So, how fast can one learn Spanish?

As I move down this continent and up in age groups I feel more pressure to learn Spanish as fast as possible. I’m beginning to find myself in more lofty conversations where the speed is faster and I trip on about 50% of the words that they’re saying (quite the jump from Special needs kids and toddlers). If I could read a transcript of the conversation I would probably understand more of it, but to just listen to the quick sounds, my brain has trouble keeping up with the foreign tongue.

Lima is fantastic. The air is warm, the ocean breeze is salty and the land is flat. Metropolitan activity excites the streets and the architecture reflects the developing economy. Southern California constantly pops into my head as I’m in a taxi driving along the wide stretches of highway and able to see for miles down the long stretches of avenues. The modern city lights tell me that it’s a few notches above Quito in development and I feel a few notches safer as well. My backpack is often worn on my back now.

Last night I spent some time on a rooftop with a mixture of Peruvians, ex-patriots (or, ex-pats: people who no longer live in their home country, all of which were English speakers) and lots of Pisco (a liquor made from grapes). English and Spanish competed for conversation the entire time. Since I was the worst player on the Spanish team, I wasn’t sure what to do. Self conscious of actually speaking my broken Spanish I just wanted to keep listening to the rapid conversation surrounding me, hoping that I would comprehend 75% of it eventually. I felt babied when a person would start speaking English with me, like when you can’t keep up with the person you’re running with so they run slower just for you. Kind in some ways, but no one likes to be pitied. Asking people to repeat their thoughts felt very dorky. In English it might sound like….

“Yeah, so I thought the movie was pretty cool but nothing to write home about.”

“Um… excuse me?”

“I thought the movie was cool but nothing special.”

“What? Sorry… more slowly, please?”

“Cool. The movie was cool. But not great.”

“Oh! Ok. Sure. Cool?”

“Good.”

“Oh! Ok. Nice.”

*Silence*

If you notice in that dialogue, it begins with two kinds of slang: “pretty cool” and “nothing to write home about”. If a fledgling English speaker didn’t know that “pretty” could be used for “very” or that “cool” could actually mean “good”… or, even worse, if the speaker couldn't pick up on the pronunciation of either, then the whole meaning has no chance of coming about. The listener wouldn’t even make it to the next idiom and would possibly only understand the word “home” and wonder, “Did you watch the movie in your home?” For the person speaking, who only made a casual comment about some half decent movie, all the repetition would feel kind of annoying leading to them avoiding the fledgling English speaker. This would reduce their interaction to smiles and facial gestures which only take you so far.

Hence, I smiled a lot last night and drank a few pisco sours with maracuya (passion fruit). Very tasty.

Prior to even arriving, I spent about 5 minutes misunderstanding my cab driver who was trying to tell me that I owed him a dollar because he had given me too much back in change. I remember my students telling me that cab drivers in NYC had been impossible to understand and now I fully comprehend why. It was the quick mumbling that really got me; I hadn’t had the same problem in Ecuador. The Peruvian accent is a bit faster and less clear. Unfortunately, I think Chile is going to be even worse.

Therefore, I am bolstering my Spanish skills as fast as I can. I was reading aloud to the maid here (yes, there is a MAID where I’m staying. Completely unheard of in the US, but not so out of the ordinary for a middle class family here) like a little kid to their mother.

La sala de espera de este doctor es muy grande porque trabaja solo.

The waiting room of this doctor is very big because he works alone.

Practice makes perfect… or makes more practice where language is concerned. Learning a language is never-ending which makes it forever fascinating but often frustrating. However, the feelings of stupidity and frustration haunt me, forcing me to absorb as much as possible as quickly as possible. I know that even at that it will still be slow-going, but I’m determined to press on!

When I got in the car after the rooftop I immediately spoke to the driver in Spanish and demanded that he play Spanish pop music only. Down the wide highway and passed the city lights we drove as I tried to kill all my English thoughts.

Hola, Espanol.

Language Logic

I know a man who has one friend.

