One thing I do every day here in Alicante is speak Spanish–– a LOT of Spanish. As I explained in my first post, language immersion is a huge deal in my program and was one of the main reasons that choose to come here, to Alicante. Not many people speak English, including many of my professors (and my Spanish grandmother Carmela of course) and so I am forced to use my Spanish if I want to communicate at all. It is exactly what I wanted, because there are only so many times I can study the subjunctive tense in a classroom before I am not getting anything out of it anymore… the way to learn a language is to use it.
The best way to describe my experience with all this Spanish would be that it is very up and down. I have good days and bad days, exciting days and frustrating days, excellent conversations and interactions that make me feel like an idiot. I can talk intelligently about politics with my professor in class one moment and later the same day, stopping at the bank, forget the word for “credit card.”
One extremely frustrating day was when I went to my first class at the University of Alicante and sat down in the front row of my Psychology of Education class, surrounded by 80 Spanish students. I understood the professor well enough, but the movie we watched was unintelligible, and after it was over we were all supposed to form groups and answer questions about it. The Spanish students, talking so quickly that I couldn’t understand hardly a word they said, immediately formed groups amongst themselves and ignored me, clearly not wanting the “dumb American” slowing down their group. I was already flustered and nervous, and when I tried to talk to them and prove that I was NOT a dumb American and do in fact speak Spanish, I stumbled over all my words and made so many mistakes that I gave up. That is the thing about language immersion––you will be going along fine, and then if something upsets you or unsettles you, your language skills go plummeting to the floor. If something startles or surprises me, I often exclaim in English even if I’m hanging out with Carmela and have been speaking nothing but Spanish all day. If I’m Skyping home or listening to English music and Carmela calls me to dinner, I sometimes accidentally answer in English. She always laughs and scolds me: “don’t say that to me, I can’t understand you!” Ashamed, I skulk out to dinner and try to prove that I can actually speak her language.
Other times I feel like I’m on top of the world. This past weekend I took a trip to Barcelona and on the flight on the way, I understood the flight attendants over the intercom perfectly. It was an amazing point of reference for me because I knew that just a month ago, when I arrived in Spain, I could hardly understand a word of the same exact safety instructions. Throughout the weekend, I helped a lost British couple communicate with their taxi driver, go asked “how long I’ve lived in Spain” by some Belgians, met a girl in a dresshop who is from Alicante and talked to her about the city for a while, and generally felt much more respected by the Catalunyans because I always spoke Spanish to them, even in very touristy areas, instead of English. Last night, in my new University of Alicante class, Psychology of Women and Gender (I switched out of the scary education class), I answered a question correctly AND the professor told me I had a “great accent.” Little moments like that, moments of clarity and communication and credibility, are enough to make me giddy.
Sometimes I get exhausted and just want to speak English. Luckily, my two best friends here feel the same way, and if I’m not with them then the internet is always happy to help. But it happens less and less frequently, that exhausted feeling. My brain still spins in Spanglish sometimes but not constantly. My next goal is to dream in Spanish––everyone says that that’s how you know you really know a language. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but give it a few months … who knows?
