Monday, January 14, 2013

Español...we meet again

Tonight, I went in for a Spanish level assessment. At the end of the session, the Spanish teacher says to me, "Wow Vivienne, you've got great conversational skills. You speak so fast and I'd definitely put you in a level 3 class...Except that you speak a LOT of Portuguese." Merp.
This, of course, I suspected. During a game of Spanish Taboo I'm trying to get the other participants to guess the word "ribs" and I'm screaming "los ossos!" which means "bones" in Portuguese, and "bears" in Spanish. Needless to say, they had no idea why I had bears on my body.
Having minored in Spanish in college, I'm a little bummed that I have to take a step backwards and "re-learn" even the basics.
The Portuguese I've spent the last two years speaking has warped my Spanish pronunciation and vocab, just as it occurred the other way around when I was first learning Portuguese in Moz.
"Obrigada" comes out more naturally than "gracias" and well, a lot of the time, I don't even know if the words tumbling out of my mouth are Spanish, Portuguese, or a mix of both.
So I'm commencing a rigorous training program to get back to Spanish because, let's face it, Spanish is what I'll be speaking in Southern California.
But at the same time, I'm terrified of losing my Portuguese. As much as it's helped me- building Portuguese on top of Spanish- because they are so similar, the flip-side is that, um, they're so damn similar.  And to lose my Portuguese would be like losing a huge part of my Peace Corps experience.
To top it all off, I'm starting a French class tomorrow. Can I juggle so many foreign languages, use them effectively, and continue to learn and improve in each of them?  In a way, it's like re-integrating into American culture while keeping all the lessons I learned in Mozambique.
The game here is balance. Now how do I find balance?

1 comments:

Casey said...

Hmm, I'm guessing instead of French you should take a non-Romance language. It'll be less likely to damage your brain, and could be more useful than French.
There's definitely been times when speaking swedish to my mom that spanish has come out since moving to Venezuela, and it's pretty embarrassing to say the least.

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