Ryan ChartrandAs I sit here at my kitchen table in early winter in Santiago, Chile, I can’t help but feel strange writing this article in English. I am confused because it should be easier than writing in Spanish, but it’s not! After 11 months here, I seem to have lost all sense of the English language. When I try to speak English, I end up using Spanish verbs or sentence structure and everything comes out wrong.
Not to bore you with Spanish and English grammar, but I think it would be worth it to repeat a few horrifying language incidents that have happened to me. When I mean to say, “That stupid fly is bothering me,” I say, “That stupid fly is molesting me” (which isn’t appropriate dinner conversation). I’m just using the Spanish verb for “bother” in an English sentence.
Sometimes I get into the flow of things, and my English catches on, but then I use a false cognate and it all goes to H-E-double-hockey-sticks. For instance, if you want to tell someone how embarrassed you are, and you say, “estoy embarazada,” which translates literally to “I’m pregnant!” It must be even more embarrassing if you’re a guy I suppose.
The worst of the worst though, is when Spanish learners try to say that the temperature is really hot, but end up saying that they’re horny. It is always at the most in-opportune moment. For example, when my host aunt offered me a blanket and I said, “cali‚ntame!” meaning, “turn me on!” instead of “warm me up!” Oh goodness.
That always happens; you try to say something innocent and it has a sexual connotation. For example, when I told my host parents I was going to meet my Chilean friend to “practicar la lengua con ‚l” which, (to an English speaker) sounds like I was going to ‘practice the language with him,’ but when translated to Spanish means, “going to practice the tongue with him.” How embarrassing! Of course we all had a good laugh after that one, but it wasn’t easy to explain why I had said that, and I still don’t know if they thought I was kidding or not … hmm. Another amusing anecdote is when I was crossing the Argentine border and had to fill out a customs paper and under the line “civil status” and I had mistakenly interpreted “soldado” to mean “single” but it really means, “soldier” to my humiliation. So when I turned in the form to the man working behind the glass he smirked at me, vigorously crossed out what I had written and filled it in with the correct, “soltera” and gave me a staunch salute. Oh bother!
And then there are some other interesting aspects about learning a new language that don’t necessarily have to do with speaking at all. This is my favorite example: a bunch of my friends were staying at a hostel in the south of Chile one night with a bunch of foreigners, and one of my Chilean friends went to knock on the bathroom door, when we all heard a noise from inside. Since my friend didn’t understand what he was saying, he opened the door on some guy doing his business. My friend immediately shut the door and said something to us like, “Why didn’t he tell me he was in there?!” And the logical response was, “Well, Andr‚s, it doesn’t matter WHAT language you speak, if there is a noise coming from inside the bathroom, that probably means that it is occupied and that you shouldn’t go in.” I’m just glad it didn’t happen to me.
Studying abroad is such an intense experience because it fast-forwards your emotional growth. What I mean is, every day you are presented with something new (whether it be a new word, a new food, a new custom, or a new person) and you have to decide how you will react to it. Will you adapt, learn or evolve from it?
I decided to learn from my Spanish slip-ups and because of that, I am not afraid to make more. A lot has changed after these 11 months here, and I confess that before I left for Chile, I thought of studying abroad as another goal to accomplish. And that somehow accomplishing that goal would make me a better person. But what I realize now is that what truly defines me is how I have adapted, learned, and evolved as a person in trying to achieve those goals.