Marianne doesn’t understand ANYTHING!
Immediately after that phrase was uttered in Spain three years ago, my first thought was to cock my right hand forward and extend my middle finger upward, saying entiendo esto (I understand this!) or some other sarcastic comment per my English speaking personality. But wanting to be a good citizen diplomat, I only smiled and laughed, which really was a genuine reaction to hearing something so ridiculous. And actually… I did understand that!
But in all honesty, that is the phrase that finally got me to enroll in Spanish class.
I have always been lucky that my fully bi-lingual hubby is a great interpreter and because of that, I haven’t (admittedly) made that great of an effort to learn Spanish. I have instead relied on him and what I remember from three years of high school Spanish to communicate, which has not always yielded great results, and has in fact resulted in some humorous miscommunications over the years. From the beginning, my mother-in-law has been the best at deciphering my twenty-plus year old Spanish and to her credit, makes a HUGE effort to speak very slowly so that I can understand her, which is a big help. I think her ability to tailor her communication to the skill level of the beginning Spanish speaker has something to do with the fact of raising many children – four sons, one daughter, many nephews, nieces and now grandchildren - and therefore understanding how the human brain acquires the Spanish language, whether they are two or thirty-five.
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| Is it the preterite? Or the imperfect? |
I have just finished second semester of college Spanish and have also taken a few basic conversation classes over the past three years. I have learned (or re-learned) the backward sentence structure of the Spanish language, the beauty of doing something to yourself via the reflexive verb, the convention of placing the adjective after the noun it describes (why?), and above all, how to correctly pronounce the Spanish vowel sounds – a guttural and short sounding ah, eh, ee, oo, ou. I have attempted to memorize the millions of subtle variations of countless verbs and their tenses – present, present progressive, preterite, imperfect and most recently, the subjunctive. I still stumble over verbs, defaulting to the present tense or omitting verbs altogether and performing a pantomime routine when attempting to speak Spanish in complete sentences. I have learned a lot in my classes over the past three years, but I have to say that although classroom instruction is helpful, I have found that it is nothing more than an academic exercise, one in which rote memorization will get you an “A” on the chapter prueba.
I’d rather take a photography class.
Instead of sitting in a classroom, this is how I prefer to learn Spanish: I learned that “comer” means to eat as in á comer – or how my mother-in-law calls the family to lunch everyday. I prefer learning that the ending –isma means “really-really” from my little niece, Andrea, who proudly told Pedro that her grandma said she wasn’t guapa (pretty)…she was guapisma (really really pretty). And I learned the word saber is one of the verbs that means to know from my now twenty-four year old cousin-in-law, Alejandro. When he was eight, Jandro threw up his arms in disgust when I doused my tortilla espanola in ketchup (a major faux pax, I know now) and said in an exasperated voice (and a twinkle in his eye), ¡Americanos…no saben! or Americans…they don’t know! He got tickled to death for that one.
So now that the semester is over and a visit to Spain is a few days away, I can put away my textbook and start learning Spanish again – the real way, the natural way – the FUN way. And there’ll be no pesky verbs to memorize either.
