I recall having a great deal of confidence in my Spanish
skills before I left Houston for Valparaíso. I was able to communicate just
fine with Yandee’s family, only getting stuck when the conversation wandered
into something technical or otherwise complicated.
I knew,
however, that it would be a different thing in Chile, having to rely entirely
on Spanish instead of being able to use that one word or phrase in English that
I couldn’t translate but the others in the conversation would likely recognize.
What I didn’t count on was how different Chilean Spanish was from the Mexican
or even Castilian Spanish to which I had mostly been exposed.
In the
breakroom at school I was having lunch with some of the other students, and
they asked me why I had chosen to come to Chile. I told them, among other
things, to improve my Spanish – and the whole table erupted in laughter. “But
we speak the worst Spanish,” one woman told me. “We don’t pronounce all the
sounds, we use a lot of words that no-one else does, and we talk so fast.” Now,
at this point I was rather acutely aware of these differences in the dialects.
But I was surprised to hear them say
that they speak Spanish “poorly.” I’ve heard it several times now, and it only
gets weirder the more I hear it. Can you imagine going to New Orleans and
hearing people apologize for speaking poor English?? Not everyone claims that
their English is the best, but most of us are proud of our accents.
Now, my
linguistic training is not so weak that I will succumb to prescriptivism even
when encouraged by the natives… but it is
really hard for me to understand the Chileans. Imagine you took English classes
from a Briton, had a long-term girlfriend from Kansas, and then, for an
immersion experience, you decided to go to Scotland. After three weeks, I can
understand pretty much everything when I’m spoken to directly, but I get lost
really easily if there’s a lot of noise, or if there’s a larger conversation.
Which makes it a little difficult to meet people, because I wind up smiling and
nodding like the worst kind of pretender. However, it makes it easy to pick out
foreigners – they’re the ones I can understand without work! I’ve made friends
with the Mexicans and the Spaniards, and they help me out with the slang and
sift out some of my Tex-Mex.
I think
this is the point where I regret everything and want to go home. Only I don’t. Even
when I have to stop and think of the word, even when I conjugate something
wrong, even when I messed up and said wine in the US is full of condoms (I
wanted to say “preservatives”), I love speaking this language every day and
getting just a little bit better at it, I love going through my flash cards and
reading in Spanish, and I love living in this city of crazy houses and poets.
I do, however, feel like I should
call all my international friends up and apologize for talking so fast all the
time.
In conclusion, it’s not been easy…
… but boy, is it worth it.
By the way, there was a terrible earthquake here and we’ve
all been without power for six days. Just kidding. But last week we were trying
to eat dinner and the table started shaking – I thought it was people dancing
upstairs, but nope – tremor. Nothing crazy happened, but it was a noteworthy experience
for the boy from hurricane country.
No comments:
Post a Comment