The Perpetual Student

The long march to learn Spanish continues. It never ends and anything resembling an end is far, very far from the horizon.  It’s not like I suffer from false modesty when I say that I have a lot to learn and it’s not like I’m such a perfectionist that I can’t be happy with the command of the language I now possess, it’s just that I know better than anyone how much I have yet to learn and how much I want to improve. Learning Spanish has given me a better perspective on my current hobby of improving my French. My goals in French are modest and very realistic: I’d just like to have a good working knowledge of the language and be able to read more. To this end I picked up a copy of Albert Camus’ La Chute at a bookstore near the main square in Valencia while I was waiting for the Mascletà on Sunday.

I was going to go to the local movie house last night just to force myself to sit through two American films dubbed into Spanish.  I happened to turn on the TV just before I was going out the door and their happened to be a movie that interested me so I stayed home and watched that instead. I ended up watching two dubbed movies back-to-back so I got a good dose of Spanish comprehension practice. The movies were Up in the Air and The Matador and I understood almost 100% of both of them. I even found a couple of Spanish expressions I had just learned last week from something I'm reading. I can’t even remember what the expressions are now but I assure you that I know them in Spanish. French movies thoroughly kick my ass and I imagine it will be a while before I’m able to watch them without subtitles—but as I said, that isn’t really my goal in French.

As any American ex-pat will tell you, it’s incredibly easy to NOT learn the language of where you are living. Television here has many channels in English, there is a large foreign population as well as many Spanish people who speak English, and English dominates in countless arenas in the modern world.  I am less guilty of relying on English than many native English speakers here. I will always speak Spanish unless I’m in a group of all English speakers. I’m sure that people who speak other European languages beside English have fewer opportunities to speak their native languages here and thus learn Spanish quicker. I don’t know this for a fact but it just seems logical.

As I have said over and over, I only read in Spanish (and now in French). My one major drawback in my study of Spanish is that I don’t write much. I write so much in English that I never make the effort to write in Spanish aside from a few short emails. I’ve actually been trying to write something in French before each weekly class. My written Spanish isn’t bad (my Spanish friends always comment on the fact that I insist on including all of the proper accents when I send text messages*) but it needs a lot of work. I would like to write competently in Spanish one day so I had better get cracking.

*I thoroughly despise text messages but they are unquestionably useful and unavoidable. I can never bring myself to use any sort of Text Speak shortcuts like “u” for “you.” When people use these things in emails it drives me crazy; are they in too big of a hurry to be literate?