Sometimes A Little Knowledge Can Be A Bad Thing

Tomorrow is the last day of class for me. I suppose now is a good time to reflect back on what I’ve learned over the past 10 weeks. Frankly, I am rather disappointed at my current level of Spanish. Granted, I had no illusions of being anywhere close to fluency at the end of my time here but honestly, I think it would take me a lot longer to get to say, Borat’s level of English.

Listening continues to be a huge struggle for me (of course I have this problem in English too so this shouldn’t have been too surprising). Part of this is simply a lack of vocabulary which I hope will continue to improve over time. Coping with the speed of the spoken language and picking out individual words is also a problem. But more fundamentally, I think my main problem is that I can only think in English. It takes far too long to translate a sentence in my head. If someone is speaking at a normal clip, they have already moved ahead 4 or 5 sentences by the time I have muddled my way through the first one. And jeez, I won’t even go into how pathetic my speaking is. The most frustrating part for me is the up and down nature of it. Sometimes I can actually understand a fair bit and string together a coherent response and feel like I’m making progress and at other times I can’t understand a damn thing even though its a really simple sentence. I find that things improve slightly if I can anticipate what the person is going to say which is possible in certain limited social contexts. For example, ordering food in a restaurant or asking for directions.

On the other hand, I have to remind myself that I came here without knowing some seriously basic vocabulary like parts of the body, clothing, food, and some semi-important grammatical stuff like, oh, past and future tenses. So I guess, yes, I have learned a lot but with this tiny bit of knowledge I now realize just how much farther I have to go.

Oh, an amusing side story. At lunch yesterday the menu described a plate with garbanzo beans and a sauce that sounded tasty along with “callo”. I had no idea what that word was but feeling adventurous, decided to order it anyway. After receiving the dish, I realized that callo = tripe. I actually like the stuff in small pieces in pho but this was a plate filled with huge gelatinous chunks of it. It was a tad much cow stomach lining for me but I scarfed down the whole thing just to prove to myself that yes, I could indeed rock the house at the eating portion of Fear Factor.