Wish #13: Learn basic conversational South American Spanish
June 21, 2010
Why? As part of my travels around the world which began in March 2010, I decided that it would be not only useful but necessary to be able to speak some Spanish, since I had planned to visit Venezuela. My knowledge of the language was near enough as inimal as it could be so I figured I ought to learn a few phrases and words to help me get by at least the introduction to new people without too much embarrasement.
I have cousins dotted across the world and more than I realised pre-travelling live in Venezuela, either in the capital city, Caracas, or in Merida state which mostly lies to the south east, but also contains some, of the Venezuelan Andes. Before visiting the country, y adventures had taken me to Australia for seven weeks then to New Zealand for three weeks (nowhere near long enough in retrospect, but I shan’t dwell on that mistake). For those ten weeks I could happily and confidently get by easily and by myself, ordering food at a cafe and meeting new people an asking directions with no problem. From that point of view it was no different from home. I did, however, get quite a shock when I couldn’t freely articulate what I wanted to in Venezuela. Duing my three weeks in New Zealand I attempted to learn from a set of free CDs that came free with The Guardian newspaper and used the accompanying phrase books to support the audio. Sadly this attempt wasn’t very well sustained and I dismissed the language (or at the very least the method of learning) all too quickly. Instead I wanted to focus on having the best time possible on the English-speaking part of my trip.
So when I arrived in Buenos Aires for my 12hour stop-over between Auckland (NZ) and Caracas (Venezuela) I had very little local language to get me from the airport to my hostel and in fact it was probably the most fraught part of my trip to date. I had to resort to gesticulating wildly and using that terrible method of speaking slowly in English, as if that may help. Thankfully, I somehow managed to book myself transport to and from my hostel and was 100 pesos the poorer. After my plane landed at 3.20pm and before my connecting flight to Caracas at 7.30am the next morning, managed to spend just 8 hours in my hostel – the rest was in some ugly, lonely, transient place where I felt dumb, deaf and blind. The lack of language, it seemed, had got to me.
Determined not to allow myself to be in such a position again, I spent the flight trawling through several chapters of my ‘Learn Basic Spanish’ audio on my iPod but the lack of sleep the night before soon erased any concentration I had. So I landed in a Spanish speaking country with knowledge of only 4 or 5 Spanish words: gracias, buenos dias/noches, por favor, si/non… that was about it. Thankfully I had arranged to stay my first week with a cousin who spoke fluent English and who I had met several times before, and the second week with her brother who also had English as his second language. In their company at least I could feel relatively at ease. The upper-class chamber music concert and 4 hour lunch, the First Communion of two young relatives and several meetings with cousins I had never met before would change that feeling of comfort, however. Over two weeks I was thrown into a mix of not only strange food and culture and a corrupt political situation evident in daily life but also the unfamiliar challenge of finding a way to communicate. My childhood summer holidays were spent with my parents and siblings in the south of France. I had been taught French ever since I was 5 years old, through private tuition, secondary school classes, pen pals and exchanges as well as first hand through interacting with French friends and locals we met on holiday. French to me is an easy second language that I was brought up with a used to speak often. I am by no means fluent but I can happily and confidently get around most situations I come across in a French speaking country. In Venezuela I was suddenly caught off guard by the debilitating feeling that the inability to converse suffocated me in.
Over the two weeks I spent in the country, I repeated words I heard frequently (e.g. ‘claro’ = of course/sure/obviously) and made an effort to include them in my half-English-half-Spanish phrases. While I had become accustomed to the stares (my blonde hair and fair skin make me stand out a mile in a country infrequently visited my tourists), the locals such as shopkeepers and security were less than sympathetic. I did find some comfort, however, knowing that my attempts at Spanish were enough to keep the relatives happy. To them the fact that I was making an effort was pleasing enough. By the end of it all, my Spanish vocabulary may not be fluent or even count as basic conversational Spanish, but I certainly expanded my understanding of the language and its formation and became atune to rise and fall of the intonation. I feel I could recognise somebody speaking Spanish and although I couldn’t converse with them it is something of a step in the right direction.
I’m kicking myself I didn’t learn it at school, though!
