How I learnt Spanish
Tuesday, 13th April 2010
Cactus' Alex Wolfson talks us through the journey that lead him to fluency in Spanish...
It was a bit of a strange path for me but one which shows the value of immersion.
I always enjoyed languages at school but was seriously put off Spanish at GCSE level by my dragon of a teacher who was uninteresting, overly strict and devoid of any sense of humour. Meanwhile my French GCSE teacher was the lovely Miss Millet, daughter of the deputy head, straight out of University, and most 15 year old boys’ idea of a fantasy older woman in her stylish Parisian clothes and English Rose features. So it was French which was the language I preferred at GCSE and continued to A Level, despite the departure of Miss Millet. I revisited my French exchange partner several times in Besançon, the last of which was the wonderful summer of 1995 and at that point it seemed French would be my second language.
But then I discovered South America. The continent had fascinated me ever since I read and heard about the Incas, the mysteries of El Dorado, Nazca, the untamed and undiscovered Amazon, football on the beach, the passionate people, the beautiful women, salsa dancing, the underlying violence in the history of the whole continent and the place as an undiscovered wild place where I could escape from the confines of an Essex suburb. On my gap year I found myself a volunteer placement in Grenada for 6 months, with time at the end for travel. My fellow volunteers debated long and hard over many shots of rum where we should go backpacking at the end. For me there was only one option; Venezuela, the closest South American country.
From the moment we arrived there, by cargo boat, I was seduced. The dirty port town of Guiria full of thieves, sailors and prostitutes was hardly an advert for the continent and we stood out like a sore thumb - 6 backpackers coming of the boat at midnight, but we found a place to stay. Everything about it confirmed for me why I wanted to be in South America; the landlord didn’t speak English, the shower was a bucket and a cup, the rooms were full of mosquitoes, we could hear the Merengue rhythm of a party a few blocks away - I was in my wild west, my GCSE Spanish was coming back to me over a few patient beers with the landlord and I knew this was my travelling playground.
Over the next week or so of backpacking in Venezuela, some Spanish came back to me. I made friends with a Venezuelan family and went away wanting to see more of this great continent. The following year lots of overtime in a pub job in Essex got me the money for a return flight to Caracas at the end of my first year at University, and I applied for my student loan earlier than usual to get enough spending money together as I could. I’d already started taking a Spanish language module as part of my degree to enable me to speak better, as my whole first year had been dominated by planning how I could discover more and more of South America.
My Spanish never got really fluent at University or on the two Venezuelan trips, but it was hardly a surprise when after graduation my main aim was to go back for more. Further overtime, now in customer service, set me up to do a volunteer placement in the country which had always been my main goal - Peru. Placed in a small Andean town in the sacred valley in an environment where nobody could really speak English, and living with a local family, my Spanish flourished. I made friends with locals, spent more time than I had to with the school in which I was volunteering, dated local girls, deliberately attempted to avoid tourists, and my Spanish got better and better. My placement ended and I knew it was too early to go home so I got lucky - in the right place at the right time - and found a paid job teaching in a British International School in Lima.
In Lima my Spanish became perfect. I met Giannina, the love of my life, moved in with her, and began to live my life entirely in Spanish. My friends were her friends, and none of them spoke English. I got to know the boys in the liquor store near my house, the market traders, the guys playing football on Mirafores beach and all of it was in Spanish. I spent two years in Peru and through allowing myself to be immersed in the language I had become almost fluent. But it wasn’t really the language I’d done it for, it was for the culture. In order to really understand the culture, a necessary step was to understand the language.
My final South American stay was in Chile, where Giannina and I lived for just under a year, and it was there we got engaged. If there was any weakness in my Spanish it was my listening. This was ironed out in Chile! Their accents are so strange that once you get used to them and can understand Chilean spanish you can understand any Spanish. In my current job I have travelled on business to Spain and there Spanish people have listened to my Spanish and believed that, although I am not Spanish, it is my first language.
So how did I learn it? Immersion in the culture - language is an integral part of culture. And of course through love; love for the place, early romances and through falling in love with Giannina. People joke that the best way to learn a language is to find a foreign girlfriend or boyfriend, and I can’t say that’s bad advice!
Read more on Spanish courses in South America
Tags: spanish, culture, spain, languages, chile, language, cactus, course, south america, santiago
Posted by Alex under Attitudes to Language Learning,
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