Exsplañatiolns (Español Explanations)

Haha remember that time when I was going to start writing a blog and posting it online at consistent weekly intervals, and you idiots believed me?

I’m joking. Some of my facebook friends really are idiots, but no-one is stupid enough to believe that I, the older version of the kid who routinely got up at 8:20 on schooldays in order to catch a bus scheduled to leave at 8:22, will ever develop the necessary organisational skills to actually stick to my word. I favour caprice over consistency, and this blog is fated to spend weeks ignored only for me to suddenly remember it exists, plough in a couple of decent posts, and then forget all about it again because I’m distracted by some lovely Peruvian scenery. Or, you know, work.

Me not doing work

In fact, it’s highly probable that I will presently be ignoring this blog for quite a long time, because very soon the semester will draw to a close and I will be going off travelling to such places as Bolivia and Colombia, and staying in the sorts of establishments where having a great deal of electronic equipment lying around isn’t always the best idea. It’s a case of either I leave my laptop here in Lima, or else one day my internet presence will mysteriously disappear and your future blog updates will come from a man called Rodrigo who lives in Cartagena, be written entirely in Spanish, and all be adverts for a nice laptop he recently acquired and maybe some of my organs.

To be honest that’s probably preferable for some of you; the sizeable portion of Colombia that the UK government advises against visiting suggests that organised crime is, as its name suggests, very well-organised, and I’m sure Rodrigo and his ladrones would do a much better job of running this blog than I do.

Having just offered the services of my blog to a Colombian cartel so it can flog stolen goods, I realise it must be time to get to the point (after all, what would the Global Opportunities Centre say?). Seeing as my time here in un pais hispanohablante is drawing to a close, I thought I’d do a reflective piece on how my Spanish-speaking ability has improved during my time here. It’s the sort of thing the GOC would have loved, and hopefully useful for anyone interested in learning languages.

My aim before coming here was, very loosely, “to be better at Spanish”. If pressed, I might have elaborated to “better at speaking Spanish” “better at writing Spanish” and “better at understanding Spanish”. Of course this is a stupid aim, for two reasons. First of all, as anyone who has ever had a GCSE English class knows, the words “good” and “better” are to be avoided at all costs because they are incredibly vague. Second of all, as anyone who has ever taken a GCSE Spanish class knows, the Spanish language is incredibly complicated.

I may have wanted to improve the part of my brain labelled “Spanish”, but that section has a lot of very niche subcategories. Such as “Object Pronouns”, “The Subjunctive” and “Vocabulary Useful When Discussing Cheese” (yes, some are more niche than others, but no less important). And in order to boost the whole Spanish category, I had to keep on top of all these subcategories. In a real life situation, a flawless execution of the pluperfect conditional meant nothing if I then didn’t know the word for ‘grater’. Overall I have undoubtedly improved; in some ways I am probably not as much better as I’d hoped. In some ways I am definitely worse (conjugations of vosotros being the most obvious example, but I blame Latin America for not using it). But it’s compartmentalising and then working on the individual components of the language that really leads to improvement.

Of course the theory is only half of it. I had to learn how to apply Spanish to the real world as well. When I first arrived in Peru I would only speak if I was confident I knew every word in the sentence I was going to say, from start to finish. I think this is something most people new to a language do. While it stopped me looking like an idiot so much, it had a lot of negative implications. First of all, it was very difficult to enter into a fast-paced conversation if I had to spend an extra few seconds planning out what I was going to say before saying it – usually someone else had already started talking. Also, my conversational range was greatly restricted by my vocabulary. I seemed weirdly interested in knowing what pets people had, or how many brothers and sisters, or their age. And most of the stuff I actually wanted to say, I didn’t, because I didn’t have the necessary words to do so. Not talking, and being really boring when you do talk, are ineffective ways of making friends. If you’re going to try and learn a language, the safe way is not the best way to do it.

For me, the best way was a mixture of overconfidence and laziness. So every time I started a sentence I would just assume I knew the way through. Let’s say I wanted to say the sentence “I was walking the dog in the street.” With my nervous, insecure approach to speaking, the conversation I would hold in my head looked like this:

“Ok do I say it?”
“Hold on, I’m not sure what the word for street is.”
“Calle, right?”
“Uh… I’m going to check the dictionary.”
“Ah, too late, someone else is talking.”

