Expats Learning Spanish

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Everyone should know why you need to learn at least some Spanish if you plan to live here. Nicaragua remains the country with the least amount of English speakers in Latin America due to the few expats and the poor education system here. You came to experience a new culture and language is an important part of the culture. And while frustrating at times, it is both fun and satisfying to learn another language. You will discover a few roadblocks on the path to learning.

Still, it is surprising how few expats speak much Spanish and the number that is fluent is rather small. Even many of the men which marry Nica women speak little or no Spanish. So much for pillow talk and intimate conversations helping the learning curve. A great many of the expats that do speak Spanish are limited to the present tense or a little more. One of our greatest disappointments has been our lack of fluency after six years though we know much more than before. We are still taking lessons once a week but comprehension has been the greatest problem. We have accumulated more Spanish dictionaries (picture and word), encyclopedias, grammar guides and other reference materials than most universities in Managua.

To get an idea of the magnitude of effort to learn Spanish, it is slightly more difficult than becoming a nuclear physicist. Assuming you have a math and science background you can become a nuclear physicist in two to six years. For an older expat it will take longer than that to become fluent in Spanish. Many times, during corporate projects in my former career, someone would state “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do this”. Well, rocket science is easier than learning Spanish.

To begin the process you need to set high goals, perhaps something like wanting to have a meaningful conversation with your neighbor’s three year old child. This is what we call a moving goal since the child will be six by the time you reach the three year old level of fluency and left you far behind.

The first step is to buy a good English-Spanish dictionary which will distinguish you from the expats that refuse to learn. There is a dizzying array of dictionaries available. Right away you will discover there are Spanish-English dictionaries and English-Spanish dictionaries. The latter is for English speakers to learn Spanish. Yes, they are greatly different. You will need to balance practicality against a comprehensive source of information. A small pocket dictionary is easy to carry around but it will have far fewer words in it and it will never have the word you are researching. The very large ones are comprehensive but due to their weight must be left on the coffee table and will require 30 minutes to find a word. Being an older expat you may want to buy one with large print. We discovered the best solution was simply to buy ten different dictionaries and like so many other things, cannot find any of them when we need one.

Being the 21^st century you may suggest using a dictionary app on your IPhone, IPad or Android device. We tried that but you often are not sure of the spelling and this is one of the few times where paper beats the electronic device. Then there is the app where you just point your device at a Spanish sign and it comes up with the equivalent English translation. Cute but hardly effective! I do use a couple IPad apps that act like flash cards to reinforce verbs and their conjugation.

OK, we have our lofty goals and a dictionary. The experts tell us the best ways of learning another language are:

• Having a Latina lover
  I approached this concept with an open and academic mind but my wife had a violent reaction to the idea. People in the know call this the “horizontal dictionary”.
• Watch telenovelas (Spanish soap operas)
  Tried this for a while and I could grasp what they were saying without understanding the words. Some of the episodes got me excited but I discovered it had nothing to do with learning Spanish.
• Total immersion
  This is the best way by far. Upon first coming to Nicaragua we did a two week immersion in Esteli. Four hours of class each morning with homework that took several hours each day. The family we stayed with forced us to continue using Spanish. We learned more in two weeks than in a year of regular classes. It was intense and that was the only teacher we have come across that was fully trained to be a language teacher. Still, had we done that for the first six months we would be completely fluent.
• Find a native to teach you Spanish while you teach them English.
  Sounds good and I tried it but you must be highly structured i.e. one hour only English then one hour only Spanish. In reality, it becomes a mix and neither learns that much.
• Take regular classes
  This is what most of us end up doing and we still do. Unless you are taking many hours a week this method helps more with maintaining your level of Spanish. It is also the most expensive. Most teachers want at least $5 an hour and most want double if teaching both of us and for here, that is a lot of money. You have to search for a good teacher since most are young ladies without any formal training. I know so many friends that kept their teacher because they did not want to hurt their feelings by asking for another teacher.
• CDs, DVDs, online courses
  I’ve tried a lot of them and some are better than others. Very good for just learning the basic rules and verbs. To really learn another language you must converse with a native speaker.