Does he honestly just have one friend, or does he have a friend? Maybe he really does have one friend (which would make him one/a lonely man). The misuse of a, an, the or one are pandemic among students, resulting in unfortunate shifts in meaning. Even more, if we want to talk about the man (that we just mentioned) a second time, we must specify by using the to point him out.

Prepositions are also complicated, as well as using count and noncount nouns. For example:

I brush my hair, not my hairs. I always enjoy milk in my coffee, not a milk, along with some sugar, not many sugars. My house has a couch, not just couch, and even more, that man up there - he doesn’t have friend, he has a friend (and maybe just one friend).

I hadn’t known those terms before I began teaching. Little do you know, but I just used the past perfect tense (had + past participle) which consistently blows students’ minds. I had eaten breakfast this morning and then I had gone to the train. Now, in that sentence the tense is misused, for we can only use it before another action that happened in the past. It’s more complicated than you had thought (right?). Perhaps it was more complicated than you had thought before you realized it was complicated. But more likely you just hadn’t thought it was as complicated as it is.

Often I find mistakes such as:

She have a sex mouth.
I am boring in class.
You went to the movies, weren’t you?
After Boston I come back to my country.
I am living in the Boston.

Have you ever thought about how “everyone” is considered singular? Or, why can we say “I go home” but can’t say “I go school”? How do we automatically know the difference between “it could be”, “it might be”, “it should be” and “it has to be”? How do we immediately know that “I considered to go” is wrong and that “I considered going” correct?

We also know that “read” in the past is pronounced like the color, yet “read” in the present is pronounced like the plant. We know that we ARE 26 years old, we don’t HAVE 26 years old. And even more astonishing, we can state perfectly that we are interested in, excited for, and are thinking about. We can recollect that we went to bed at 11, we didn’t necessarily sleep at 11. Moreover, we know that we can break up with a boyfriend, break out in a rash, break in new shoes, and even take a break when we’re tired. We also know that we’re tired, not tiring.

Modals, gerunds, infinitives, and the future perfect were all terms that I had no knowledge of before teaching grammar. But now I can confidently spew out all sorts of grammatical terms that would make any English speaker zone out. It’s like learning the inner workings of the human body, a car, or even mother nature.

But the major problem is that language is only mostly consistent. Students desperately desire to label grammar rules with “always” or “never”, but there are always exceptions and always things that they will never be able to express from their own language.

“We just don’t say it that way in English.”

That is all I can offer them, for any language must be learned purely as is. Constant translation only leads to frustration, as one tries with all their might to punch that language into the way they are most comfortable thinking. This is why children are the language prodigies. Their minds are so eager to absorb everything around them, the wires in their brains still malleable.

Each language is so closely tied to its culture and the unique way that each society thinks about things. English pops with so many different kinds of words that capture the tiniest contours and shifts in meaning. I could say that I am happy, or I could say that I am elated, excited, content, well-pleased, joyful, merry, cheerful or satisfied. Each would connote a different meaning and require an appropriate tone or context. Why do we have so many slightly different words for things? And as people have often noted, why only one word for love?

But even more than this, some things, in some ways, can often be more appreciated when taken as is. Rather than try to translate people or events into our own language of how we view life, and what they ought to mean, it is more meaningful to open the mind to possibility. Not flippantly, but in a way that helps release a creeping anxiety about the direction of our lives and the illusion of control. Sometimes life works differently than our limited understanding of it.

Yet, it’s difficult to be open when you believe that if you could figure out the rules, then things would click. In some ways, the rationalizing just needs to be turned down a bit.

An end. One end.
The end.

English Fall Mashup

Some trees have the leaves
Some trees no have the leaves
The leaves they fall in the ground
The leaves was feel
and to falling
down.

Any trees; they have the leevs
to be for color
The colors was felt
upon floor
between rocks who was put
next to one and one.

All in all, the fall is there
and here
and anywere.

The fall is live after the winter.

I like the fall.