2006.05.04: May 4, 2006: Headlines: Language Training: NY Times: Lili Wright writes: Learning Spanish: a Tense Undertaking

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Lili Wright writes: Learning Spanish: a Tense Undertaking

Lili Wright writes:  Learning Spanish: a Tense Undertaking

"Although it has been a lifelong goal of mine to master a second language, my mission has led to little more than a string of highly enjoyable failures. A French major in college, I spent my junior year in Paris. Somehow, despite the painful hours spent shoulder-to-shoulder with the warty matron who taught phonetics, after rainy promenades with our flighty art history instructor pointing her umbrella at yet another flying buttress, after plowing through Existentialist plays about bald sopranos and people buried neck-deep in sand, I managed to leave the country with only a precarious grasp of French grammar and slang."

Lili Wright writes: Learning Spanish: a Tense Undertaking

Learning Spanish: a Tense Undertaking

By LILI WRIGHT
Published: May 4, 2003

AS I pushed my 3-year-old daughter, Madeline, in her stroller down the cobblestone streets of Ronda, in southern Spain, I practiced my question in my head. I wanted to ask Carmen, her day-care teacher, if Madeline was having problems with toilet training at school.

I found my verb and shifted it into the past tense before pushing through the front door. When the words came out fairly fluently, I puffed up with pride.

Carmen cocked her head, a polite gesture the Spanish use to convey that what I have said makes absolutely no sense.

''Yo?'' she asked. ''Me?''

I had just asked her if she wet her pants yesterday.

Although it has been a lifelong goal of mine to master a second language, my mission has led to little more than a string of highly enjoyable failures. A French major in college, I spent my junior year in Paris. Somehow, despite the painful hours spent shoulder-to-shoulder with the warty matron who taught phonetics, after rainy promenades with our flighty art history instructor pointing her umbrella at yet another flying buttress, after plowing through Existentialist plays about bald sopranos and people buried neck-deep in sand, I managed to leave the country with only a precarious grasp of French grammar and slang.

Ten years later I set my sights on Spanish. A night class led to a series of trips to Mexico. Language became an excuse to travel. I took courses in Cuernavaca, Guadalajara, San Miguel de Allende and Mérida. This spring, eight years later, I am at it again.

I know of few tasks more frustrating, especially as an adult. When we reach a certain age, we're used to being good at things (the rest we ignore). As a writer, someone who makes her living with words, I can't help seeing my inability to discuss intelligently the plot of the film, the meat in the soup, the sound on the street, as beyond humbling. Everyone says children learn languages more quickly than adults. But do they really? Or is it that we as adults expect so much more of ourselves? We know our crude sentences lack the grace and nuance we intend. Our jokes don't translate. It is hard to be a student again.

When my husband, Peter, our daughter and I arrived in January in Ronda, a whitewashed city perched on a gorge in Andalusia, I immediately enrolled in a language school at the Palacio de Mondragón. More than 100 college students take classes in this 14th-century Moorish palace, most of them Americans. Oh, how quick my academic descent! With one placement test I was demoted from assistant professor to just another amateur in ''Básico Dos.''

On the first day we began grammar class with idiomatic expressions, a friendly ice breaker. A good person is a chunk of bread. If someone is boring, he is a corpse or furniture or just so-so. And if you're having an off-day, you can say ''I am not very Catholic today.'' Someone who is sexy is like a train or like cheese; if he is really irresistible, he moistens your bread. Our teacher, Ana, acted out this expression, a favorite of hers, by rubbing an imaginary crust down the forearm of an invisible Antonio Banderas then popping it into her mouth.

Later that week we struggled with the subtle differences between ser and estar, the two forms of the verb ''to be.'' Soon, even though we managed to get only half the answers right (which you could do if you knew nothing at all), Ana announced with grim resolve that we were moving to the subjunctive. Everyone nodded solemnly. Oh, yes, we've been there before.

Subjunctive is a linguistic back breaker, the wall I slam against each time I pick up Spanish. A few years ago a Mondragón student created a cartoon expressing the depths of his subjunctive despair. In the first few cells, a happy-go-lucky student skips off to class. ''I love my classes. I speak better Spanish each day. I go to the bars at night. I like my host family.'' In the next drawing, the professor announces they are to study the subjunctive. The student faints and crashes to the floor.

The subjunctive is a second set of tenses, a parallel zone used to indicate that whatever is happening is hypothetical or a matter of opinion and might happen in the future, or might not, because maybe it's only what you want or demand or desire and not actually what's real. It is the tense for bad love affairs, for pundits and dreamers.

Despite my academic credentials, I am a mediocre student at best. I steer the class into as many digressions as possible. My notes are a mishmash. Between rules of grammar, I record each tidbit of cultural flotsam. When McDonald's first opened on a central plaza in Ronda, Ana tells us, vandals stoned its bright red sign until police were forced to guard the Big Macs and McPollos all night. Divorce is still relatively rare and can be expensive; spilling wine is considered lucky, as is stepping in dog poop.

''If it happens,'' Ana says, ''You should rush out and buy a lottery ticket.''

As we slog through the rules and exceptions and conjugations, breathing whiffs of gas from the lone leaky heater, I cheer myself up by keeping a list of the most ridiculous things other students say, if only to make my own gaffes seem less egregious:

I really enjoy smoking myself in the afternoons.

New York City, including the outer donkeys, has 15 million inhabitants.

Behave yourself as if you were coats in winter.

The U.S. economy is very bad. Even the grapes are unemployed.

Out and about on the streets of Ronda, every conversation is a challenge. Andalusians speak at a furious pace. They chop off the beginnings and endings of words. They lisp. Expressions that worked so beautifully in Mexico don't fly here. In Mexico, I couldn't go half an hour without saying ''Mande?'' a quick, polite way of asking ''What did you say?'' Here, when I say it, Spaniards squint and cock their heads quizzically.

SOME days I get downright petulant before the enormous size of the task ahead. All the vocabulary blurs together (pila, pina, piña, pino, pito, pillo, piso, pico, pío) and I swear that I must have learned every word in the Spanish language by now. But then I look up a new word, tierno, which means tender, and you can't ignore the word tender (what would Luis Miguel and the other crooners do?) or all the others I've tried to cram into my brain today: Landlord. Pacifier. Misfortune. Randy.

Trying to cheer me up, a fellow student points out that, of course, Spanish is impossible. Every verb can be conjugated 96 different ways. Every noun has a gender. There are four different kinds of ''you,'' depending on how intimately you know this particular ''you'' and how many ''you's'' there are. Subjunctive aside, I can count 24 different ways to say ''you were.''

And yet, I enjoy the struggle. It is immensely satisfying to get the words down right. Instead of being just another gawking tourist asking for the menu in English, you can learn how people in other countries think and feel by what they say and how they say it. On a good day you can hear something unexpectedly beautiful come out of your mouth, without being quite sure how you managed it.

Still, at this rate, it doesn't seem likely I'll ever be fluent; so I have set my sights on the next generation. After four months in Spain, Madeline has at least realized what's going on: Spanish people have a different word for everything, and we're all playing a big game trying to learn their words for our things. One of her favorite jokes is to mutter a string of nonsense words, smile proudly and say: ''I am speaking Spanish.''

I don't know that I am doing much better.





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Story Source: NY Times

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