Some advice for the married male learners. Many, if not most, of the Granada Spanish tutors are young and often, above average looking women. I don’t mean to discriminate against beautiful women but they can sometimes be difficult to learn from, especially when they are wearing some of the outfits you see here. We had this one young lady that came twice a week to teach my wife and me. She was a wonderful young lady but she had a tendency to wear dresses that exposed much of her ample upper body. Even with my wife being there I found it difficult to concentrate and after two weeks, could only remember the Spanish word for breasts. Though difficult to do so being a normal male and to the embarrassment of my wife I asked the young lady to wear more high collared clothing when instructing us. Out of sight, out of mind so hiding the cleavage greatly helped me to learn more in the following weeks.

It is better to use a professional teacher but they are more expensive and there are very few in the Granada area. I once had the brilliant idea to use a college student as a tutor, mostly to save money. I asked around and our pharmacist suggested her daughter. The first day she was 30 minutes late, the second day 45 minutes late and the third day she asked me for a loan so I fired her. At least use an experienced teacher and interview them first. Not all of them are compatible with your needs or moods. Older expats have moods, believe me.

I have run into many frustrations in trying to learn Spanish here. One was discovering that Nica Spanish was different than Spanish Spanish, Cuban Spanish, etc. This discovery invalidated half of my reference books and CDs. We had a group of volunteers from Spain and our Nica friends could not understand them. This really raised my confidence level when two Spanish speaking groups could not understand each other. Nicas use the informal Vos form and most Spanish reference books do not even show that form. So be sure to buy the Central American version of Spanish CDs and DVDs.

Sometimes I suspect my Nica neighbors are trying to sabotage my efforts at learning. Many of them tend not to use verbs at times. For example, I have a friend, Ivania, who sometimes runs up to me and simply states “enojado?, feliz? or triste?” (mad, happy or sad). I spent many weeks memorizing the 501 most used verbs and the mysterious differences between ser (to be) and estar (to be) so I expect everyone to use verbs. Another thing is that we have traveled all around the world and when we are not understood, we slow down and state the sentence or question more clearly. Not here. Many times we apologize (since it is our problem) and simply state “Mas despacio, por favor” (slower, please). Their response is to say it again at the same speed or perhaps speed it up since they are starting to get frustrated with you. It was explained to us that with the current method of teaching Spanish phonetically in the public schools, it is difficult for the speaker to know how to say it more slowly. More likely, the Union of Spanish Teachers here in Granada is behind this to ensure we take more classes.

There are so many words that are the same spelling or similar to the English equivalents. They call these the false amigos since you think you are using the right word but you are not even close. For example, I took our neighbors to the carnival recently to ride the various typical carnival rides. Their favorite was the bumper cars which I tried to say in Spanish but because of a one-letter difference it came out as the homosexual cars instead of the crashing cars.

Examples of False Amigos

Delito – You might think it means delightful or to delight but it means a crime. Delito usually refers to a minor crime, as contrasted with a serious crime or crimen.

Despertar – This verb is usually used in the reflexive form, meaning to wake up (me despierto a las siete, I wake up at seven). If you’re desperate, you can use desesperado.

Embarazada – It might be embarrassing to be pregnant but it means pregnant

Éxito – It’s a hit or a success. If you’re looking for the exit, look for una salida.

Ganga – It’s a bargain. Although ganga may be heard in Spanglish as a word for “gang,” the usual word is pandilla.

Spanglish is very popular here and it usually means you don’t know Spanish or worse, you think you know Spanish. When we first arrived here I tried to come up with my own translations. We had a worker come to our house and we needed him to fix the ceiling fan. I only knew a few words and did not know the actual word for fan so I pointed and said “maquina de viento” (wind machine). I thought it was a witty translation but he just replied “Oh, el fan?”. They have adopted quite a few of our words and he did not think I was witty.

