A Word about Learning Spanish

Though I’ve been sharing lots of stories about my time here in Quito, I have rarely shared anything about my progress learning Spanish, which is in fact the reason I’m here. I actually feel pretty confident about how I am doing. Learning a language is really a mental game. It requires one to realize that for a long time he/she is going to sound like a six year old child but, despite that realization, to go ahead and talk as much as possible to as many people as possible. By some stroke of luck, I have been able to accept and embrace this fact. I really do try to talk as much as possible and at this point, I can hold conversations, though I talk very slowly and probably do sound like a six year old. This week is my fourth week of class and I have learned what I think is equivalent to a little over one semester of college Spanish. Not too bad!

I take my Spanish classes for four hours each day with Aislinn, as we are the only two in our group here who have never learned Spanish before. I feel blessed to have the advantage of six years of Latin plus four semesters of Italian under my belt. It’s amazing how much this helps. Spanish grammar is virtually identical to Italian grammar, so I can just transfer a lot of the rules. Additionally, I often find myself encountering a word and knowing what it means before finding out its actual definition because of my Latin background. ¡Que suerte!

This being said, I do have two comical little stories to share. Number one: My host sister’s boyfriend was telling me this long story the other day. I was so pumped because it was the first time that someone had told me a long, involved, story, and I basically understood the entire thing. His story involved Pinchincha, the peak that I, at that point, was to be hiking the next day. I decided I would reciprocate by telling him about the time Elise, Phong, and I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back in one day. I tried to tell him, “When we were finished, we were so hungry and ate a huge dinner.” In Spanish, to say “We were hungry” you say “Tuvimos hambre,” which, if translated literally means, “We had hunger.” Instead of saying hAmbre, I told him, “Tuvimos hOmbres,” which means “We had men.” He looked at me for a minute, then pointed out what I had said, and we had a good laugh. Oh the trials of a second language!

Story number two. One day in class, Aislinn and I were learning reflexive verbs. Our teacher, a relatively quite, modest, Ecuadorian man named Arturo, would introduce a verb, have one of us conjugate it, and then ask the other to use the verb in a sentence. He asked Aislinn to conjugate the verb “desvertirse,” which means “to undress,” and then asked me to use it in a sentence. I was focusing so hard on my grammar that I said, “Tengo que desvestirme ahora,” which translates to, “I need to undress now.” Again, just my luck! Hope you all had a good chuckle on my behalf. I’m sure there will be more stories like these two to come!