The Year of The Spanish Fever
There are no magic chants or mobile apps to make learning a language easy.
The term ‘language immersion’ suggests that you can learn through osmosis and master a language in your sleep. The reality is that your brain can absorb only so much before it needs to process in background mode. At some point it shuts down and demands tequila (sake you’re studying Japanese), a long walk or a nap. Read more…
The Year of The Spanish Fever
Let’s say you’ve scored a modicum of vocabulary and some fundamental points of grammar. Congratulations.
Now for your trial by fire.
Conversation requires you to intercept sounds in mid-flight. And they spin and tumble as they come at you. Spanish vowels are strung together in ways we English speakers have a hard time recognizing. You don’t hear words at first, you hear hums and murmurs.
The Year of The Spanish Fever
The world is full of people who dream of one day having time to pursue foreign language. The old man wasn’t one of them.
He had been lobotomized by a dead language during his formative years and there was no reason to expect he’d met another language late in life.
The Year of The Spanish Fever. Post 4
The old American’s years of hiking in the Rockies were behind him. Hips, mostly.
“Now what?”
He started searching for something that would be rigorous in a different way. The possibility of spending a good length of time alone in a foreign city, without knowing a soul or speaking the language, seemed intriguing.
He had never imagined doing anything like that. He wasn’t a particularly cosmopolitan kind of guy. He had southern Ohio table manners.
It dawned on him that enrolling in an intensive-language program would place him in the company of interesting people for a good part of each day. With that safety net in place he was sure he could handle the rest of the time on his own.
If he hated syntax and vocabulary, he figured he could fake it. Besides he could skip classes whenever he wanted. He didn’t owe the language a damned thing.
| LOST IN TRANSLATION | To “consult your pillow” means to sleep on an idea.
The Year of The Spanish Fever. Post 6
Waiting until nine at night to have dinner was as about as outward-bound as the old man wanted his overseas adventure with the Spanish language to be.
He planned to step out of his old comfort zone and immediately step into a new one.
The idea was to unpack and stay somewhere long enough to watch a neighborhood change with the season, to visit the same barber shop twice and to get around town without unfolding a map.
He decided Barcelona was as good a place as any. Two months sounded about right.
He didn’t book his trip until he found an apartment where he wouldn’t mind having the flu. A washer and dryer would be good.
He rented a small studio with a terrace overlooking the hills to the north and down the slope to the Mediterranean. The Basilica of the Sagrada Familia was two blocks to the front. He watched that monstrosity of a masterpiece being built over breakfast.
The apartment cost much less than a hotel and not much more than student housing. He skipped tourist places he’d visited with his wife on an earlier trip. Barcelona’s streets, architecture and public events would fit his schedule and his budget.
| LOST IN TRANSLATION | Spanish speakers don’t say it is four in the afternoon. They say they are four in the afternoon.
