Nerd Alert

Wednesday, July 6

I realized in review that I haven’t really talked about classes yet. I think that’s because the days are incredibly long here. By the time I sit down to write each night, the morning classes seem days ago. As I’ve put it more than once, the days last so long, but the month is going to fly by.

But classes are great so far. Over the years, I’ve never really had a Spanish teacher with much influence from Spain. The majority of them were Americans who had studied in Latin America somewhere for a semester or two, and I’ve only had one native speaker, and she was from Mexico. The Spanish is incredibly different. It’s sort of like the difference between English from England and from America. They’re most definitely the same language (not quite so with Australia, so don’t make that far of a comparison) but the vocabulary, the colloquialisms, and the accent are all different.

So having my first Spaniard for a Spanish teacher is a wonderful new adventure. It is a little bit odd to understand his accent. I don’t think I’ve mentioned the Spanish lisp yet, but it’s a big part of my life. Everyone here lisps naturally.

The word for thank you, in America, is pronounced gra-see-as. Not so in Spain. It’s gra-thee-is.

And every “s” they speak gets chopped up into this th sound. But if you ask them to pronounce a “th” (I don’t know, say in the name Kathy?) it’s impossible for them.

Though important, I digress. My teacher, his name is Victor, for our morning class (from 9:30-11:30 and again from 12-1) has been great so far. He’s very animated, doesn’t speak too far over my head, and is working with us on things that are expansions on grammar we should’ve already learned. Each day already, I feel like I’ve learned secrets to the whys of the language that I never got. In language classes, it’s easy to get lost in the what, but he puts a lot of emphasis on the why and the how. It’s fantastic for a grammar geek like me.

My afternoon class is with my Mizzou professor, Zemke. He’s so odd but so fantastic. He started us out on the first day with what he calls the “Zen approach” to language. Don’t translate anything, he says, and you’ll finally start to understand. It’s so difficult when I actually tried it with my host family. It’s like trying to hear but not listen, and then still understand what happened. I’m working on it.

And then today Zemke made me have like 6 different “aha!” moments in one hour of class. He explains a lot about the differences in language in general, and the interesting tidbits about native Spanish that you need to understand for poetry, which is the unit we’ve started with.

For example (if you’re not interested in the nuances of Spanish, skip ahead three paragraphs!!), in English we start our sentences with emphasis and trail off. Think of “How are you doing?” we trail off our pronunciation, put less and less emphasis on each word, and even slur vowels to become “ya” and “doin.” But in Spanish they build until the end of a sentence.

Also, one of the biggest differences is that English relies on rhythm to sound right. As Zemke put it, you can fit as many syllables as you want into a second of time, and as long as you keep the seconds straight, English sounds right. But in Spanish, every syllable has it’s own space of time, and once you set a rhythm, every syllable should have the same time.

Final nerd point, in English we think words are little golden nuggets of their own, and are completely separate from other words. But in Spanish, syllables rely on vowel placement, not on word barriers. For example, in the sentence “Pienso que el año es largo” (Simple Spanish for “I think the year is long”), the two E’s next to each other in que and el won’t each be fully pronounced because they are two strong vowels. And, even more obvious to anyone who has heard Spanish, el and año will combine into only two syllables because the vowel (remember that it’s being relied on to form the syllable) will borrow the l. It sounds more like la-ño.

If you’re not finding this as incredibly interesting as I am, that’s ok. I’m only explaining this because of my final point, which is that I’m finally getting a great opportunity to not just learn this, but hear it and attempt to speak it. I learned all of these things at 1p.m. and then went home and ate lunch with my host mom and tried to decipher where she was doing this.

I’ve only been in Spain for a week, but I guarantee that my Spanish has improved ten fold. So much for the last six years, I’ve spent six days and I feel like I’ve learned more!