I think I have finally driven my teacher crazy. I am finally learning the imperfect subjunctive in Spanish class, which opens up a whole new world of expression for me. It’s quite liberating actually when you have been trying to express yourself adequately not knowing exactly how to conjugate the verbs properly or the correct structure of the sentence you wish to say. Now that I have learned much more advanced grammar, I am more interested in getting all the tiny details in the stories or articles I read rather than simply getting the idea. It’s very easy to read something and gain an understanding of what is being said when you only know 60-70% of the words. I’ve been living on this standard for the last two months, and now I’m ready to really “hunker down” to learn this language! When I’m in school I speak Spanish nearly all day with confidence and ease. However, when I spend the weekend in the city with my boyfriend and we go out or we spend time with his daughters and their friends, I realize I still know only a tiny fraction of what I need in order to be fluent. After a weekend of feeling frustrated, illiterate, ignorant, and perhaps even stupid, I decided to really focus and study harder during the rest of my time here in Antigua.
When you learn a new language, you realize that you’re learning much more than simply conjugations, translations, and grammar. One example of many is that you realize the sense of humor of a culture can be quite different from your own in a different language. I have lots of examples of things my teacher has said or other teachers have said amongst themselves as jokes that she and they think are hilarious and I simply don’t understand the humor. It’s not just me either. Almost all of the students in my school are from the States, and we look at each other sometimes wondering at what are they all laughing?
This morning I was running a little late, and I arrived at school 5 minutes after 8:00. When I sat down at the table, my teacher said with a huge smile that she was thinking perhaps I went to the city because I was a little late. She followed this up with a huge belly laugh that lasted a good minute. You see, she knows I have a boyfriend in the city. She often uses this to make jokes, but honestly I don’t understand why it’s so funny to her. When I come to school wearing nice clothes, which is almost every day because I prefer to dress a little more formally than the average American, she laughs and has an almost creepy smile on her face and says: Oh, you must be seeing Guillermo (my boyfriend) today!!! Again, this is followed by a huge belly laugh. It’s getting a little old, and to be honest it makes me feel a little dirty. I just don’t understand why she thinks it’s so funny.
This is one of the reasons I am now combing each article, story, or workbook exercise for the exact meaning in English so I can absorb much more than just the grammar. It is also the reason why I said I think I’ve finally driven my teacher crazy. I found myself asking her all day today, “Si, yo entiendo, pero porque?” I felt like I was a 5-year old asking why, why why. I had an exercise for homework last night of 5 short stories, and in each of them I had 10 verbs to conjugate. It was a great exercise actually because it was a mixture of all of them: present, past, imperfect, present subjunctive, imperfect subjunctive, etc. The first short story was about a guy who bought a necklace for his wife for Christmas. He didn’t want her to find it, so he was looking for a hiding place. She came home and when she asked what he was doing, he yelled at her forcefully that she shouldn’t look at him like a thief. I made a few mistakes conjugating, but what really aggravated her was that I kept asking why he was so upset. Then we read many newspaper articles, and when I would come upon a word I didn’t understand, she would respond with a general idea of what the word represented, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I asked her why she thought a person felt that way or did whatever it was that they did. I could tell by the end of the day she was ready for a break from me. When I returned from lunch, she told me that some students wanted to play Scrabble. I’m the Scrabble champ at school, and normally I never turn down an invitation to play, but today I said I’d like to study more. I saw the look on her face, and it it looked like what I felt last weekend when I couldn’t understand all the people around me.
I’ve realized that when you are trying to learn a new language, it’s vital that you understand your own very well, at first. Then you get to a point where you almost need to forget your language before you can truly capture the new one. Too many times I try to translate literally or structure the sentences as if they were in English. That simply doesn’t work, and often you end saying something completely different. I am determined, however. That means that I must go now and complete my homework. Voy a hablar con ustedes mas tarde!
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