Poco a Poco

I don’t know what brought on the flashcards. It was probably the fact that I have the Spanish vocabulary of a 7-year-old—a mute 7-year-old from a remote village without common modern necessities. Sadly, I also have the Spanish pronunciation of his deaf brother.

So, like I say, my Spanish isn’t that good. No, really. I know I’ve mentioned this before in this space, but now it’s time that I actually confront it. (That’s the reflexive verb encararse con in Spanish. Or enfrentarse a. Awesome, no?)

Okay. Ya voy a encararme con este problema. From third grade to my senior year in college, I always was in some sort of Spanish class. Somehow, though, I’ve learned more in three weeks in Mérida than I did in my entire four years at Carolina, including the four-plus months I spent in Sevilla. How does this happen?

The biggest problem, it seems, is vocabulary. I look around my apartment and have words for only about two-thirds of everything I see. Wall socket? (Enchufe.) Not sure, although I probably should know that one. Doorknob? (Perilla de la puerta.) That’s a gimme, right? I mean, I took two literature classes at the Universidad de Sevilla and several more at Carolina—these words had to be in some of the books I read. Then again, maybe Cortázar and Borges were too busy being geniuses to worry about little details like how their characters entered buildings or plugged electrical appliances into the wall.

Maybe it’s my fault, though. My buddy Luis, whom I met at the posada across the street when we first got to Mérida, is a burgeoning English speaker. He is taking classes at a language school here called VENUSA (a not-so-clever combination of—get this—VENezuela and the USA), and just moved on to Level 6 (of 8). Not only does he know more American slang than I, he also knows ridiculous words like “car dealership” and strangely, “rapist.” (Although we worked on that, starting at “raper”, which I assured him is no way the same as “rapper”.)

Luis is a quick study. He absorbs words, devours them even, and better than that, he is incredibly industrious when it comes to learning vocabulary. If he can’t remember a word, he’ll write it down 20 or 30 times and say it again and again until it sticks. Hence, “car dealership” doesn’t faze him. It’s just another notch in his linguistic belt.

My linguistic belt, on the other hand, seems to be one-size-fits-all these days. If you thought my non-stop uttering of “good times”, “not so much”, and “I’m not gonna lie” was annoying in English, then you’d never want to hear me in Spanish. It’s as if I only know six or seven sentence constructions, and I just put them on one continuous vocal loop all day. Tengo que … voy a … es que … por eso … ¡coño! Over and over again.

So, with Luis as my example, I’ve attempted to become an auto-didact. That’s right: I want to be the Ragged Dick of Spanish comprehension. What exactly does that mean? Long hours with my Spanish 50 book, Manual de Gramática, and even more time with Inglés Ilustrado, this little book Luis gave me that includes vocab from every location and situation possible. And flashcards, of course. Now, words like nail-polish remover (quitaesmalte), mascara (rimel), eyeliner (delineador) and tweezers (pinzas de cejas) don’t bother me in the least.

That my vocabulary is tilting toward that of a cross-dresser, well, that’s another post altogether.