Take That Spanish Class in School, Kids!

7 Lessons Spanish Taught Me in Europe

For 8 years in school, I dreaded Spanish class. Everyday you’d walk in and memorize genders for inanimate objects, calculate 2 forms of the same concept of “you,” and roll your r’s. (Still to no success.)

But living in Berlin and having traveled to Portugal and Italy last month, I wish nothing more than to have had paid better attention to preterit vs. imperfect. Knowing Spanish has helped me interact not only with Spanish-speakers, but also largely with people who speak Portuguese and Italian. (Not with French people though — they seriously use too many vowels per syllable.)

Here are 7 odes to Spanish, probably one of the most useful classes I ever took. This post is simply a way for me to appreciate the language and hopefully convince some middle-schooler who comes across this to yes indeed take Spanish in his/her free period.

To that middle-schooler: Here are 7 ways Spanish would help you when you travel…

1. When you want to eat the famous pasteis de belem in Portugal, but the line to do so is 100+ people long and you are already late for your flight, so you find a random employee and kindly ask if there’s any way you can purchase some pasteis faster, and they say it’s cute that you’re trying in Spanish and sneak into the back kitchen and give you 6 pasteis to-go. People are extra kind to you when you try to bridge the communication barrier.
2. When an Ecuadorian is sitting on the plane next to you, and you chat for 2 hours in Spanish about what it feels like to appear-different-from-the-identity-that-people-assume-you-to-be, and he invites you to his soccer game in Germany, where he has been identifying himself for over 21 years. People tell you a lot more about themselves in their own language.
3. When your Brazilian software developers want to teach you bad words and share NSFW songs with you. People are not always like Brazilians.
4. When you want to ask your Portuguese Uber driver what the best spots in town are to see the long-famed and illogical Eurovision contest, and after a long talk on the pros and cons of living in Portugal, he drops you off at the heart of Lisbon, where you watch the team you didn’t think had a single chance of winning rank highest on the leaderboard and the Austrian man with the soothing voice lose. People give you the local insights when you go through the language struggle of expressing your curiosity.
5. When your waxing lady in Germany speaks 6 languages, but English is not one of them, so you hope she speaks Spanish so she can sympathize with the pain you’re feeling, and jackpot — percentage of people who know Spanish in the world is quite high. People who speak more than one language are functionally helpful and reduce growing pains (pun intended) for others who try to communicate with them.
6. When you are learning wissen vs. kennen in German, and it clicks because the teacher says it’s saber vs. conocer in Spanish. People learn with frameworks, and knowing 1 framework means learning other ones faster.
7. When you are making fresh Italian coffee with your Airbnb host mom in Naples, and she generously gifts you a bottle of the finest white wine you’ve ever tasted, and she describes in detail the first date with her husband using words you recognize in Spanish (with sprinkles of English and loads of hand motions). And when you mention you want to learn German, that same host mom who happens to be fluent in German tells you that “what you can learn in 2 years in German class, you can learn in 2 months with a German boyfriend” and encourages you to find a German boyfriend. (WIP.) People jest the same no matter what language you’re speaking.

I’m really thankful to have learned Spanish growing up. I didn’t even mention the other times the language has made me feel connected to society, be it while dancing in the Bay Area and Barcelona or negotiating in Mexico or listening to Hindi songs that blatantly reference Shakira’s hips.

Of course Spanish is very different from other romance languages, and sometimes your comprehension will be to catch only but a few words in conversation. But when you are in a foreign land where people seem to be so different from you, those few words make all the difference in helping you find what’s similar. With a few words, you can see others more clearly for who they are, and in doing so, you learn about yourself.

Abrazos,

niki