Speaking a new language is scary. You are trusting that people won’t laugh when you say “I love to cook in my chicken,” or when your pronunciation of “duck” sounds an awful lot like “dog,” as in “I love to eat dog.” You take it on faith that those around you won’t laugh, or that they’ll wait to laugh until you’ve done so yourself.
Holding back laughter can be a challenge. I know this because I teach English, and my adult students say some pretty funny things. One student says “mommygranate” instead of “pomegranate.” Another describes her new computer as a male, as in “he is a good one.” Often it’s tiny things that set me off – a student’s “hello mister teacher” or the tick “este” instead of “um” – because there is something about the abuse of the English language that I find extremely funny. Unless a native speaker mixes up “they’re” and “their.” Then I just fume.
Farith doesn’t laugh at me. He’s been my Zoom penpal for the last few months, and he sits quietly, in his home in Potosí, Bolivia, as I run the Spanish language through a garbage disposal. I pick verb tenses at random, and slot in the subjunctive every tenth sentence, with wanton disregard for its purpose. The first, second and third person might as well be the same, because I’m constantly saying “yo fue” instead of “yo fui” and making other errors I would never make on an exam. I’m back in the classroom: “¿Cómo se dice ‘pandemic’?”
Something I’ve learned from my friendship with Farith is that speaking another language reduces who you can be in those moments. I can’t tell stories in Spanish. I can’t talk about politics in Spanish, or music (other than “me gusta mucho”), or food (“es muy bueno”). I try to explain how a rewards credit card works and instead explain a rewards letter – I’ve mixed up “carta” and “tarjeta.”
After my allotted thirty minutes of Spanish is up, relief washes over me as though I’m sinking into the couch after a long run. If we started with Spanish, then in the next half hour I am a genius, my thoughts flowing freely, undiluted. If we end with Spanish, then I close down the call and sit there for a few minutes, my brain unknotting. “How am I so stupid?”
On my resume it says “Fluent in Spanish,” right next to “Deliriously overconfident in my abilities” and “Can juggle.” Fluency does not sound or feel like the mess I make during that weekly half hour. My fluency is all backwards – I can watch Money Heist in Spanish, I can read El Código Da Vinci, but ask me to say “it was as if he were trying to hurt me” and I will explode.
Instead, I have experienced brief periods of fluidity. My Spanish was fluid yelling at a Peruvian bus driver while he waited an hour for passengers to show. It was fluid speaking with my Argentinian host mom about the canned tuna pie we ate every Thursday. The language flowed through necessity and repetition.
About 67 million Americans speak a foreign language at home. That’s twenty percent of Americans who struggle, at some point in their day, to communicate with other people. Some have trouble with the basics, like asking directions, and others with more nuanced phrasing, like switching the indefinite article in “he is idiot” and “he is a stupid.” Many have to write resumes and go on job interviews in a language they aren’t truly comfortable speaking.
There is great privilege to English fluency. I think about this often on work calls with European colleagues, who have to speak my language on a daily basis, and with my students, one of whom needs English to land a job teaching nuclear physics. The language has a magnetic pull – just ask the hundreds of thousands of English teachers working in rural classrooms around the globe about their job security. The flow of students is never ending.
Farith is largely self-taught. He doesn’t use English for his job or in his home. His city of less than 200,000 is not a hub for international business. But still he learns.
I don’t need to practice Spanish. I could easily give my thirty minutes to Farith, tell more coherent stories, and continue to caveat in interviews that “ha sido bastante tiempo que lo he usado mi Español” – it’s been a while since I’ve used my Spanish (translation pending). But there is solidarity in struggling together. I learn more about my students that way. And I need to speak Spanish well when Farith and I meet up in Potosí.