“Tim, your Spanish vocabulary is better than mine!”<\/p>\n
This wasn’t true, wasn’t close to true, but last month I still felt buoyed by the Spaniard’s compliment as I shuffled to the busy Ventas caf\u00e9 counter for our next round of drinks. Capcioso<\/em><\/a> was the word I’d just used, that had so impressed my companion. He’d had to look it up in the DLE<\/a>.<\/p>\n ‘You’re getting there, Tim,’ I thought, and gave the order to the waitress. She responded, politely but quickly; a server in a hurry, telling a customer in rapid-fire, native-speaker-to-native-speaker register what he needed to know about picking up the drinks.<\/p>\n The buoy sank.<\/p>\n I hadn’t understood her.\u00a0 Not at all, not a single word.<\/p>\n This wasn’t an isolated example.<\/p>\n I navigate daily life in Spain much more gracefully than when I posted Polyglot Tips N’ Tricks<\/a> in early 2018. I chat sociably in Spanish, sometimes for hours, fear the phone less, take in first-run, un-subtitled Spanish movies at the cinema, only occasionally have to research vocabulary before completing errands. But I still contend with an intermittent haze of partial fluency, that dissipates completely in some conversations and then descends in a pea soup fog in interchanges like the one with the waitress. I have adapted to accommodate the unpredictable fog, like one with hearing loss.<\/p>\n These issues must be familiar to others who have emigrated between language domains — from, say, Costa Rica to the U.S., rather than from Costa Rica to Chile. Our taken-for-granted native language skills matter more than we knew.<\/p>\n Before I could walk, talk or even babble, I was surrounded by the communicative utterances of my native tongue, by phonemes and morphemes conveying meaning in English. I logged thousands of waking hours of passive exposure to English before I said my first words, and would continue to be so exposed as I learned to hold a crayon, a cup, a spoon, to tie my shoes. I can fill in the gaps in some slurred, mumbled catchphrases almost instinctively, because I have heard the same catchphrases so many times from other native English speakers.<\/p>\n Advanced language courses may offer little help to a student determined to cross this barrier, and may dwell on matters irrelevant to the exigencies of day-to-day life. One Madrile\u00f1a lamented that she lost points on a C-level English test for not recognizing wont<\/em><\/a>. Millions of Americans will finish long lives as absolute strangers to wont<\/em> (as I presume Spaniards have passed on to la Almudena<\/a> without ever uttering capcioso<\/em>) … but they understand waitresses who talk to them in restaurants, strangers who give directions, CSRs who tell them what they have to do to get the refund.<\/p>\n A few examples, in MP3 format, variations of experiments I have tried often at in-person language exchanges:<\/p>\n I’ll bet that only native English speakers will understand what I say in the linked .mp3 recordings 1A<\/a>, 2A<\/a>, and 3A<\/a>. Students will make out some words, but mostly will be lost. Intermediate and advanced English students should understand the same paragraphs in versions 1B<\/a>, 2B<\/a>, and 3B<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another example, a song: musician George Thorogood performing a raunchy rock standard<\/a>, from the 1:16 mark to 1:55.\u00a0\u00a0A native English speaker will note grammar errors, will hear that the lyrics are voiced quickly … but also will understand all the words, without conscious effort. No native Spanish speaker understood more than a few phrases. One had to ask if Thorogood is even speaking English.<\/p>\n I have been masochistic enough to log my personal experiences with these fluency issues. A small sampling:<\/p>\n 7\/29\/2020:<\/strong> A doctor offered a running commentary on what he saw onscreen during a sonogram. He might as well have told me that an eagle is devouring my liver, like Tityus’ in the de Ribera painting<\/a>. I understood nothing.<\/p>\n 12\/28\/2020:<\/strong> A bank chatbot wanted my NIE number. It was trained to understand native Spanish speakers, not guiris<\/em><\/a>. I tried three times, gave up. (Perhaps a ready made comedy skit for actor Gabino Diego<\/a>.)<\/p>\n 3\/5\/2021:<\/strong> \u00a1Cuidado con la mampara!<\/em> warned the staffer. I would have, if I’d had any idea what a mampara<\/em><\/a> is. I finesse my way through many chats without knowing all the words, but not if the word is key. This one was.<\/p>\n ‘But that’s not a bad track record for a foreigner in Spain, Tim,’ you may think.<\/p>\n And you’re right! It’s not. I understand much more than I did even a year ago (largely thanks to my ever-growing collection of made-in-Spain movies<\/a>), will understand more in 2022 than I do today. I successfully jumped language domains, even though I was pushing forty when I first dared a present tense conjugation of estar<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n But these fluency issues still inhibit full assimilation.\u00a0 \u00a0Americans regularly talk to each other at the pace of the ‘A’ recordings. Not always, but often enough. Spaniards do, too.<\/p>\n Many members of one U.S. demographic group will effortlessly understand the ‘A’ recordings, and equivalents of the ‘A’ recordings in Spanish, too: the children of Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants I taught and worked alongside in Los Angeles. I can leaf through old class albums to remember names and faces, or click through online photo galleries<\/a> of TransitPeople trips past.<\/p>\n I spoke low B1 Spanish when I knew them and envied their fluency, but never thought of them as privileged. Today, I do. The Spanish they grew up with sometimes wasn’t polished, but this post will show why I think that matters much less than childhood exposure to two tongues. Only a few regulars in our online language exchanges<\/a> belong to this demographic, but their complete fluency in both languages ranks them head and shoulders over most of the rest of us. Command of both languages was a taken-for-granted fait accompli<\/em> by high school.<\/p>\n
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