Some days I adventure without taking a single physical step outdoors. I begin by navigating the choppy waters of conjugations, conjunctions, and clauses. Then I arrive at an unknown frontier, one where I have to hack through the jungle of new vocabulary and construct a sentence that bridges the abyss from my vernacular to this new terrain: Spanish. My thoughts in this land are halting and deliberate. My ideas are simple:
—El tiene muchos libros. He has many books.
—Yo hablo ingles. I speak English.
Progress is difficult, some days impossible, and I am left struggling on the shore, repeating quiero, quería, querré for hours. I keep at it, however, a bit everyday because this landscape of language fascinates me. I have the keys to further my study of words and structures. Someday these keys will allow me to dream in this tongue. They will lead me to climb the summits of Márquez’s thoughts, swim in the embrace of Neruda’s phrases, and walk upon the roads fashioned by Matute.
Learning a new language has made me more aware of the one I use. Complicated rules and compositions in English I mastered without knowing their intricacies crop up with new questions. Thoughts I have designed without ado break apart and turn out to have singular names — participial phrase, appositive, past imperfective — which prance around the page.
“I am now a foreigner in two places, discovering novel facets of speech I thought I understood.”
This is complicating and adding meaning to both spaces I inhabit. Acquiring a form of communication from the outside is not the same as growing up with it. There are rules I am memorizing, but nuances I will not be able to attain. I am building a foundation with boulders instead of bricks. Inevitably, some meanings are lost to me in the translation. Learning how to speak, how to live in the argot is not something I am going to manage soon, but the possibilities ahead are part of the experience.
I marvel too at the personality of the content I am asked to ingest. These are not expressions I hear my Spanish friends utter but they are the ones I must study for perplexing reasons. The sentences themselves are a mystery, an enticing door into the infinite imagination:
—Ella debe encontrar a su marido.
She must find her husband. Where did he go? How did she lose him?
—El perro come pasta pero no bebe leche.
The dog eats pasta, but does not drink milk. Curious type of dog. Would it also eat fries? Does it prefer wine with the pasta?
A thousand tales erupt from these elementary sayings and I wonder if this is what is also taught to native Spanish speakers. Does it make them born storytellers? Even the words they choose to teach me give the language a personality different from the flavor of English: libertad, revolución, violencia, pobreza. My gained vocabulary is forcing me to pay attention to content I do not consider in English, to a larger consciousness. This too adds color to my daily adventures.
Exploring this linguistic landscape is recreating me, forging a new existence. As I delve deeper into the uncharted, I also expand. When I started learning French in school we were all given new names. The moment I stepped past Madame Moreau’s threshold I became Monique.
“A new name, a new identity in order to acquire the new speech.”
Though I keep my name in Spanish class, I have that same feeling. Soy diferente, a hidden me revealed. The brisk shortness of Spanish sentences, the ability to obfuscate the single subject, the cadences of speech are becoming a part of the multilingual me. Without the full weight of its culture, I experience the lightness of the language’s being. It is an exhilarating relationship I am looking forward to deepening for years to come.
ADVENTURE NOTE:
The best linguists are ones who begin at an early age. Research shows that bilingual brains function differently than monolingual ones. Learning more than one language restructures the neural networking system and enhances structural plasticity. This allows those who frequently speak more than one language to process and control the intake of sound quickly and easily in challenging or new environments.
How have you dealt with tackling a new language? What language has been the hardest for you to learn and why?
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Reblogged this on Inspired Mrs. B. and commented:
Whether you are a casual language learner or a serious student, you will understand how your world is opened up with the acquisition of a new language. The addition of a new language, no matter your age opens the door to a whole new culture, new experiences, new friends etc…. It’s a long road, but worth the trip.
Very good read! Being a language nerd, I’ve been throwing myself into speaking Swedish as much as I can while I’m here and I think the breakthrough happened just yesterday 🙂 Here’s hoping it’ll work to revive my Spanish in South America next year. Because you can never have enough languages and through those different versions of yourself 😉
🙂 Yes, each language is like discovering another version of one’s personality. Congratulations on having a breakthrough in your Swedish studies!
I learned French and even have a Bachelor’s Degree in the language, but don’t use it enough. Currently living in the former U.S.S.R and trying to learn Russian. It has Latin elements that remind me of French. I liked this view of language transforming you and your perspective.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience. It’s too bad you no longer have the chance to practice your French skills. I found learning elementary Russian to be a much more daunting task than French or Spanish since I had to first learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Unfortunately, I was never able to smoothly transition between the Latin and the Cyrillic. I admire your tackling the language and wish you all the best with your Russian studies.
