Why My Spanish Will Never Be Good Enough
I started learning Spanish in college. Growing up in California, you can get a lot of the basics just by osmosis, but I needed the foreign language requirement. In 2015, I moved to Argentina, and I’ve lived in Spanish-speaking countries ever since.
After four years of near-total immersion, my Spanish is pretty good. On the Richter scale of languages — the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages — I’m a solid B2. The CEFR measures language learners on a spectrum from A1 to C2. Absolute beginners are A1. Speakers who can get a PhD entirely in a second language are C2.
Frankly, most native English speakers can’t even use English at a C2 level. For most everyday communication, we’re using B1-B2 at best. Asking people about their lives, how they’ve been, what they’re up to, what their plans for the weekend are, etc., is all intermediate-level language use.
That’s why the recommended reading level for newspapers (and online publications) is 8th grade. So, essentially, you only need an 8th-grade English level to read and comprehend 90% of what’s published. The same goes for Spanish.
You can take a test to get certified as C1 or C2, but why bother? At a certain point in the language acquisition process you speak better than you’ll ever need to. Unless you’re getting a demanding job or a graduate degree in that language, B2 is good enough. In use, B2 is defined as the ability to understand complex text and speech and produce clear text and speech on a wide range of subjects, In other words, with B2 you can basically live in a Spanish- or whatever-speaking country without too many problems.
Getting a certificate at any level costs money and, unless you’re trying to get a job or residency in a country that requires proof of a certain level of Spanish (which no Latin American countries do, to my knowledge), it proves nothing to anyone except yourself. If you need a certificate to know you speak Spanish, you probably don’t speak Spanish.
Which brings me to the real test of language proficiency: how well you interact with native speakers. I used to get complimented on my Spanish all the time. People would say, “Hablas muy bien español,” and I would tell them thanks and silently yip for joy.
Then something happened. After I had been living in Spanish-speaking countries for about 3 years, people stopped telling me how well I spoke the language. What was wrong? Was my Spanish, somehow, perversely, getting worse?
No.
People stopped telling me how good it was because it was so good they didn’t think to mention how it good it was.
Imagine it. If a non-native English speaker speaks English almost perfectly, do you compliment them on how well they speak? I wouldn’t, because it would be patronizing. Germans are the perfect example of this. They study English from kindergarten (totally German word, by the way) to college. As a result, most Germans can speak English better than a lot of native English speakers. Do you compliment a German who speaks English perfectly? No. You only compliment people who are obviously still learning the language as a way to encourage them to continue. Once they’ve mastered it, compliments become unnecessary and patronizing.
I haven’t heard “Hablas muy bien español” in a long time, and I take it as a sign of progress.
Of course, I still want to improve my Spanish. But there’s a question of diminishing returns. I can already communicate with 90% of Spanish speakers with zero problems. Sometimes accents and idiolects (a person’s unique way of speaking) give me trouble. Chileans and Argentinians, for example, are pretty tough to understand. On the plus side, it’s easy to tell if someone hails from the Southern Cone. If they’re speaking Spanish and I can only understand half of what they’re saying, they’re probably Chilean or Argentinian.
Accents are fun, both to listen to and to master as a non-native. It’s extremely gratifying to hear “Hablas como un mexicano,” which is the ultimate compliment for a language learner.
But there’s one thing I may never master, and which will always mark me as a foreigner in Spanish-speaking countries (as if my blonde hair and green eyes didn’t do the trick). It boils down to two words which are impossible to pronounce fluently if you weren’t born into the culture.
Gestural accent.
We all have a verbal accent, and lots of research has been done about how we speak based on where we come from and our native language. There are entire databases filled with speech samples for accent researchers. When it comes to gestural accents, psycholinguists aren’t even agreed that they exist.
For psycholinguists, it’s still a question “whether language learners may be fluent on the verbal level but still show signs of their other languages through gesture and other non-verbal behaviour.” (What Is Psycholinguistics, p. 136, de Bot and Kroll). The answer, in case any psycholinguists are reading, is yes — obviously.
Gestural accents are not something you need to worry about if you’re just getting started. But if you want to talk the talk and walk the walk in a foreign land you need to pay attention to them. Which brings me to a funny story about Argentina.
Argentinians talk a lot with their hands, thanks in part to the large numbers of Italian immigrants who arrived around the turn of the 20th century. In fact, many “Argentinian” hand gestures are exactly the same in movement and meaning as their Italian counterparts.
When I was in Buenos Aires for the first time, I asked a passerby for directions. He responded by putting the tips of fingers under his chin and moving them up and out, like he was scratching his chin beard. Being American, I was duly offended. In my gestural accent, this particular gesture means “fuck you.” I stormed off without saying a word. It was only later I learned that in the Argentinian gestural lexicon, this gesture means “I don’t know” or “I don’t care.”
And it goes way beyond specific hand gestures with coded meanings like in this example. Gestural accents encompass facial expressions, head movements, body language and micro-gestures that are unintelligible to the uninitiated. Have you ever seen someone and known they were a foreigner just by the way they moved? More crucially, have you ever spoken to someone with zero detectable verbal accent and still known they were a non-native speaker based on their gestural accent? Yeah.
Because gestural accents are largely subconsciously executed, they are very hard to learn and naturalize. And, once fixed, they are very hard to change. We don’t think about the way we move our hands, face and body while we’re speaking — we just do it. Trying to learn a new gestural accent would be painful to watch. If you’ve seen early Hitler, you know how cringeworthy it can be.
Hitler wasn’t trying to fit in a foreign setting, but he was trying to develop a new gestural accent. And, as we can see, it’s not pretty. And, to make matters worse, gestural accents are not taught in language classes or graded in the CEFR. Meaning you can speak a language fluently and still routinely make gestures that have wildly offensive (or just inappropriate) meanings without even knowing it.
My Spanish may be good enough to fool native speakers into thinking I’m one of them (at least for a little while), but as soon as I execute a gesture, I signal my foreign origins. My gestural accent is as thick as it gets, and that’s why my Spanish will never be good enough.