I understand why American tourists rarely bother to try to speak the languages of those countries they visit: It can be frustrating, it’s work, and it hurts. Far easier to wrap yourself in a linguistic cocoon, blissfully passing the days of your vacation in the sunshine sipping a cocktail on the beach.
I am strenuously trying to not be that sort of visitor, and so, almost three years ago, I began studying Spanish. I blasted through the Duolingo app, completed all 150 classes in an online course run by a company called Fluenz, spend time almost daily drilling my vocabulary on another online resource, and have been paying for twice weekly 90-minute Zoom classes most of this year.
And yet, even after all this time and effort, I felt swamped by the flood of Spanish that crashed over me during a recent trip to Baja, Mexico. I was traveling with my friend Charlie, and his friend Abe. Charlie, son of a Venezuelan who spent much of his childhood in Costa Rica, and whose scientific fieldwork is in Sonora, Mexico, and Abe, son of immigrants from Michoacan, Mexico, are both fluent in Spanish.
Tagging along with them revealed to me a world I would never see otherwise. Casual conversations, active interviews, happenstance observations — all things that are the hallmark of an adventure in human discovery, things I do constantly in English here in the United States and in Canada. But while not exactly linguistically blind in Mexico, I hear the Spanish-speaking human world through a filter of static and white noise, like a radio dial turning through channel after channel. Everything is crystalline, then nothing, then every third word comes into focus, then every other, then nothing again.
Intellectually I knew this would be the case. I know that I am not fluent. I know that the experience I had in La Paz, Mexico, shortly before this trip to Ensenada, San Felipe and Mexicali would have been better entirely in Spanish. I knew I was missing things. But these past few days were shocking nonetheless.
Shocking and numbing, even a bit painful. Numbing because my brain can only keep up with rapid-fire Spanish for set periods, so I’d find myself briefly checking out during longer conversations between those we met and Abe and Charlie. Then I’d check back in and have to extrapolate what they’d been talking about.
Painful because there is a physical toll to all this. Focusing on understanding Spanish (or any other language) for an entire day left me with a headache, and in dire need of silence, or at least the sanctuary of English. I went to bed earlier than usual, wrung out and frustrated at my lack of progress in Spanish. Three years?! Why can’t I do this better? What’s wrong with me.
Nothing, of course, but I feel as if I should be better. After all, I can read books in Spanish with few difficulties, and I can write reasonably well enough. One of my tutors, a Venezolano named Nikola, noted that spontaneous, natural speech in another language is the Final Frontier, the jazz improvisation of language. I actually imagine that joke-telling might be that final hurdle, but they’re both of a piece.
Make no mistake: I can certainly get by in Spanish, and can string a few sentences together. But it requires effort, and has not been coming as easily as I had imagined.
All of this makes me think most strongly of two things: First, the ignorant arrogance of the American educational system, and second, the workaday trials of the millions of Americans for whom English is neither their first language nor one they’d studied since childhood.
I have met hundreds of foreigners over the years, maybe thousands. The overwhelming majority of college-educated men and women learned English as children. My friend Patricio barely remembers when he started learning; he’s from Monterrey, Mexico. Yes, there are lots of people you will find all over the world who don’t speak anything but their mother tongue, but only the British match us for monolinguism among the educated.
I get why. It’s the arrogant notion that “we’re number one!” and everyone wants and should be like us. But this sort of linguistic jingoism doesn’t do us any favors. After all, Spanish is the most spoken language in this hemisphere. And even if we were and are “number one,” which alas, is debatable these days, shouldn’t we show even an iota of politeness by learning the primary language of the entire rest of this slice of planet Earth? Hell, even the British learn French for that reason.
Apparently not, and it’s not going to change. Asi es, it is what it is. Nor am I entirely innocent, either. I studied Latin and Italian in high school, admittedly more useful for a potential English major living in a very Italian town in New Jersey, and then, in college, I dallied with both Russian and Irish Gaelic in order to chase girls I’d taken a fancy to. Later, since I was studying East Africa in graduate school, Swahili became the language I needed. At least that one I can still understand, zaidi au chini. So yeah, I had my chance to learn Spanish, at least starting high school, but didn’t.
But it needs to be said that most truly bilingual people began that second language either before school or right at kindergarten. That wasn’t available to me or anyone else in the 1970s. Again, it is what it is.
This ongoing language adventure — and it is an adventure, with trips and new friends and nuances unveiled, hilarious missteps made — has also made me much more empathetic to those foreigners all around me who have thrust themselves in my world, the English-speaking world of the United States.
That takes courage, and what’s more, I now understand that they are feeling what I feel in Spanish: They’re not picking up our nuances, they can’t casually shoot the shit with strangers. At the end of the day, their brains must hurt as much as mine does. They too will seek solace in the warm embrace of their mother language, in radio or television spoken in tones familiar, with jokes understood and intricacies left open, like gemstones on a sidewalk.
I’ll get there eventually. I don’t know when, or even if, there will be a day where I stand up and proclaim proudly, soy bilingue! Until then, I’ll take it as it comes, day by day, trip by trip, page by page. Paso a paso.
Paso a Paso
Good people appreciate the fact you’re trying, and would step right up to answer you when you ask, Como se dice…
I know the pain and struggle of speaking and immersing yourself in a new language. It really does cause you to zone out and shut down sometimes! All I can say is to stick with it: I find after ~3-5 days immersed (no English!) you start dreaming in the new language, then after 2 weeks or so, you find yourself lasting much longer, speaking for much longer and not tiring as easily. Once you have the fundamentals down, it gets easier, and somewhat quickly. But that first week is indeed tough. Your struggle is real! Now imagine all of those who came to the US without studying online for three years prior....