Whereas with my overconfidence method, it looked like this:

“Ok do I say it?”
“HELL YEAH YOU DO ALEX, YOU GOT THIS! YOU’RE THE BEST AT SPANISH EVER! KNOCK ‘EM DEAD YOU HANDSOME DEVIL!”

And of course, sometimes it turned out I didn’t actually know the Spanish. Sometimes, I wasn’t really even confident I knew the Spanish. I would launch into a sentence, only to discover I didn’t know half the words. To illustrate this, say a sentence in English (or your native language). Then replace half those words with a very loose definition of them – and then half the words in those definitions with THEIR definitions.

“I was walking the dog in the street.”

Becomes:

“I was… going along on my feet… with the animal that has four feet and the long thing at the back that some animals have… and I was in… the place between the houses where the… things that people drive go in the middle, and the people go on their feet along the edges.”

Every sentence turns into the plot of Inception. What’s meant to be a quick, maybe witty observation becomes a painful, drawn-out game of spoken charades. It sounds stupid. It’s made me look stupid on several occasions. But the alternative is saying nothing at all, and if you say nothing you don’t learn. It’s not necessarily about being confident, it’s just telling yourself you are so that you’ll actually make the mistakes you ultimately need to make.

And in fairness the above scenario doesn’t happen very often. Usually, if I close my eyes and blurt out the word I think is right, it is – or at least, it’s close enough that the person I’m talking to understands me or corrects me. It’s tough when you do make mistakes, and sometimes it feels like you’re getting your comeuppance for so brazenly assuming you can speak Spanish. But really what’s happening is that the areas you need to work on are being revealed with pinpoint accuracy so you can work on them later – or right there and then, if the person you’re with is sympathetic.

For me, that’s the process. Imagine it like a board game. You hide away in the library and do all your vocab building, all your grammar, all the theory, readying your strategy. Your turn comes: you must go out to speak Spanish. Your strategy was terrible; your flaws are brutally exposed in front of everyone. You remember them, go back, repair them, consolidate what you’ve learned. You go out again. Things are going better, but you roll a double 6 and the conversation turns to politics. A whole new set of flaws is exposed. You crawl back to the library to find out the words for ‘fake tan’, ‘misogyny’ and ‘wall’. You go out again, confident in your ability to talk about the US Election. You draw a community chest card: oh no! The conversation is all hypothetical, and you can only talk in indicative tenses! All that precious vocabulary is useless. You waste two turns crying quietly in the library.

You learn the subjunctive. It doesn’t come in useful in a single situation for the next twenty-thousand turns. In the meantime you find yourself pressed to use the preterite tense to discuss your past experiences. Oh no! You discarded your ability to talk in the preterite in order to learn the subjunctive! Oh no! You mix up the first-person and third-person verb preterite verb forms, and accidentally tell your friend’s grandmother about the time you committed a war crime. Go directly to jail.

There you meet a man called Rodrigo from Cartagena who asks whether you’d consider blogging for his cartel. Finally, a chance to use the subjunctive! You say you would accept, if he were to offer. You stand there with a smug grin on your face. Rodrigo knocks you out, harvests your organs, and uses your laptop to sell them to your friends and family via your blog. You are dead.

So, uh, to recap… learning languages is great! You will die.

Anyway, I shall try and pick this blog up with a bit more success when I get to Italy. Maybe aim for one of two blogs a month, something like that. “Ah, well, you say that now Alex!” you cry – but I can’t hear you because I am 10,000 miles away in Peru, where your well-founded scepticism regarding my inability to structure my life is drowned out by the soothing sound of panpipes, that unexpected and somewhat unsettling squeal llamas make, and the man who cycles past my bedroom window every weekday morning shouting about fruit.

My god I’m going to miss this country.

Quick shout out to what may be my best title yet; if you don’t like it, fight me. And yeah, don’t hold your breath for the next blog (as stated above, you will die). Thanks for perusing!