Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay

Reflections On Learning Spanish

I really wish I could flirt in Spanish! Eres como el aire... Flirting
and innuendo are pretty advanced, nuanced parts of language. I suspect
that's all quite a ways off, unfortunately. Si tu cocinas como
caminas, ¡quiero comer las migajas... Hahaha... ¿Carino? ¿Cómo se
llama lo que estamos haciendo? I could learn as I go. I could just cop
lines from Neruda, but it's too flowery (no pun intended): Me traes
madreselvas y tienes hasta los senos perfumados... Maybe not. Eres tan
bonita desnuda. Me pones nervioso! You make me nervous!

I also find it pretty ridiculous that I don't even use foundational
verbs like "hacer" (to do, to make) but I know gaggles of ridiculous,
nearly useless words. I know grio (grasshopper), hormiga (ant), mamut
(mammoth -- they don't even exist anymore!), musselman (Muslim),
suegra (mother-in-law), globos (balloons), poligono de tiro (shooting
range), ombligo (bellybutton), lenceria (lingerie), porta liga (garter
belt). For hula hoop, people just say "hula," or describe it as a un
aro plástico tubular -- a plastic tubular hoop. Travesti is
transvestite, the same as in French.

I know how to say highway (carretera), street (calle), path/trail
(sendero, thanks Sendero Luminoso!), walkway (pasarela), and route
(ruta). I can say idiot, stupid, imbecile, dumb and insipid, when any
one would've sufficed. Philistine is filisteo. I know a word for small
rocks and pebbles (piedra), rocks too big to move by human power
(roca), and gigantic rock faces (penasco). Rocks! Worthless! I know
that I can properly use hoja for a leaf on a tree, a page in a book,
and the corn husks used to wrap tamales. I can say pencil (lapiz) and
pen (lapizero), but I also know pluma -- a word that describes a
fancy, calligraphy-style fountain pen. How useful is that?

I guess this is what happens when you learn things organically. Surely
if I was learning this language with some sort of method, I'd have, in
the name of efficiency, learned a single word for "rock" and then just
used modifiers for scale. I'd have learned "pen" and saved the brain
space that went to pencil and calligraphy pen.

It's pretty funny to sit back and look at this. This is, really, how
children learn language. In that sense, it's a wholly natural and
beautiful process. I happen to pick up "shooting range" where kids
pick up "playground," but the process is the same. I've picked up
"pues" as a hedging, filler word to start sentences as we use
"well..." in English. Tirar, to throw, is used for throwing a ball, but a gun also "throws" a bullet. It's also widely used as "to fuck," as in, "I want to (throw) Shakira." Cojer, to grab, is used for things like "grabbing" a taxi, but, again, is also used for fucking. "Look at him! I'd love to (grab) him." And "menos mal," literally "less bad," which is used as an exclamation like "thank god!" (Nevermind "dios mio!")

In all of this, I've probably picked up loads of things that're dead
wrong. At some point I "learned" that mosquito in Spanish was
"mosquitaro" -- but it's just "mosquito," without the funny Three
Musketeers flourish on the end. I still can't decide if "near here"
should be "cerca aqui" or "cerca de aqui." (If anyone knows, please
tell me! Now's the time to clean it up!) And I'm changing my mind
almost daily on what you can saber vs conocer, and tomar vs sacar. I
thought saber was all general knowledge (places, things) and conocer
was for people only, but now, hearing people use both, both ways, I'm
sensing that maybe saber is surface knowledge, and conocer is a more
familiar or intimate knowing? And tomar, to take, vs sacar, to take
(out of?). Tomar drinks and things off of tables, but sacar things out
of bags, and blood (OUT OF) your vein in the hospital. And sacar
photos, a hold-over, I imagined, from the days of removing a film
slide after each exposure, but now I hear people use tomar as well.
The nuances of things like "ambas" versus "los dos" are lost on me.

I'm loving it even though it feels like a slow process and even though
I think I'd benefit ENORMOUSLY from a formal Spanish class at some
point. There're big gaps. Big ones that I'm aware of, which suggests
that there're probably even bigger ones that I'm not yet aware of. I
haven't pinned down "this" and "that." I already admitted that I don't
use "hacer" even though, if pushed, I can spout off the
barely-irregular present tense verb forms. I presently ignore the past
tense (ha) except for "hace (un mes)," and "fue." I get pretty easily
thrown by different accents and regional variations: The Argentinians
substitute "vos" for "tu," seem to use "vo" like "de" (of/from) (?),
pronounce their double l's like "sh" instead of "yuh," say aca instead
of aqui (are these truly the same?), drop the "s" off the end of
almost everything, and sometimes drop the entire second half of words.
It took me days to sort it out and get back up to normal speed with my
comprehension.

Whew. That said, I am speaking more Spanish than when I started this
trip and that was one of the goals. I'm now at, let me think: Seven or
eight years ago, I went to Ecuador with Sadie speaking, essentially,
not a word of Spanish. After two weeks, she wrote down a handful of
pre-conjugated verbs for me on a piece of notebook paper and I struck
off on my own, traveling around the country for another two weeks. One
month. Over Christmas last year, I spent four weeks in Central
America. And then this trip, now, of five weeks total. So I'm at just
a hair over three months of immersion, zero classes, and spread out
over multiple years.

The good news is that I don't feel like I backslide at all. I pick up
right where I left off, every time, with zero loss in vocabulary or
grammar. Maybe in forty or fifty more years of occasional, short trips
in Latin America, I'll actually be fluent.

posted by daviduri @ 12:43 PM