Thursday, June 1, 2017

Unlearning Spanglish

As some of my readers will know, language learning is a big passion of mine. As well as going through the tortuous and mostly futile experience of learning French at secondary school back in Jersey, in recent years I've got pretty fluent in Spanish and Swedish, as well as spending hour after hour, drinking coffee after coffee, helping non-native speakers practise their English at language exchanges and tandems in Uppsala. Here in Mexico I've given numerous English classes to family and friends, and for the last few weeks I've been taking an intensive advanced Spanish course at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). As well as giving me a pleasant place to go for a couple of hours every afternoon and some new friends to hang out with, this has the added bonus of providing me with a valuable student ID, allowing me to pretend I'm 22 again, pay cheap entrance to museums and get 10% off some of my coffees.

While my Spanish vocabulary has undoubtedly grown during our visit (Swedish not so much), I find more and more that improvements come from understanding small subtle differences in the way certain words are used in English and Spanish. Take two of the most basic words imaginable: ir (to go), venir (to come). You learn these in Spanish 101, memorise the irregular conjugations, learn when to use subjunctive, and think you've got it nailed. You can formulate sentences in impossible tenses like "I had gone before you would normally have come". Then suddenly after five years you start getting corrected all the time: "you mean ir, not venir". As if I didn't know whether I'm coming or going. After several prolongated and prickly discussions you finally figure it out: "venir" is in fact used much more strictly than "come". In English, if we're in the supermarket buying ingredients and I say "What time's Dave coming?", it's pretty clear from the context that I want to know what time Dave's going to arrive at our place for dinner tonight, not what time he's going to arrive AT THE BLOODY SUPERMARKET. Obviously, no? Well not so in Spanish, apparently. If I enquire "A quĂ© hora va a venir Dave?" I'll be told in no uncertain terms that Dave has no plans to join us on our shopping trip. A similar thing applies with traer (to bring), and llevar (to take). If you want to know what Dave's going to traer with him, you better be damn sure you're pretty much standing on the exact spot to which the bringing will be done, otherwise you'll get barked at that you mean llevar, idiot. N.B. Dave is a fictional character. Any resemblance to any real Dave, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

I've also started to realise just how cruel some of the tricks are that Spanish and English play on each other when it comes to pronunciation and its relation to the way words are spelled. One common misunderstanding is that the Spanish letter "y" is pronounced like an English "y". So English speakers saying "yo" in Spanish often sound suspiciously like Jesse from Breaking Bad (minus the subsequent expletive of course), when in fact the sound is more like if you were to say the word "jogging", stopping just before you get to the "g". Conversely, if you ask a Spanish speaker what their favourite colour is and get the answer "jello", it doesn't necessarily mean they've misunderstood the question. I normally advise Mexicans to pronounce words beginning with "y" in English to pretend they begin with "hi" in Spanish, so "yellow" starts pretty similarly to "hielo" in Spanish, which happens to mean "ice". To confuse things yet further, in Spanish the "h" is silent, while "j" is pronounced like an English "h". Confused yet? Add all that to the general insanity of English spelling and it's not hard to see why many foreigners have difficulties getting their pronunciation right. Incidentally, during one of my recent classes I came up with an explanation of how to pronounce the word "foreigner" in English: just say "forin" followed by the sound you make when punched in the stomach. A surprisingly large number of English words end with this sound, regardless of the vowel that we actually write.

To conclude, learning and perfecting a foreign tongue, whether it be English, Spanish or any other of the world's thousands of languages, is a tough challenge. I'm really enjoying my course at UNAM, even if I often feel that each new rule or tidbit we learn just opens up a dozen more questions and exceptions. It's easy to get frustrated and think I'll never understand everything or speak perfectly in any other language. But then I remember that no-one speaks perfect Spanish, nor perfect English for that matter, because such a thing simply doesn't exist. I can only hope to get a little bit better each day, and as months and years pass the distance between my Spanglish and the 'real' Spanish of a native speaker will get shorter and shorter. With that, I'm off to eat some jello.



2 comments:

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  2. Nice observations! I wonder what happens when you add Swedish to this pot.

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