I finished my first week of class and decided to sign up for a second week. I feel like I’m learning a bit, but I’m definitely getting value out of just talking out loud more. It’s one thing to think the words in your head, it’s a whole different thing to make your mouth make the right noises. It’s funny; they use the same alphabet as we do, but since the pronunciation is different, sometimes it’s hard to make the sounds come out right, and I still stumble over big words, like “adolescencia”, “enamoramiento”, and “antidisestablishmentarianism”.
We’re also getting into the stuff that always screwed me up in school, both in English class and in Spanish: parts of speech. Sure, subject, verb, and object are fairly easy. But direct and indirect objects, antecedents, and verb conjugations like the imperfect subjunctive and the conditional perfect? Yeah, I have no idea what’s going on. Despite the many quirks about the English language, this is one thing that’s easier in English than in the European Romance languages; we have fewer verb tenses to muck around with. For example, there’s a form of the subjunctive that’s used depending on how sure you are of something. If you’re very sure that something will happen, you use the indicative. If you’re not certain, you use the subjunctive. Another scenario is that you use the subjective if the object of the sentence is not known to you. For example, if you’re looking for your black pen, you use the indicative. You know the pen exists, you’ve seen it, so you use the indicative. But if you’re just looking for a black pen, you use the subjunctive. You don’t know if the pen exists, so there’s an uncertainty, and you use the subjunctive. Make sense? Yeah, it doesn’t to me, either. Apparently people with French, Italian, and Portuguese backgrounds don’t have much trouble with this, since these tenses exist in their languages. For the rest of us, it’s confusing as hell.
And then there’s region-specific stuff. For example, goodbye is “adios.” Most Americans know this. But in Spain, they don’t say adios. They say “hasta luego,” or “see you later.” There’s an innate cultural belief that paths will cross again, so you don’t say goodbye, you say “see you later.” So that’s been fun to try to figure out. When I say something that could be normal in Mexico or Puerto Rico, I get a double-take in Spain. Same language, but it’s very different language.
On the other hand, when I was talking to the instructor the other day, he said that I spoke with a Latin American accent, which I took as a compliment. I figure that, learning Spanish in America with a heavy Mexican, Puerto Rican, and South American influences, it makes sense that I would learn with a Latin American accent.
However, as I thought about it, another thought occurred to me. Depending on how Spaniards view Latin America, telling someone that they have a Latin American accent could be the local equivalent of us telling someone they sound like an inbred hick. Maybe it wasn’t the compliment that I thought it was….