Learning Spanish warrants an entire post and then some. I'm striving for conversational fluency to better connect to the cultures and people (an added bonus is not getting stranded at bus stations). I studied Spanish in school for four years, but it's disheartening how little has stuck. To be fair, the countless hours of cassette-tape lessons and fill-in-the-blank homework embedded a solid foundation of vocabulary and grammar in my long-term memory. Half my queries in Google Translate are words or phrases I've learned before. But no classroom would ever have prepared me for immersion. Here's why:
1. Different words refer to the same thing
The title of this post is an example of this problem. In what might come as a shock, I usually don't understand what someone is saying in Spanish the first time around. Based on classroom Spanish, if I wanted to reply with "what?", that translates to "que" in Spanish. But folks down here say "como", which translates literally to "how". In context, it means "come again?".
Some other words that tripped me up:
- Car can be "coche" or "carro"
- Avocado can be "aguacate" or "palta"
- Here can be "acá" or "aquí" (learning this legitimately doubled my comprehension)
It's not just individual words. In the Rio de la Plata region, consisting of Argentina and Uruguay, there's a pronoun and set of verb conjugations replacing the second person "you" form. Instead of "tu", folks use "vos". At the beginning in Argentina, I couldn't even understand the most basic questions.
2. Accents
It's discouraging to cross a border and feel like you're listening to a different language. In the Rio de la Plata region, in addition to the heavy Italian influence, there's another major difference in the accent that threw me for a loop. Folks pronounce "ll" and "y" as "sh". For example, the word "calle" would be pronounced "ca-shey" instead of "ca-ye". This was another 'double your comprehension' lesson. Needless to say, I was quite proud when I finally used the correct pronunciation without hesitation in casual conversation!
Managing all these accents got me thinking about how the Mexican Spanish accent I'm used to hearing in the US has likely impaired my ability to understand the accents down here. I find myself listening for words pronounced in a certain way, and even the slightest difference can end up sounding like gibberish as a result.
3. People talk fast
I have a theory. Each percentage decrease in talking speed results in the equivalent increase in my comprehension. In other words, if people talked at half speed, I would understand twice as much of the conversation. It doesn't help that the locals have a habit of slicing off s's when talking fast (e.g. "dos" becomes "doh"). It's unreasonable to ask everybody to slow down, but my struggles have made me more self-aware about speaking in English. These days, I try to talk a bit slower to non-native English speakers.
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Thankfully, not all is lost. I've adopted these strategies to sound less like a gringo:
- language exchange meetups
- Google translate every unrecognizable word
- start conversations in Spanish (50% of these conversations devolve into Spanglish, but people appreciate the effort)
- read Spanish before English (e.g. menus, museums)
- watching YouTube videos, TV, and movies in Spanish
- podcasts
If anyone has advice, I'd love to hear it. Before arriving in South America, I watched a lot of 'Top 20 Spanish adjectives to know' videos and finished all the lessons in Duolingo (twice). In retrospect, I was being lazy. Memorizing vocabulary is easy; making conversation is hard. The road to fluency is long... filled with awkward silence, misunderstandings, and wild gesturing. Sometimes, I forget how to say something in English but I actually know it in Spanish. Am I getting better at Spanish or just worse at English?!