Thank You For Your Patience
I’m learning as fast as I can.
There are caverns in the back of my brain where I stored seventh-grade Spanish. I know that my teachers would laugh to learn that I was attempting shine a light in them and use it again, given how haphazardly I packed things away in the first place.
I’ve had a basic understanding of present tense Spanish verbs since then: -o, -as, -a, -amos, ais, -an, and so on. There are some vocabulary words that stuck — mesa (for table), excelente and bicicleta (cause how can you not get those right), mujer (for both woman and wife, so don’t try to talk sexism until you have more vocabulary) — but they have never seemed like enough to accomplish actual communication. Malik and I joke about the sentence “Los pinguinos beben agua.”, the sum total of what I took from listening to her work with DuoLingo Spanish!
But we have been working at it. The roots that my junior-high teachers planted didn’t completely rot, and working with a tutor and taking classes are starting to show progress. Spanish verb tenses are a nightmare, but I’ve managed to squeeze one form of past tense into my brain recently. I’ve been using my Spanish whenever I can; honestly, I can’t avoid it. There are few English speakers here, and I don’t want to be that asshole who just talks at people in English, bullying them into managing around their ignorance.
It’s not perfect and it’s not fast. Today, searching a store for the thing I wanted and not finding it, I walked through two aisles while I formulated my question for the clerk. Upon reflection, it came out something like “My wife I have you told you have haircuts?” I was aiming for, “My wife said that you have hair clippers?” and missed, but I was so proud of myself at the time. The kind woman parsed out my terrible, potentially insulting phrasing, and managed the time-honored “right where you were just standing” point with accompanying polite words, which luckily crosses language barriers (much like my “Thanks, I’m a dumb-ass” shoulder shrug).
The things that do cross language barriers are amazing. Today, walking away from an outdoor cafe, we watched a little girl — probably eight or nine — run up the street, get roughly a hundred feet ahead of her family, turn around, stick her fingers in her ears, and yell “Laa-la, la-Laaa-la, something unintelligible in Spanish!” Damn right, little girl, you are something-something better than them!
Maybe someday I’ll understand the language as well as an eight-year-old native speaker.
