Mexico 2002: ¿Habla español? Part I

Mexico 2002

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Stories, Observations, and Miscellany

¿Habla español? Part I: We Practice Spanish

One of the reasons we wanted to go to Mexico was to have an opportunity to use the Spanish we've been studying these many years. I started taking Spanish in night school about five years ago, and ever since then have dutifully been going once a week to one type of Spanish class or another. Erica learned Spanish by spending two years in Spain off and on, and has been attending our "classes" — really more of a weekly social time — for the last couple of years. In the artificial atmosphere of a classroom, where people speak carefully on topics you know about, our Spanish seemed reasonably competent. Putting it to use in the field would, we thought, be another test.

Certainly we had ample opportunity to practice. My immediate relatives are from a German family, so they are comfortable conversing in German, but for the first time, Spanish came more readily to me than had the German I'd pounded so laboriously into my head during college. Oscar speaks several languages, including very good English, and with him it did prove at times easier to switch back to English to make a particularly strident point, or to toss off a witticism, or, of course, when I was tired.

One benefit of having somewhat better Spanish during this trip is that it provided, for the first time, a chance to communicate at a semi-sophisticated level with people with whom we would otherwise have been able to exchange only nods and smiles. Tomás, Oscar's father, is a renowned playwright who understands English, but does not speak it. Lalo, a friend of Oscar's who was with us in Puebla, is similarly much more comfortable conversing in Spanish. For me especially, it was a treat to be able to have actual conversations with people such as these, people who have many interesting (and often funny) things to say that would be wholly missed by an English-only speaker.

Not that our comprehension was perfect. Margot's two younger kids, aged 20 and 14, shot rapid-fire Spanish back and forth at the dinner table, which even with the utmost concentration we often found opaque. Had we known what they were talking about — and their conversations often concerned topics we had no clue about — the speed of the Spanish alone would have been a serious problem. Oscar also explained to us that their speech was salted with the argot of their generation, making their conversation as difficult for us as a conversation with "phatty" and "da bomb" (or whatever teens say these days) might be for the textbook-educated English speaker who is, like, just off the boat.

Speaking proved more awkward than listening, not surprisingly. We managed to convey our thoughts, not always rapidly, not necessarily as brilliantly as we might have liked, and surely not always grammatically. I especially have a tendency to start a sentence and then be left stuttering painfully while frantically searching my brain for the right word or form, but fortunately this was often supplied by my patient listeners. Erica speaks much more fluently than I do, but did report that she found very frustrating her occasional need to stop and restart. The solution, of course, is more practice.

But we are proud to report that we did not oblige anyone to speak English to us, even given how obvious it was that we are gringos. As Erica observed, the young ladies who staffed the hotel desk surely spoke English at least as well as we spoke Spanish, but our interactions with them, always very polite, were entirely in Spanish. Likewise our guide at Monte Alban, who spoke English quite well, albeit with a heck of an accent, was as easy to follow in Spanish as he was in English. At various times, people noted to us that our Spanish was good, a compliment we chose to take at face value and not (just) evidence of how hospitable the people of Mexico are.

¿Habla español?