Language Learners

by Natalie Golden

At the school I studied at in Mexico last summer, we were paired up with local students who wanted to practice their English. Being a language student myself, I was quite empathetic to their mistakes and embarrassment. My language partner was extremely shy and absolutely petrified of me. He was about a foot shorter than me (he couldn’t believe it when I said I knew people taller than me) and his hair was parted in the center and gelled into waves on the sides. We sat on a bench at the school to talk.

“How are you?” he asked me meekly.

“I’m good. How are you?” I replied smiling. He still looked at me like I was a dangerous alien that he wanted to impress. I tried to assure him that I wasn’t going to hurt him if he messed up.

“I am umm,” he paused to think of the word, “fine.”

We sat there for a moment in silence. His nervousness was rubbing off on me and suddenly I forgot how to carry on a normal conversation. Finally, he asked me a question:

“Are you a… um… bar fly?”

“Excuse me???” What was he basing this question off of? Did I look like a bar fly? Whatever the hell a bar fly looks like…surely this is not what they teach in an English conversation class! He turned extremely red at this and pretended like he was reading something far off in the distance. After a moment he turned to me said “You like dance?” My shirt had a dancer on it.

“Yeah! I love to dance. I took a salsa class a few days ago.”

“You … como se dice… go out salsa club?”

“We went out salsa dancing last night!”

“So you are… how you say… a farmer in the club?”

I looked at him, trying not to let on how ridiculous that image sounded.

“I mean foreigner.”

“Yeah I guess I’m a foreigner… in the club…”

Again we had a long awkward pause. His knee was bouncing with nervousness at the speed of a mile a minute. I thought I would try to keep the conversation going with a semi- safe question:

“So what movies do you like?”

“Ummm… I like the X-man. But my DVD is faulty.”

Wow. Faulty? Where did that come from?

“Oh cool… I like comedies.”

“Ok.”

We continued to talk for a while longer, his nervous knee persisting to bounce. Every once and a while, when he was particularly unsure of how to say something in English, his voice would drop so low it literally seemed like someone had muted the sound coming out of his mouth. Maybe I, the dangerous alien from planet Gringa, had taken away his power of speech. Perhaps he thought I didn’t approve of his lack of confidence so I took away his voice all together. He would only get it back when proved he was capable of not making a fool of himself.

“Excuse me?... I’m sorry I can’t hear you… Can you repeat yourself?” I tried to be polite, but there are only so many ways to nicely say “What?” that an intermediate English speaker understands. Whenever I said anything that he didn’t understand he would just stare at me blankly for a minute and then say “yessss?” even if the question I had just asked him was “What are your parents names?” When this happened I usually didn’t know how to respond and there was a momentary awkward silence when we both stared off into the distance before I asked the question again.

During my experience learning Spanish in Mexico I’m sure I made many mistakes also. Fortunately they weren’t always pointed out to me. What you don’t know won’t embarrass you.

My host mom, who hosted students staying in Mexico to learn Spanish and was used to people make errors, usually politely and subtly corrected me. One night over dinner I told the family a story of what had happened to me that day. I was walking down the street when a man started walking very closely behind me. I walked faster and faster but he continued to follow me for a few blocks.

“Tuve mierda. Tuve mucha mierda!” I told everyone gathered around the dinner table how frightened I had been. They all paused then broke in to intense laughter. Why were they laughing at me? I thought I had had quite a traumatic and life altering experience. I had made serious plans to never walk down a street again, in case it happened another time! They continued to laugh as I discretely checked my teeth for food.

“¿Que pasó?” I asked them what was going on. Turns out I had said, “I had shit! I had lots of shit!” I meant to say “tuve miedo”, which means I was scared, not “tuve mierda”, I had shit.

Another day, my friend ran out of soap and so she asked our host mom if she could borrow some “sopa.” Again everybody began to crack up at hearing this- it took her a few short seconds to realize that she had asked for soup!

Soon my English became just as awkward as my Spanish. I would get confused and start saying something in one language and be forced to finish in another because of my forgetful mind. This made talking to people in English quite difficult. For a while I was stuck in that in-between state where I didn’t know if I should say “I don’t know” or “yo no sé.”

When I accidentally would bump into someone on the street, I would instinctively say “I’m sorry” then after a second I would realize that they most likely had no idea what I had just said. “Lo siento!” I would spit out the next phrase that came to mind. Usually by this point the people had already forgotten why I was talking to them in the first place. After my trip was all over I found out that “I’m sorry” and “lo siento” were both incorrect responses for that situation. I should have just said “perdon.”

One day my language partner approached me in the courtyard at school and asked me to help him with his English homework. He was with a group of friends from his English class. I was uncomfortably aware that I was taller than all of them. I knew that he wanted to impress them with an easy A on his homework.

“Is this the correct?”

I stared at the paper. The pressure was on! All of his friends were staring at me in awe like I was performing a magic trick. Now I was a dangerous gringa alien who knew all the answers to the homework questions. I told him to switch an “an” for “a” and to capitalize or change the spelling of a few things, but other than that I was lost. I had no idea if the sentence was correct.

For a while Spanglish was my norm, but soon I was speaking better Spanish than English. I began to think only en Español. I still made plenty of embarrassing errors but came to understand that these were tiny mistakes that would soon be forgotten (unless they are written about in a humor story). I realized that mierda, miedo, bar flies, and farmers were all just part of the fun of learning a language.