Spanish

Living among Spanish speakers for even a few days has been consciousness-raising for me. Having grown up in San Francisco, I always had Spanish around, but my friends didn’t speak it (my neighborhood had mostly Cantonese and Russian). I was mostly hearing Spanish on the bus. In the class I taught here, everyone spoke at least a little English, but some only a little, and I thought it was more important that they learn the course material than practice their English so I encouraged them to speak Spanish when they were collaborating among themselves. Thus, for three days, I was surrounded by Spanish as the professional language of scholars I came to know and respect. It’s a very different sensation from hearing it on the bus.

For someone who never had any Spanish instruction more formal than Sesame Street, I do pretty darned well. I can read signs fairly reliably (my good knowledge of French helps) and I can even read a paragraph of accessible text if I have a minute. For example, in my hotel there was a card on the bed with advice for a good sleep: “Practice exercise with regularity.  In the night avoid stimulants such as coffee, nicotine, and drinking much liquids.  Listen to music channel 41 on your television while you prepare to sleep. Lie down, place two pillows under your feet, and take six deep breaths, in and out.” I can speak some too; my accent is very good, I am told, and if I am prepared, I can do things like ask the breakfast lady to charge the breakfast to my room (“Desayuno a la habitación, por favor, doce-cero-uno”) and even respond sensibly when she says “Caliente o frio?”  In Starbucks, I ordered in Spanish, and she rattled back a question to me about "crema" so I said si, and "para llevar" to which I also said si.  But I am easily tripped up, because then she seemed to be asking for my number.  Huh?  Oh, right, nombre is “name.”  See?  I am not very good.  And then taking a taxi to the airport, I found myself needing to ask if the university had already paid for the taxi, and if not would he take a credit card.  I was completely stuck.  I didn’t know the word for “paid,” or the past tense, and the “already” seemed very important but I had no clue about that, and come to think of it would this question even make any sense to them conceptually?  I thought Tec had arranged for this taxi, but I wasn’t certain, and paying for a taxi in advance is not normal in the US, and, um, help?  In French, I would have been all over this (“Est-ce que Tec vous avez déjà payé? Si non j’aurais besoin d’un banque, s’il vous plait.”).  But here they had to call down a manager from the hotel to talk to me.  I was embarrassed to be so helpless.  I think it almost makes it worse that I can almost participate in Spanish.  If it were Thai, I wouldn’t even try to go past hello and goodbye and counting to three, and I wouldn’t worry about it.

In class, I integrated what Spanish I could, really just for politeness and because I like learning languages.  When we were dealing with technical terms I would have them teach me the Spanish equivalent.  When I wrote an announcement on the board I would get their help writing it in Spanish.  For example, “TARDE: Presentaciónes.  15 min incluyendos preguntas.  Equipo grande – 45 min.”  Here is a map I made of the classroom in which I was assigning different topics to different tables:



As far as understanding people when they spoke, I did well when I had a lot of contextual help.  Watching the people in the class talk together, I often knew the kind of thing they were talking about already (because I knew what question they were answering or what data they were looking at), and by paying attention to their prosody and gestures (which is funny, because that was part of what the class was about) I could track their conversation to a pretty good degree.  I assume I was missing all the interesting details, but it was still fun for me.  Sometimes I could respond to what I thought they were talking about.  Mostly I just listened; if they needed me, they switched to English.  On social occasions (such as dinners out), it’s amazing how much you can figure out partly by knowing what kind of conversation it’s likely to be:  I know they are trying to figure out what time to meet me for dinner, so it’s easy to hear the bits of conversation about what they need to do before leaving campus, how long it will take to get to the restaurant, etc.

Similarly, at the conference I attended on the last day, there was one speaker whose slides provided such good contextualization for his talk that I felt like I was understanding every word he was saying, even though he was talking a mile a minute.  I was briefly very proud of my receptive Spanish.  But then the rest of the meeting was panel discussions (no slides), or talks whose slides were a blur of small technical text going by too fast, and I understood nothing.  I didn’t even get the gist.  I saw that they were presenting a methodology and saying what population was studied, but I had no clue what their methodology or population actually was.  I felt completely awkward.  I want to take this as lesson for talk preparation:  Prepare slides that a Spanish speaker with elementary English could understand.  Surely it is good for the speakers that share my language, too.