Thanks! I need all the luck I can get 🙂
one of my favourite posts in a long time – partly because I too have recently set out to learn Spanish and am finding the journey challenging. Loved the images as well as the narrative that expresses so well the experience of speaking in a different tongue – but Spanish has music and passion – and that makes all the difference
Muchas gracias. Bienvenido al club español! Yes, I too am enjoying the lilt of the Spanish tongue. People have told me that French is a very “romantic” language, but I have to say that now I am learning Spanish, I think it is the more romantic of the two.
Estoy de acuerdo!
wonderful!
Great post! I teach English as a Second Language and experience, through my students, nuances of English that I have never thought of before.
I just reblogged you. 🙂 Thanks again.
And I just reblogged you too!
I love this post! It is eloquently written and speaks to two of the things I cherish the most: travel and languages. I’m a natural born traveller and now sign language interpreter and this was a great read! Thanks for posting.
Thank you for enjoying the story and sharing it with others! As a sign language interpreter, what language or aspect of a language have you found to be the most difficult to translate?
Reblogged this on Weal World Travel and commented:
In between travels I work as a Sign Language Interpreter. This post speaks to experiences and sentiments where these two worlds, travel and culture through language, intersect. Enjoy the read! I did!
I learned French in school as a child but I am afraid that without practice it has become rusty in my brain stem. I seem to have a collection of basic phrases in six languages which leap out together at the most inappropriate times. Congrats to you an your persevering of learning Spanish!
Thanks Sue. I am determined to keep at it. The trouble with learning (or partially learning) multiple languages is that the wrong one always wants to pop out! Franglitalanese is something no one seems to understand. 😬
I’m especially proficient at Turklish. 🙂
😀
Reblogged this on soulfuljourney92.
The photos enhance the mind to learn another language, thanks for sharing!
Just like I feel now when learning Japanese. The hardest part is how the sentences are built up completely different from the European languages. It really forces me to think of my own language too and how the rules are there. Rules I never thought of before.
I love it though. Good luck on your Spanish 🙂
Thanks and the same to you with studying Japanese. I have heard it is one of the most difficult languages to master, so I admire your pluck.
Thank you
In many ways Japanese is easy, in other ways so hard. There isn’t that much grammar, they don’t have plurals, past, present and future forms, so you don’t have to learn much grammar, but the sentence structure is totally different and the alphabet of course. I’m progressing slowly 🙂
Intriguing! Thank you for the explanation, now I know a little bit more about Japanese. 🙂 I am finding that perseverance and practice, practice, practice go a long way towards progress. Best wishes.
I learnt Spanish in Guatemala, and it made me realise that although I’m a native English speaker, I’m actually really bad at English. The rules don’t make sense, there are so many exceptions, and everything is written and pronounced differently (one of the beauties of Spanish is that it’s written as it’s said) having said that, I loved learning Spanish, although I found it tough, it’s a beautiful language, and the more I learnt the more I realised how different 2 languages really can be. I’ve always admired people fluent in more than 1 language, but I now have a deep respect for them too, it’s no easy feat to learn another language!
😆 Those silent letters in English are so sneaky! English is incredibly difficult to master, for the reasons you enumerate and also because I think modern spoken English is very idiomatic.
Very true! I would hate to learn English as a language, so much doesn’t make sense and I’ve only noticed how much since learning some Spanish and chatting to travelers whose English is a second language, there are lots of common mistakes which actually make sense to make when you think about it!
I loved learning French in middle school and high school. I felt like a world was opening up to me. When I was fifteen, I went to Paris for the first time and ended up speaking with an African Francophone on the train. His dialect was different than what I had learned from books, but we were still able to communicate in bits and pieces. It was extraordinary. Then, in my senior year, I read “Le Petit Prince,” in its native language and was amazed how far I’d come. I couldn’t understand everything without looking some things up still, but the fact that I was reading even a paragraph at a time in another language blew my mind. In college, out of practice, I started to feel dismayed that I had lost so much of it and struggled through my one French class every other semester, but when I went to Paris again with my husband for our honeymoon, I was able to work out a problem with our train tickets and get us around with the little French I still had left. I think it’s so important to practice all the time, which is hard when you don’t have someone else handy to speak the language with all the time. I hope my daughter ends up taking French so that we can practice together. Great post. Good luck with your endeavor into the Spanish language! Thanks for sharing!
Yes, it is immensely difficult to remain fluent without the necessary practice, especially the speaking part. I am finding this to be the biggest hurdle in tackling Spanish and have experienced the same issue with French. Perhaps you can start teaching your daughter the French you know (when she is of speaking age), so that you will be able to converse sooner with her? Thank you so much for telling us about your own language adventures!