Studying Spanish

For about two months now I have been studying Spanish through the use of the Rosetta Stone computer program.  At some point I therefore expect to be able to write a blog post in Spanish, although it will be brutally simple, and horrifically littered with errors for anyone who actually speaks Spanish.

I don't actually expect to be able to really speak Spanish, after all language is an incredible complex thing that changes all the time.  All of us have spent a lifetime learning our language, and all of us get it wrong some of the time.  What I hope to achieve is to be able to go to a Spanish-speaking country and get around as a tourist using their language rather than requiring people in their own country to speak mine.  To me, being a visitor and not at least trying to speak their language is simply rude.  I don't think you have to be good at speaking the language but I think the effort is a requirement for politeness, and I think the effort is greatly appreciated.  I find those who simply speak louder and more angrily when faced with a communication problem to be among the most boorish people around.  I cringe in sympathy for the person subjected to it, feel embarrassed on the behalf of the boor, and feel sad that someone has missed out on the multilingual future.

I study the amount that people refer to as, "trying to study an hour every day."  This means in practice that I study for somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour three or four days a week.  I can tell that this is significantly faster than the program expects of me and at my present progress I should be finished with the entire program some time in the summer.

What I really want to talk about is the experience of studying a new language using the program.  Rosetta Stone claims to teach languages in the same way that we learn languages, and I can see what they mean.  Instead of learning grammar rules and vocabulary lists there is a constant combination of pictures and spoken words.  The program revolves between vocabulary, grammar, speaking, and listening, combining these different components in what are essentially constant tests.  Like a small child you are shown objects, given the name of the object wherever possible, and asked to repeat it until you understand and remember the word or phrase.  There is a constant barrage of questions in which the correct word, phrase, or sentence is left out and you are given praise (a happy tone and a green check mark) or a sense of failure (an orange cross and a disappointed tone).

Mentally this is the hardest thing I have done in a long time.  It is very reminiscent of the exhausting, almost physical, effort of doing sudoku puzzles for the first time.  I can literally feel my brain straining to solve the puzzles, remember the words, make some sense of what is going on.  The program functions essentially by starting you off in almost complete bewilderment for each new section.  There you are, lost in sentences combining words you know and words about which you have no idea.  As you take stabs in the dark the program says "Fail, fail, fail" until you start getting the right answers simply by a process of elimination.  At least it feels like that although I still get the majority of the answers right at these points.  There is something very powerful about being told you have failed.  I understand very keenly the frustration of a child trying to get the right words out without knowing them.

Next the program goes over the different parts again, in slightly more detail, but with more clues.  The tests become somewhat easier as a result.  Then there is my favorite feature, Adaptive Recall.  This consists of reminders from past lessons, repeated at different times over a period of days, weeks and months.  So you find yourself moving between crushingly hard mental steps and very basic answers.  It is only at this point that you really understand what you have learned, that "El tren sale a la cinco y veinte-cinco de la tarde" (or something close to that), means that the train leaves at five twenty-five in the afternoon, and realize that this could be a life-saver when abroad.  That bewildering, painful, frustrating effort at the beginning transfers into understanding.

Studying Spanish is not really fun in the usual idea of fun.  It actually reminds me quite a lot of playing really competitive sport.  In the actual moment it is hard, exhausting, draining.  When you have finished and realized what you have achieved it is uplifting, exhilarating.  The other day I was cruising through the cable listings and simply read one of the Spanish program titles, and realized that I understood it.  I listen to Mexican music stations down here (often just to feel more like a tourist rather than someone stuck in suburban Texas) and I can pick out words here and there.

However, most of the time as I slog through this process I remain mired in the belief that I will never understand Spanish, and any attempt to speak it is simply embarrassment in waiting.  It takes effort to see that I am trying to learn an entire new language in less than a year, that of course that is hard.  retaining motivation takes reminders that even now, after only ten weeks of study, I am enormously better equipped to get around in Costar Rica.  I can ask how much something costs, where the bus station is.  I can tell my right from left, and say I want a cup of coffee.

It may take ten thousand hours of mental work to master any skill, and I don't think I will ever master Spanish (at my present rate of study it would take about sixty years), but I am doing something worthwhile, soemthing useful, something about which I can be proud.  But it is bloody hard work.