On learning Spanish, despacito
There is a line in one of my favorite books, To Kill A Mockingbird, that always resonated with me: “until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” Similarly, I never thought of myself as someone who loved to talk until I lost the ability to do it.
At 24, I moved to a foreign country with a language I had cursory experience with at best. By that, I mean that in college I took Spanish 101 & 102 and grew up in a Spanish speaking state. And by that, I mean I knew most of the bad words and how to order at restaurants, given the menu wasn’t too diverse. So at 24, I willingly became deaf and mute.
Granted, I should have heeded the warnings of the Peace Corps to study more in anticipation of my arrival. But I still don’t know how prepared I would have been for Dominican Spanish, practically a language in and of itself. Accents and peculiarities aside, Spanish is a language spanning continents and customs, varying so much between each country and even region of the same. As someone who grew up hearing mostly Mexican Spanish, I still fight the urge to cringe whenever I use the word coger in a polite sentence. In Peace Corps Spanish training, I remember gaping when my Dominican teacher told me she taught her kids to say “carajo” in place of what she called the “really bad” swear words.
And even if I am a stranger to Dominican Spanish, I am not a stranger to language learning — my degree was in education, and one of my specialties in teaching English language learners. I’ve taught children and adults alike, studied the science behind it, understood it all intellectually. There’s a certain irony in becoming the student myself, in coming to know the process viscerally. Whenever I catch myself enthusiastically nodding to a sentence I understood none of, desperately trying to not feel like an idiot for once, in my head I apologize to every student I’ve ever scolded for not letting me know when they didn’t understand something I said.
It should go without saying that I find myself reflecting on what I know about language learning now more often than ever. There’s an old hypothesis in linguistics that posits that the way we see the world is heavily influenced by the mechanics of the particular language we speak. Logically, it follows that the way we view others is influenced by their language. There’s a reason why national newscasters in the United States all speak in the same flat American accent, all traces of regionalism gone. It’s the reason you don’t speak to your boss the way you do your best friend, the reason why we sometimes subconsciously write off people with accents or vocabulary we deem substandard.
What I’m getting at is people here think I’m very stupid. They assure me often that that isn’t the case, they they think I’m very intelligent, while five minutes later they feel the need to explain to me how to wash my hands. Part of me can’t blame them — who would trust a so-called university educated adult with the vocabulary of a 7 year old to get anything done? How do you take someone seriously when they don’t know the word for seriously? I try to remember this, and to not take it personally that my 1 year old niece and I are often spoken to in the same exact command form.
Language, when you start to pick it apart, reveals itself to be complicated beyond the telling of it: not just new verbs but new ways of using them, not just new adjectives but new implications with them, not just new verb tenses but a whole new system of categorizing time. When learning a new language, the brain can’t just directly translate. It literally creates new pathways, new meanings, new structures to comprehend a new way of viewing the world. At times I can almost feel myself straining against this new world, like seeing objects in the dark that you can just almost make out the shape of.
All of this brain construction, it turns out, is exhausting. If you have never done it, it is impossible to explain the experience of learning a new language, let alone learning it while living and working in that language’s environment. I can easily sleep 10 hours a night and take a nap the next day. Even with the Spanish I am sure of, my grasp on it is tenuous. If it’s before coffee, after too much coffee, before 9 AM, after 9 PM — Spanish isn’t going to happen. Sometimes even English won’t. PCVs joke about forgetting English a lot, but it’s a real phenomenon. I can’t describe how strange it feels to be on the phone with my mother, in the middle of a sentence, and completely forget the word “washing machine.” I think and I think and I stare directly at the thing and all that comes to mind is lavadora. How strange it is, to not be able to talk to the woman who taught me how; to forget the words she gave me in the process of pairing them with new ones.
It is not just the loss of words, but the loss of personality, too. I never realized how entwined the two were. I have rarely, if ever, been deemed a shy or meek person, but in Spanish, I am. In Spanish, I have verguenza, because for the first time in my memory I do not have the words to express myself. For the first time, I cannot wield words the way a painter would a brush, to color ideas and opinions with precision, with flair. Out of all the politely worded comments made on all of my report cards growing up, I don’t think “too quiet” was ever one of them. I was a bookworm of a child with a fondness for words bigger than I was. As an adult I am a motormouth, a walking Gilmore Girls episode: I have to consciously monitor how much I dominate conversations in groups. More than once I have found myself suddenly hearing my own voice talking while my brain was thinking of something else entirely, my tongue its own separate organ, operating of its own volition.
So there is something to be said for this language that has finally made me slow down, to get back to basics, for allowing my brain to catch up to my mouth for once. Even beyond coming up with simple sentences, Spanish forces me to cut the bullshit. One of my university mentors used to tell me to never use a $10 dollar word when a $1 word will do — here, I find myself scrounging hard-earned pesos for each palabra. For all the times I have been chomping at the bit waiting for someone to finish a winding thought in English, in Spanish, I sometimes make people wait so long for an intelligible thought that they start suggesting words halfway through, trying to put me out of my misery. In Spanish, I have to digest words, to really chew them up and let them sit until they simmer before I can concentrate on crafting a response. And what luck it is, really, that I am learning this language in the campo, where we have all the time in the world on all of the porches in town, where no one is in any particular rush, where a cup of coffee is always being strained somewhere. Although people here talk fast, we live slow.
And there is an unspoken arrogance, I think, in my assuming the process would be quicker. As though 5 months after landing I would be speaking at the level it took me two decades and a college education to get to in English. My neighbors remind me that it is un proceso, that paso a paso I will get there. Sometimes I have to deliberately take stock of how much ground I have already covered, to make lists of things I am able to do now that I couldn’t last month, last week. I try not to get jealous when my friends who have spoken Spanish for years are able to make better small talk than I am with my own host family.
All of this frustration, and yet: sometimes, I edit my own emails to find myself using Spanish grammar that I didn’t know I knew with English words. In conversation with friends and family back home, I find myself reaching for translations of words that don’t exist but are the only way I can describe something. I hear songs that I understand but can’t quite explain in my mother tongue, beautiful lyrics that turn ugly in the other one, words that don’t quite sing the same. How there are jokes that only make me laugh in Spanish, phrases that never feel quite right now in English. I hear myself match genders and order words in a way that confused me a month ago, hear myself drop my Ss and slur my Ds as I settle into a brand new accent; things falling into place slowly, so slowly.
I think to myself: what a wonderful world, and here I am standing on the edge of it, watching a whole new one open up. I think to myself: what a wonderful world, and how did I go this long knowing only one piece of it? How many years did I spend only being able to look at it one way? All of the movies I couldn’t watch, the books I couldn’t read, the stories I couldn’t hear. To think I was content with translations of Neruda, and thought I understood his poetry, without being able to hear the music of it in its original Spanish. When I was younger, I would ask Spanish speaking friends to translate a word or a sentence, and was so confused when they said they couldn’t. And now, with a different brush in my hand, painting with different colors, despacito, I think I’m starting to understand.
