Pass the Papas, Por Favor
The improvements I’ve made with my Spanish since I’ve been away are really remarkable. If you’re studying a language, I strongly encourage you to study abroad in a non-English speaking country, because as much as I learned at Cornell in a classroom, there’s nothing quite like complete language emersion to develop skills. I’ve switched my computer, my facebook, and finally my brain over to Spanish. Maybe I’ll switch it back when I return to the States, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe I won’t.
Moving towards some level of fluency has been both a blessing and a curse. I’ve stopped internally translating everything before I speak and I participate in class without turning completely red every time I make a mistake. My ability to express myself and understand the dinner table conversations have improved tenfold, but my ability to spell and be eloquent in English seems to have gone down the tubes. In Spanish, you pronounce everything as you would read it; each letter has just one sound and there are no silent vowels or strange exceptions as there are in English. Yet despite my growing confidence, I have managed to make some of the most uncomfortable mistakes since I’ve been here.
The other day I gave a presentation in my Andean Anthropology class about the origins of fútbol (soccer) in Latin America. It was a thirty minute presentation and I was pretty nervous so I started off by telling the class that if they didn’t understand me, they should let me know and that I was embarrassed about my gringa accent. “Estoy embarazada,” I said smiling and then continued on with the presentation. I spoke slowly and took my time and at the end of the class, the professor approached me to give me some feedback. “You did wonderfully,” she told me. “Unfortunately, you began by telling the class that you were ‘embarazada’ which doesn’t mean embarrassed, but pregnant.” I was mortified and trying to remember if maybe I had put my hands on my stomach at all during the presentation.
I got home that night and sat down to a dinner of steak, potatoes, rice and bread (Latin Americans are pretty big on the carbohydrates). My host mother asked me what I would like and I told her, “Un poquito de carne y el papa, por favor. (A little bit of meat and the potatoes, please.)” She gave me a strange look and then filled my plate. I realized several minutes later the mistake that I had made. The word for potato in Spanish is la papa. However, I had asked my host mother for el papa, which translates to the Pope. So there I was, more than 3 months into my Spanish emersion, in the middle of Lent, asking my host family to kindly serve me the Pope as a side to my steak.
I didn’t sleep well that night because I was feeling kind of sick (maybe from my papas) and the following morning I passed on a giant breakfast of pancakes and eggs and opted for some fruit and bread instead. When my host sister, Carolina, asked how I had slept, I told the truth and said “No dormí bien porque me sentaba mal. (I didn’t sleep well because I was feeling sick).” Unfortunately, I mixed up the words sentir and sentar, the first of which means “to feel” and the other which means “to sit.” I had told Carolina that I had slept poorly because I wasn’t sitting well. She made an odd face and her reply to me was something along the lines of, “I’m not surprised, it’s really hard to sleep sitting up.”
At restaurants sometimes I’ll ask for el cuento (short story) rather than la cuenta (the check) and I once tried to describe the outcome of a soccer game as un ampute (an amputation) rather than un empate (a tie). At times I’ll accidentally declare that I am casada (married), when I really want to express that I am cansada (tired). Overall, I’m doing well and really proud of how far I’ve come. I’m grateful that my host family, friends, and professors have been so patient with me here and I’m hoping I can find a way to keep the Spanish in my life once I leave the country. Grammatical errors are just a part of the process, I suppose. Nobody is perfecto and everyone makes mistakes.
Que te vayas bien,
Ariel