Note: All Spanish words are italicized.
It all started back on a random September morning in 2012. The teacher wrote estar and ser on the board, two verbs that both mean “to be”. She then conjugated them for us starting with estar in the present tense. Estoy estás está estamos están. She then repeated for ser. That was a bit difficult but a little bit of memorization and then I’d be good. Little did I know, you don’t just conjugate to be and call it a language. Verbs get conjugated, and not just that, they get conjugated into different tenses! Ahh, my brain just about exploded and I found myself at afterschool tutoring many times.
I proceeded to spend the next four years repeating the process of “oh I got this, haha just kidding I’m screwed”, dragging myself until the first opportunity allowed me to call it quits with Spanish. And that was that with second languages, until I moved to China.
Preparing for China sparked an interest in learning another language again, except for whatever messed up reason, I wanted to go back to studying Spanish, not Mandarin. Why start a new language when I’ve still got work to put into my first second language, I reasoned. I could study all the Spanish I wanted in China and it’d never teach me an ounce of Mandarin, so reluctantly I put my Spanish aside and spent six months at about 20 hours a week on top of my internship learning, studying, and practicing Mandarin.
When I returned to the States I needed to finish my last year of college. My dean offered the choice of two Spanish or Mandarin classes to complete my humanities requirement. Deciding after a year of Mandarin and China, I wasn’t quite interested in going back and even after letting Spanish sit for almost six years, I was still far better off with it than Mandarin. And so I resumed my Spanish classes.
The first semester of Spanish went by uneventfully.
Second semester was a different story. First day the professor announces that the class will be taught about 95% in Spanish. Ooh boy here we go. Surprisingly, I’d already absorbed enough that this wasn’t the horrifying transition it originally appeared to be. That wasn’t the end of it though; classes were challenging and required a larger commitment than the previous semester’s class. I pushed through though until one fateful day when my acceptance letter to Panama collided with something my professor said. “Frankly, at this point your Spanish is going to plateau until you get yourself abroad.” And so I coasted myself to the end of the semester, sorry mom!
I arrived in Panama, ready to put the plateau behind me, and continue hiking up the mountain. Continuing on with the mountain metaphor, I felt as if Panama was a constant set of sprints, after which I’d fall over gasping for air and not move an inch for far too long. We were going hard with 4 hours a day 4 days a week of language training, only interrupted by scavenger hunts into the city, homework with the host family, volunteer visits, and other activities to continue improving our Spanish.
Finally, the giant mezcla, mix, in my brain was beginning to organize itself into useful bits and pieces I could use to converse. I was having hour or two hour long conversations with my host brother about various interesting topics, of course I was horribly burnt out after each conversation, but I was doing it!
Then I arrived to site where I hit a brick wall. I couldn’t understand campo, countryside, Spanish at all. My host dad would later tell my sister when she arrived (Dam her, I told her campo Spanish was horribly difficult to understand and she was chatting with my host dad in the first five minutes of arriving to my house!) that for the first two weeks, I just sat there and didn’t really say anything. True, I understood maybe 20% of what he was throwing at me.
But I used the great work ethic I developed while teaching myself Chinese, and applied it to Spanish with great success. After a few months, I was conversing rather well.
The last big hurrah, at least that I’ve experienced so far, came just last month, when we got the chance to return to our training community to get some extra language classes. It was my chance to finally organize everything that I’d crammed into my head in the last few months. I realized I’d gotten down most all of the tenses needed to converse and various difficult grammar structures including present, future, preterit, imperfect, conditional, present perfect, past perfect, future perfect, conditional perfect, indirect object pronouns, and direct object pronouns. I even had the beginnings of subjunctive which is usually a pretty abstract tense for English speakers to wrap their heads around.
The climb was long but amazingly worth it. I remember traveling through South East Asia, relying on my ability to play Pictionary and charades, and the basic English of the people I met along the way. But now, I can stop to ask for directions, find a good restaurant, and delve much deeper into the rich lives that people live around the world.
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