The instructor shut the door and said in Spanish, “Today we’re going to spend some time learning slang. There are some slang phrases that are common throughout Spain and some that are unique to Málaga. To help with the common phrases, we have a guest teacher today.” He turned to the projector, turned it on, and started a video on his laptop. Our surprise guest instructor was a YouTube video of Antonio Banderas teaching us Spanish slang.
I’m in Málaga, Spain, a great little town on the southern coast. It’s a big tourist destination, in no small part due to the weather. And while Brits, Germans, and Finns not just vacation here but also have second homes and retire to Málaga, there are also cruise ships that come in daily, disgorging thousands of passengers. Despite all of that, Málaga doesn’t have the feel of being a tourist town. Most menus have text in English, most people you interact with will speak English, sure, but it still feels very local and very authentic. It’s a great place to hang out for a few weeks if you have nothing more pressing to do. And, with nothing to occupy my time, I decided that I should brush up on my Spanish.
It’s been over 25 years since I took a Spanish class, and longer since I actually paid attention or studied. Despite my dismal grades over the years, I somehow managed to retain enough of the language to be able to have minimal and functional conversations when I travel to Spanish speaking countries. But I wanted to go beyond functional and get to the point where I could actually talk to people and have real conversation. My girlfriend Karen told me about the OnSpain language school in Málaga that her friends had attended that they thought highly of. After a little research, I signed up for the class. 4 hours a day of nothing but Spanish. Sure, why not go from zero to 100? Forget ramping up slowly. Forget the fact that I haven’t been in an academic environment since the beginning of the Clinton administration. Forget the fact that I couldn’t remember the difference between present, preterit, imperfect, and subjective. I’m just going to dive in and see what happens. How bad could it be?
On the first day, I was given a test, part reading comprehension, part listening comprehension, and part writing. After grading the test, I was placed in the advanced intermediate class, although the instructor suggested that it might be a little tough for me. One of my classmates is a Korean university student who is transferring to a Spanish university for a while, so she needs to be able to speak and understand Spanish well enough to operate at that level. She’s been studying at OnSpain for about 6 months. The other student is a Chinese girl whose boyfriend just got transferred to his company’s Málaga office, so she’s been taking classes at OnSpain for the past 4 months to be able to function in society. And then there’s me, who’s taking classes for a week to try to learn how to speak more gooder.
The classes are intense but good. Since we’re all coming from different countries, there’s no English spoken in the class. Well, there’s a little, but it’s usually coming out of my mouth when I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. The entire class is in Spanish, which adds a level of complexity to the lesson that I wasn’t expecting. Since the three of us understand Spanish reasonably well and we can speak with some degree of proficiency, we’re not using the textbook much at all. It’s mostly conversation about whatever we want to talk about, from world travel to politics (Trump was a fun topic) and from religion to food, and we muddle our way through sentences with our limited vocabularies. When we get stuck, the instructor gives us the proper word, and when we conjugate a verb incorrectly, they correct us and explain why the conjugation was wrong. As a result, my notes end up being a list of random words that don’t follow any real pattern or theme, along with random other tidbits of information that I learn that have nothing to do with Spanish.
For example, I learned that, in Korea, when a child is born, they are considered to be 1 year old. They turn 2 on January 1st. Everyone’s age increments on January first, regardless of when they were actually born. So if a child is born on December 30th, they’re 1 year old when they come into the world. Two days later, they’re 2 years old. I don’t get it, but that’s how their system works. They still celebrate the anniversary of when they were born, but their age doesn’t change on that day. I don’t fully understand it, but that’s their system and it works for them. I also think they start school at a later age to compensate. It has nothing to do with Spain or Spanish, but it’s in my notes. Along with a note that says that Chinese girls are generally not allowed to wear makeup until they graduate high school, and as a result, Chinese women are more comfortable going out in public without any makeup as compared to their Korean or Japanese counterparts. When I’ll use that information, I have no idea. But it’s in my notes.
After we finished the Antonio Banderas video, it was time to learn local slang. We were instructed to go out on the street and ask random locals to help us with multiple choice answers for local slang words. We had 20 minutes to get the answers and return to the classroom. I found an especially helpful group of waiters on a smoke break who knocked out all of my answers in less than two minutes. Rather than go right back to the school, I decided that I’d take a moment to review my notes and the answers, something I was terrible at during my academic career. I found a local sidewalk cafe near the school and started reviewing my notes. There I sat, in the afternoon sun in the south of Spain, with my Spanish notes in one hand and a beer in the other, reviewing my Spanish slang. This beats Mr Taggart’s windowless classroom any day.
There’s a phrase in Spain, “me cago en la leche” which is used as an expression of surprise, but it literally translates to, “I crapped in the milk.” We definitely didn’t learn fun stuff like that in high school. I may have paid more attention if we had. I’m actually looking forward to class tomorrow, just to learn more ridiculous stuff like that.