Our major problem is that when we hear something, we must translate it to its English equivalent, think of the response, translate it to Spanish then speak it. And that’s assuming we still remember what the original question was. Amy is much better at comprehending what people are saying while I still just hear mumbo-jumbo many times. My strength is that I understand the rules of English and Spanish grammar better so I can form more correct responses assuming the Spanish speaker can wait two minutes while I formulate the response. So we do make a better team than tackling it individually.

We have been told it is usually 5-7 years of immersion before we begin thinking in Spanish instead of translating everything which brings up the original issue again. You cannot literally translate Spanish to English which is probably true for most languages. For example, we say “I am hungry” while they say “I have hunger”. This may seem minor but it means you cannot just translate the words and get the same meaning for the sentence. Please remember, I am not a linguist and these are merely my perceptions on learning another language. I now have much more respect for people that speak multiple languages. I shudder to think how many times I heard someone in the states make derogatory remarks about a Latino speaking halting English. I now wish I had that much mastery of the second language.

People will tell you Spanish is easy to learn because so many words are the same or similar but that is what makes it difficult because you tend to fabricate non-existent words by adding an “o’ to the end or just pronouncing it differently. People will also tell you that in Spanish you always pronounce the letters the same unlike English where vowels are pronounced in many different sounds depending on the word. That may be but in Spanish the “h’ is silent but the “g” has the “h” sound only when preceding “e” or “i” while “j” normally has the “h” sound. And don’t forget every language has a lot of foreign words in it and then the rules do not apply.

You can’t do anything about the nouns, you just must learn the new words. It’s the verbs that are the killers. In English there are basically three forms of verbs; the infinitive, the past tense and the past participle. I drink a beer, yesterday I drank a beer and by tomorrow I have drunk another beer. All of the other forms simply add the same old auxiliary verbs. I will drink, I would drink, I have drunk, I had drunk, etc, etc. A few oddities like I drink, we drink, they drink but she drinks, adding the “s’ in third person singular. Spanish speakers must learn all of the irregular verb forms of English and I never realized there were so many since we take them for granted.

But in Spanish there are 15 forms of each verb plus the past participle and gerund. Within these 15 forms the verb has six styles to indicate who is the speaker or originator of the action. In English we would say I have, you have, we have, she has, they have while in Spanish you say yo tengo, tu tienes (informal you), nosotros tenemos, ella tiene and ellos tienen. And here they use the vos form also so each verb has up to 90 spellings for a single verb.

Add on top of that, that adjectives must match in gender and number and that nouns may be masculine or feminine with corresponding articles, and you have quite a lot to learn. One of the other oddities is that saying a Spanish sentence may be different than the spelling. For example, if a word has a final syllable that sounds the same as the first syllable of the next word, you just drop one of similar sounds. This creates a smooth sounding, more efficient sentence but more difficult to comprehend. We’re not looking for sympathy but it has proven to be a challenge to learn Spanish and I’m not as patient now as when I was younger.

Do not be discouraged. You can learn Nica Spanish. My major problem was I waited until I was a crotchety older man before trying seriously. Some days I’m just not in the mood to speak and hear something other than my native language. I have been known to be unruly in Spanish classes and even telling the teacher she is incorrect just because I feel ornery. I know when I’m ornery because I then start saying things like “you young whippersnapper, I was studying grammar rules before you were a gleam in your father’s eye”. Classes usually go downhill after that.

Some final tips. Classes are much easier in the early morning than in the hot afternoons. Learn the verbs and the subjugations on your own and use class time for practical application and conversation. Have the teacher come to your home then if you get frustrated you are close to the refrigerator for a beer or a drink. Beautiful women can be good teachers but they are distracting. Learning with your wife is difficult, requires excellent social skills and is a good way to ruin a marriage. Good teachers give you homework. Poor teachers tell you that you are making excellent progress and speak Spanish well. You should change teachers every few months. Always interview the teacher before starting a series of classes to ensure you are compatible. After all, you are paying for a service.

Good luck, I hope your road to Spanish is smoother than mine.

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