I know that I’ve already given the disclaimer that I doubted I’d be writing as much as I did last summer. Part of that has been intentional, trying to spend more time with people than behind a screen. But For the last two weeks, part of that has been that any writing time I’ve had has been spent doing compositions in Spanish.
Since Friday the 9th, I’ve been doing intensive language classes every weekday morning. A lot of other people from Youth World have been to this language school, and it’s connected to what used to be the Mango Tree Cafe in the Mariscal. Each day I make the trek down the hill, on the Trole, and into La Mariscal beginning around 8:15. It really doesn’t take me 45 minutes to get there, but I like to be early and look over my notes at least once in the morning when I get there.
My profesora is Alexandra, a very smart woman who speaks quickly but doesn’t mind my slow (me parece, or “it seems to me,” anyway) pace. We’ve pretty much got a system down at this point: she comes in apologetically at 9:05 every morning (that’s super-on-time here in Ecuador) and greets me as I pack up from studying downstairs at the tables in the old cafe. We discuss something trivial in Spanish as we head upstairs, and then go over my homework, which tends to be somewhere between five and a zillion exercises from the book, and a composition. I read through what I’ve written at the pace of a second-grader, and she doesn’t interrupt me except for wherever I’ve left out the preposition “a” (which is just about everywhere an “a” goes).
Usually at this point she’ll ask me questions using whatever tense or vocabulary we’ve gone over in the last couple of days and throw in some new words, before heading on to the next tense or word part for the day. It’s a workout for me to switch back and forth from doing exercises to speaking to trying to understand a new concept as Alexandra explains it in the language that I’m still trying to figure out. But it’s also in a way a respite for my brain when she starts diagramming something on the board or when I am just conjugating a list of things out of the book as opposed to trying to hold a constant conversation, which will totally fry my brain.
What’s exhausting is how much effort it takes to get an idea across because I sometimes just don’t know one word. I’ve spent enough time now talking to Alexandra and realizing her patience that I will try to speak without stopping in the middle and asking “¿Como se dice….?” I know that most of the people I have to speak to in Spanish won’t know that one obscure word in English that I’m trying to translate, so many times talking just becomes an exercise in outside-the-box thinking.
It is a ton of fun though, for several reasons. First, I can see my own progress, in everything from my vocabulary to my understanding of the logic behind how sentences are formed in Spanish to my confidence in speaking it. We also totally pick on each other. I laugh at Alexandra when she thinks I’m going to make a mistake but I actually roll out with some phrase a lot smarter than what she thought I was about to say. She laughs at me when I respond “uh-huh” instead of with a complete sentence beginning with “Si…”, or when I come up with ridiculous answers to her questions.
This morning, for instance, we were going over reflexive verbs. At this point Alexandra has figured out that I lean slightly toward the introverted side. So of course, for her example question she chose to use the word casarse, or “to marry.” Her question was something along the lines of “¿A quien quieras casarse?” or “Who do you want to marry.” So of course I responded “Shakira.” I thought she was going to cry.
Since my main project right now is language school, people keep asking me really detailed questions like “So how’s that going…?” My practiced answer includes how my brain is fried at the end of most days. And while there are times when I want to rip out my literally 101 pages of notes (so far) and declare how worthless this is, 99% of the time I realize how good it is that I’m completely shot by lunch. As Preston put it, “You’re supposed to feel like an idiot,” and I remember that if I knew Spanish, I wouldn’t be in language classes. My brain is working overtime right now, and there’s definitely a bigger reason than the altitude that I need a nap every day. But it’s really cool to see my own progress and to realize how much I need to be able to communicate with people, and how thankful I am that I have the opportunity to do classes and sound like an idiot in front of one person instead of the whole Spanish-speaking world around me.