5. Espanol

This has probably been one of the most difficult yet interesting challenges I have faced here in Argentina. When I knew I was going to spend a significant amount of time here, I went on the search for a Spanish teacher as my Spanish was limited to “dos cervezas por favor”. Finally after the 4th attempt, we managed to tempt some poor teacher to come to my place for 3 hours once a week. Keep in mind I struggle with English, I learned Japanese for 3 years in high school, can’t remember a thing, yet I was quietly optimistic that I could understand some given I was “immersed” in it every day – besides how hard could it be?

Turns out it is very difficult, even though I consider myself relatively well educated and intelligent, my initial education in rural New Zealand was somewhat lacking, and believe it or not (my Spanish teacher was shocked), I don’t know the what a verb, noun or adjective are, I only know through experience how they form sentences together. I feel as though I am learning more of English than Spanish right now but I guess that is a bonus.

Speaking to a number of friends who have learnt languages after the age of 18, I am a little older than that now believe it or not, we are no longer sponges and we need reference works to link different languages together. After so long in what is essentially analytics, I need to see patterns in sentences to be able to associate that with English. This works some of the time, but unfortunately for me Spanish is not a linear language and I have decided that it wants to really mess with me.

What we don’t realise as fluent speakers of a language is the huge amount of vocabulary needed to even get of the ground. Once you even get somewhat confident with learning more words, you have to deal with verbs, these beautiful creatures change depending on, what seams the weather, and being an analytical soul, I now have a wall chart the size of Brazil with only a few of the main verbs and all the changes. When I first learned about this, my Spanish teacher told me not to freak out – I did.

After 6 months of learning, I now take the attitude of I will learn when I learn. The brain, especially if you are not language minded like me, can only process so much at a time and given all the pressures of the project we are finding my brain is focused on many other things at once, so finding the “right time” for Spanish is somethings difficult, I know that sounds like an excuse, but unfortunately that’s the reality.

I was hoping that I would be able to understand most of what people were saying and for me to be able to get my messages across in 12 months. 6 months in, it is looking like 12 years and not 12 months even though I now work with my translator full-time, albeit on much more than Spanish but I will talk about that later.