them both with a degree of equanimity.
With less than two months remaining in our stay, I am inclined to be pessimistic about my prospects for making much more progress in Spanish—at least this time around. I have lost the fire in my belly to attend daily classes and diligently apply myself to homework. I occasionally meet with a Spanish tutor with whom I converse, in fairly basic terms, about art, politics and music, and I may or may not opt to take a few refresher classes during my remaining time in some of the subjects from last summer that are now long forgotten.
My intercambiamigos, as I call them, are a far different story—for these are people who have become my friends, and I eagerly look forward to sharing an hour or two with them every so often in a café or park. They are friendly, helpful and forgiving, and they seem to genuinely care about this gringo viejo who wants to know everything they can tell him about their home, culture and customs. To Javier, Oscar, Maury, Yessenia, Lucia and Eunice: ¡Muchísimas gracias! It’s been a more-than-fair exchange.
While I’m at it, I am grateful beyond words to all my skilled and patient teachers from over the years: Luz, Teresa, Ileana, Karen, Juan, Edgar, Isabel, Estefanía, Jacob and Abram. Each brought me a little (or a lot) further along and gave me a new window through which to view the language I have chosen—perhaps a bit quixotically—to learn in later life.
A calaverita, or whimsical poem, composed for me by my intercambio friend Javier on the occasion of Día de los Muertos. It describes how Lady Death, entering the cafe where Javier and I usually meet, at first does not know me because I am so white. But when I unwittingly engage with her in friendly conversation, she recognizes me and leads me off to my doom: The Final Intercambio. ¡Híjole!
* An intercambio (exchange) refers in this case to a conversation between two or more people with different language backgrounds. The primary purpose of the meeting is to help each one learn the other’s language; but it also helps to foster intercultural understanding and international amity.
