Tu madre tiene traseros como las montañas
Hola chicos!
Aren’t you impressed? That’s proper Spanish, that is. Well, I don’t think it’s bad considering the amount I had just a few weeks ago.
Seeing as most of South America, and Mexico, speak Spanish I did have very good intentions of learning some before I left. Sadly, these fell by the wayside as being far too boring. I made another stab in Africa, but trying to learn Swahili in parallel made it tricky, and the fact that I was driving for hundreds of hours in America meant that I couldn’t use the journeys to study either. So I stepped across the border with shockingly little control of the language.
Clearly, by this stage it was time for a crash course. It was only then that I realised how differently the three of us approached learning a new language. L, who has a GCSE in the damn thing, used the “how do I introduce myself/get to the beach?” technique we all remember well from school, where formations come much later than actually speaking. R had ended up with a series of comic/language books where she would figure out what each comic said using a dictionary, and try to figure out why that was the case. Personally, I’m absolutely astounded that the first thing they did was not to write out their verb tables and spend a productive afternoon chanting them.
I reckon they think I’m mad, but I can’t imagine a better way to learn a language. Granted, my vocabulary is dire, but I tend to pick that up during day-to-day activities. I can’t imagine just “picking up” verb endings - they’re hardly the easiest thing to distinguish in speech.
After the verbs I’m afraid I rather shunned the books, and have been relying on films, shown in English with Spanish subtitles on the oh-so-long bus rides we’ve been having, to fill me in on what normally occurs in conversation. After a film about tramps I had fully come to grips with the word “hedgehog”, Friends taught me “butt”, and after Blown Away I left with a range of vocabulary about bomb construction and denotation.
Of course, however you learn a language, you should always remember that as soon as you talk to someone it will be wrong. A very enthusiastic woman who was at the hostel selling Tintin books had a conversation with* me in which I am sure there was not a single word I already knew. Still, with enough gesturing you can always make yourself understood, and we spent a long time looking at pictures of Alfredo Fernandez on the Internet and discussing his bodily merits.
* talk at
Mexico City - Saf
France, Location, North America | saf | 
June 22, 2009 1:10 am
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