Tag / Spanish

by Jen Seriously

Say What? Edition 7: More Than Words

No, this post is not an ode to that old Extreme song, although it’s still a great one! The post is a little bit about “code switching,” I started hearing about everywhere a few years ago. Code switching refers to the verbal portion of the many personas we all have. The words we choose, the way we say them, the tone of voice, affected accents, and sometimes even the language itself. It was weird to me that suddenly code switching was a phenomena because it’s something I’ve recognized myself doing, often consciously, forever. More on that later in a minute. But this post is also about much more than code switching. It’s about all sorts of language choices and language differences that help us relate in specific ways to the world around us and reveal a lot about us.

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Haven’t we all been adapting our speech since we were children? I know I have. I spoke one way at home with my family and one way at home with my friends. I spoke another way with my teachers and even another with people at church. Later, I had various sets of speaking mannerisms for work relationships: waitress talk, teacher talk, tour guide talk, boss talk. In my “performance” jobs (teacher, tour guide) my code switch was so strong that I felt quite self-conscious of people who knew other the other versions of myself hearing me in that role. While the degree to which I code switch now is less—for example, I’m now an adult who lives on her own, so I don’t feel I need to bend to my parents’ rules of acceptable speech nearly as much any more when I’m around them—I’m more conscious of it when I do engage in it. For example, sometimes I realize my speech is too casual with my manager orI feel like I’m crossing some line, so I’ll stop using certain words and will hold back expressing certain ideas.  Continue reading →

by Jen Seriously

Return to Spain

Against my own personal rules for how best to take advantage of a life that is far too short to absorb everything the world has to offer, I have traveled to an international destination twice. Two weeks ago, I went to Spain. Fourteen years ago I lived there, working in a summer camp in Andalusia with kids who by now are somewhere around the age I was during those brief moments when we knew each other, young adults out in the real world.

I didn’t feel like much of an adult at that age, but I certainly do now, which is why I didn’t mind retracing my steps a bit. That summer camp job was a lifetime ago and I was another person. I have only a few handwritten notes and photos printed from film to remind me of my previous adventures in the land of valiant conquered and intrepid conquerors. This time, I’m transferring what I jotted down into this blog post, structured according to the chapters in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. De Botton is a modern day philosopher whom I greatly admire. The Art of Travel was the first book I read with Ironman, who accompanied me on this trip, for our long-distance book club, one of the many ways we have of staying close while we are geographically distant.

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by Jen Seriously

Say What? Edition 4: Thoughts From Italy

A collection of random linguistically-related thoughts that popped into my head while in Italy four weeks ago.

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Language can provide anonymity in a crowd. One of my biggest linguistic pleasures when in Europe is hearing half a dozen languages spoken around me at any one time. I enjoy it partly because you feel a buzz, an energy around you, without having comprehension interfere with your own thoughts. But also, there’s a certain anonymity in being in a multilingual place. I could be anyone. Of any nationality. In any life situation. No one knows a thing about me until I speak. This makes me feel exciting and mysterious. Continue reading →

by Jen Seriously

Say What? Edition 3: Thoughts From Switzerland

A collection of random, linguistically-related thoughts that popped into my head while in Switzerland five weeks ago.

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Going abroad makes you realize that your language skills aren’t nearly as good as they should be. How did I used to be fluent in German but a few weeks ago I couldn’t even understand what the Swiss shopkeepers said when I walked in the door? Swiss German is quite distinct from Hochdeutsch, but still, I feel I should have been a little more competent. Continue reading →

by Jen Seriously

Say What? Edition 2: The Foreign Language Edition

I used to speak four foreign languages at a high intermediate level. Now I can still hold my own in Spanish, but that’s about it. I went to a French conversation group a few weeks ago to attempt speaking French for the first time in about three years and was mortified that I could barely even get Je m’appelle Jennifer to come out of my mouth. But the problem wasn’t that I could only speak in English. Words were tumbling out in all sorts of languages in an unstoppable Babelfish short circuit. The word between would only come to mind in Russian. The word very was relegated to German. I haven’t spoken either of those languages in over six years. It was like I was having some kind of stroke.

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So, I signed up for my first ever language lesson via Skype. Make that my first real video chat ever. I used Google Hangouts in my last job and I taught online for a few years, but never with video turned on. Mon Dieu! C’est bizarre! This lovely French gal was right there, 18 inches in front of my face, practically in my home even though she lives in Manchester. It was quite uncomfortable at first. Never mind that I was trying to communicate in a foreign language; the whole experience was strangely intimate. I’ve made some small strides in the last few weeks but still, it’s a bit depressing to have spent all that time and money on lessons and yet be reduced to speaking like a four-year-old (who would undoubtedly start speaking fluently sooner than I will). Continue reading →

by Jen Seriously

Lima

I have a friend from Lima. A mutual acquaintance introduced us because I was looking for a tutor to work with me on my spoken Spanish when I was applying for a special appointment in South America with the State Department. She is personable, well-educated, fun, and we clearly had a lot of common interests, and I knew after our first meeting that I wanted to be her friend. So, I invited her to my first birthday party as a single gal, some six months after I left my ex-husband. This was probably not the smartest move if I wanted her to be interested in me as an intelligent, considerate, and valuable friend because I was a bit of a wild child in my newfound freedom and I may have been obscenely drunk by 5:30PM at a party that went until 2 or 3AM. I won’t go into all the sensational details, but let’s just say that four years later, my friends are still talking about how epic that party was. Continue reading →

by Jen Seriously

Alpha

I never studied Greek, but I meant to. When I was 19, I had a plan. A list of 10 languages and how many years I was going to spend studying and becoming fluent in each to be the ultimate polyglot powerhouse. It was a motley collection of languages from all continents. Norwegian, Swahili, Vietnamese. They were all on the list, as was Greek.

In reality, I took 5 years of Spanish in grade school but only placed into Spanish 102 in college and ended up walking out in the middle of a Spanish class a year later (never to return) because I just couldn’t understand the subjunctive and didn’t see the point. Continue reading →

by Jen Seriously

Quoi?

Near the end of sixth grade, the school herded everyone in that grade into the auditorium. Someone explained to us that next year we would start learning a foreign language. Yes, that is a pathetically late time to start, but that decision was out of my control. We were given two choices – Spanish or French. We already knew these were going to be the options. Chinese was not in vogue in Western New York in 1991 and my school was not large enough to also offer German or Latin, as many of the surrounding schools did. We also already knew that the French teacher was a b***h and we were all scared of her, though I can’t recall a single event or detail that led to this perception. So the choice of Spanish or French wasn’t really a choice. Everyone wanted to be in tiny, perky, friendly Ms. Periera’s class.

If the administrators thought we were going to evenly divide ourselves, they were in for a big surprise when about 130 people moved to the right of the auditorium and 14 moved to the left. Obviously that wasn’t going to work and some poor souls were unpleasantly surprised to see French on their schedules when they showed up to school the following September. I – whose mother was on the Board of Education – was not one them. I was relieved not only because I was terrified of the teacher but of French itself. Even though I hadn’t started learning French, I knew that it had a lot of letters that weren’t spoken (only English is allowed to do that!) and that the letters that were spoken often sounded slurred together and nasally (only English is allowed to do that!). Who wouldn’t choose the blissfully phonetic and clipped (how naïve!) Spanish instead? Continue reading →