28 days later: taking pride in the pain

Today, I have been in Chile for one month. Between spending a day in Santiago, ten days in the south, and eighteen days living and working in Viña del Mar, I can honestly say that I know Spanish now than I did before I left. 

I used the phrase "the confidence that comes with an immersion experience" in my leave of absence request to describe why I wanted to live in South America to improve my conversational language abilities.

Yeah. Confidence. Um...when does the confidence part kick in exactly?

"Lo me dice" 
Coming up with words to get the essential points across has been relatively easy. Recall a few verbs and nouns, fill in the blanks with hand gestures or drawings (iPhone apps come in handy when you can't find a pen), and off you go. I probably have a few more words in my active, easy-to-recall vocabulary, but it is a rare and beautiful moment when I can say exactly what I want to say.

Also, the more I learn, the stuff I've known for a long time disappears for awhile. For example, I have said "tengo que + cualquier verbo" to say "I have to + whatever verb" since I was 13. Try to say that in the past tense "tuve que pensar" and all of a sudden I have to stop and think about what I'm saying again. 

"Me entiendes?"
Understanding what is being said is the hard part. It's definitely getting better, but I know I'm missing a LOT.

• Hearing the accent is a lot harder than I expected. Not only is it spoken at break-neck speed, certain consonants are dropped. (For example: Ss are dropped. So, "dos mil" sounds like "doh mil" and "hasta luego" sounds like "hata lugo".) I'm having a harder time parsing out the syllables or consonants than usual. For example, I can usually spell the Spanish words I hear in Minnesota. I can't do that here! That should get better the longer I'm here, the more words I know, and the more Chilean telenovelas I watch with subtitles (in Spanish) on.
• Also: people here can't understand my Spanish accent (which, granted, is terrible) so it goes both ways.
• My ability to comprehend for long periods of time is...getting better. At first, I was constantly translating. If someone was giving directions or instructions, I would stop and translate the first part, and by the time I was ready to listen again I had missed the second and third parts. I can comprehend longer chunks now than I could a month ago, but I am still missing a LOT.
• My brain gets full very quickly, and I hit a point (mid-afternoon usually) when there isn't any more room for Spanish words. Yesterday, for example, I ordered an empanada. I'm not sure what he told me to do (brain=full) but I ended up going to another counter to pay for it (why? I don't know!) and couldn't understand any part of what they were telling me when I got back to the empanada stand. I finally just started handing them things (like, my receipt) and they gave me the empanada.  

A library patron told me once that he (and a lot of recent immigrants) was scared to ask the librarians any questions about tutors at the library and Homework Help because he didn't know what we were going to say. I took it to mean that he didn't know if we were going to be kind or not. Now I wonder if he meant that he literally didn't know what we might say. It is extraordinarily easy to not ask the question when you know that the likelihood of your being able to understand the response is not high because you don't quite know the language yet. 

I hope that being able to recognize more words and understand more of what is being said will translate into my being able to say more things. That's how this works, right? Passive vocabulary begets active vocabulary? 

Getting to intermediate
If a person's command of a language was presented on a scale of 1-10 (1 being "my name is..."), I got through levels 1 and 2 easily, and a long time ago. Getting to 3 takes a bit more effort, but getting to 4 is a giant leap, and where most people abandon ship (myself included).  I would say I'm somewhere between 2.5 and 3.25, stumbling towards and striving for 4. 

I am encountering some of the same road blocks that stopped me in my tracks in the past, but I do have new motivation to work through them. You know how English is a common language for people from differents parts of the world? Spanish is one of those languages, too, and I want to be able to communicate with people from around the world. I don't want to point and grunt and draw pictures the rest of my life in order to speak with people.  Also, I'm here for another three months, so in a way don't really have a choice but to work through the stumbling blocks.

The plan
I meet with a tutor each week, and will through June. She's Ecuadorian (easier for me to hear her accent) but has lived in Chile for a very long time. 

I'm doing some exercises to train myself to more easily hear the Chilean accent, watching Chilean movies with Spanish subtitles turned on, and listening to a Chilean podcast. 

I went to church with Alicia this Sunday. Church is GREAT for learning a language! Preachers slow down when they are making a point, AND you have the words to the music right in front of you. Brilliant.

I'll keep talking with people. I think I've had extended conversations with every security guard in the complex we are -still temporarily- living in, and have spoken with a few guards in the park near my school. Security guards are among the best people to chat with! I connected with friends of a friend of a friend in Viña (they are so great about insisting that we speak in Spanish) and have a few more connections to make yet. This is not the time to be shy.

I'm going to branch out (eventually) and go to some Toastmasters meetings that my tutor runs, and will also try to set up a language swap with someone who wants to learn English who will speak in Spanish with me. 

Take pride in your pain

At any rate, overcoming the language barrier is hard, tiring work. As I was leaving my lesson today, I ran into Ricardo. He asked me how the Spanish was coming along, and I told him that it was a good lesson, but my brain hurt.

His response was "take pride in your pain. You are working hard, and it should hurt."

I splurged on two books to make learning verb tenses fun.
I chose one because it is written by a Chilean about the
2010 earthquake in Santiago.
I chose the other because John Green.