The arrival of COVID-19 to South America in March 2020 disrupted the travel side of this travel blog, but in terms of my acquisition of Spanish as a third (?) language, the subsequent and ongoing quarantine has been something of a blessing and a curse.
One of the advantages of backpacking while learning a language is that one gets to arrive in a new hostel every few days, which means that one gets to meet new people and go through the routine “getting to know you” conversation. This conversation of “Where are you from? Where have you been? Where are you going” can quickly become tedious if repeated too often. On the longer trips this ritual can reveal the superficiality of all one’s interactions and heighten the inherent loneliness of travel. However, when taken as an excuse to speak in the target language, it is a perfect practice regimen for improving fluency.
This daily practice was dramatically cut off when Argentina went into lock down. All the other opportunities to engage with local inhabitants also went out the window as one’s world was reduced to a home and a grocery store. When I parted ways with my roommates to live alone, I must have gone three months without speaking to anyone in person (other than the pro forma “tengo una bolsa” or “gracias” of the checkout line).
On the other hand, given the gift of time on my hands, I have consumed more Spanish content in the last 8 months than I could ever have imagined, both reading voraciously and justifying the roughly $5/month cost of Netflix that I haven’t been factoring into my travel costs. Having just finished my first Spanish novel of 2021 (in eleven days, or according to my library reading app a mere 7 hours), now seems like a good time to take a look back at my Spanish learning saga.
Early Exposure
Having spent most of my childhood (excepting the times in Germany) in San Antonio, Las Cruces and El Paso, I was definitely exposed to Spanish at an early age. However, at least as late as sixth grade, my ignorance of the language was total. I recall thinking the Jesus‘s I heard in the school halls were calling out to an Olympian (to be fair, I was really into Greek mythology) and I also remember hearing qué as the letter k. I may have accidentally participated in a bilingual “Who’s on First” routine more than once.
Notably, when the time came to choose a foreign language, I picked German in high school. I rather conspicuously did not want to learn Spanish whether it was a germ of xenophobia or merely a defense mechanism to preserve my identity against the Spanish-speaking host culture. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to learn something when one is both obsessed with Mexican food and every other radio ad includes some Spanish.
When it came to university, I didn’t even consider taking a Spanish class, but discovered that the library had a set of Pimsleur (or Berlitz) CDs. I went through those without really learning anything, but that was when I decided that I should maybe try to get fluent in Spanish at some point in my life.
Reemergence
Years later in the fall of 2017, I was sitting at a cafe in Taidong, Taiwan and not feeling particularly motivated to work on my dissertation. I don’t know how it occurred to me exactly, but I decided I should maybe try to learn Spanish. At the time, I was at a plateau or pinnacle of my Chinese, not needing to actively improve my language skills as I was literally swimming in Chinese academic papers. I had used to enjoy studying Chinese, but I stopped studying the language when I started grad school. So, maybe part of me was yearning to learn something new. In any case, I downloaded a pdf of the Foreign Service Institute’s ancient Spanish textbook and committed myself to Duolingo.
It took me about three months to complete the Spanish tree on Duolingo, after which I switched to Japanese for a couple months, then redid Spanish when the app completely redesigned the tree and structure of the course. If it weren’t for a particularly boozy weekend last August, I would have maintained a streak on the platform for these past three years. Of course, finishing the PhD was always the priority, and maybe ten minutes a day of some Spanish translation exercises wasn’t magically going to make me fluent.
Immersion
It didn’t take me long after arriving in Buenos Aires in October 2019 to realize that Duolingo was not going to be sufficient. Between reviewing lessons and completing new lessons they had added since I last focused on Spanish, I had maybe enough to keep me busy for a month or two. I had spent the week before my flight intensively reviewing and maybe had a notion that I was could be a competent elementary level speaking. Unfortunately, I was disabused of that fantasy when I couldn’t understand a word of what anyone was saying. To be honest, I still don’t know what porteños are saying half the time. So on top of the daily practical experience as already described above, I needed to seek out additional resources.
Lingvist
I had plenty of time to kill in the hostel for the first week while waiting for the airline to find my luggage, so I found a second app–Lingvist. It’s a straightforward vocabulary-focused app, using cloze items (the fancy pedagogical term for fill in the blank) to teach upwards of 5,000 words. It’s good to have example sentences provide context for the vocabulary items while forcing the user to conjugate. It’s bad that each conjugation was apparently listed as a separate word, so “to eat” must have accounted for 5 out of the 5,000 items. I could never make sense of the ranking of words. The app implies there is an ordering from easy to difficult, but the reality seemed to contradict that. After a one-week trial of the full featured app, I put up with the limited-feature free version for a while before springing for a 3-month membership so I could blow through the entirety of the (European) Spanish and (Latin American) Spanish modules, plus the bonus grammar and reading quizzes.
ANKI
ANKI is a popular, general purpose flashcard app with fully customizable parameters for spaced repetition. I found a 10,000 card deck of the top 5,000 most frequent Spanish words (1 card Spanish to English, 1 card English to Spanish). I really don’t like flashcards, so I only worked on it sporadically and never finished getting all the way through the deck.
Podcasts
It took me a couple weeks (or basically my second stop) to realize that Youtube might be useful. In Rosario, I watched several compilations of Spanish Listening exercises from SpanishPod101‘s extensive library. That reminded me of SpanishPod, which apparently no longer exists as a business, but is completely archived on the internet. I find it useful to have short, easy to understand dialogs playing in the background on bus trips or whatever to familiarize my ear and memorize language chunks.
Meanwhile, in my actual podcast app, I am subscribed to News in Slow Spanish (Intermediate–Latin America and Advanced-Spain), The Spanish Dude!, Yabla, and Duolingo. Of course Duolingo has their own podcast for telling bilingual stories of the Spanish speaking world. Yabla is a paid video platform of graded Spanish content with bilingual subtitles that releases free videos via the podcast. The Spanish Dude is an American gringo who talks more about learning strategies and sharing his experiences learning Spanish. News in Slow Spanish is pretty self explanatory but also functions as a free podcast advertising the company’s paid platform.
Reading
It was also the hostel in Rosario where I discovered one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series in Spanish translation on the book swap shelf. I suppose that counts as the first book I read in Spanish. I’ve been looking for the others in the series ever since and perusing the book shelves of other hostels, but never found anything worth investing the time with a dictionary to read. Hostel book exchanges tend to be a weird mix of Swedish novels, pulp fiction, and technical manuals.
A lot of my early reading was mediated through Duolingo, which has multimedia stories available for some of their languages. It’s not a particularly fun way to read, as the stories appear one line at a time with audio narration and the ocassional pop quiz question to see if you are paying attention.
By the time I reached Salta, I was starting to Google “online Spanish textbook” and “Spanish learning resources,” which lead to finding two graded Spanish readers on Project Gutenberg, dated of course, but enough to keep me busy for a month or two. I also found Practical Spanish to be quite useful with just a number of readings sorted by beginner, intermediate, and advanced.
Video
Though I tried to watch a couple of Pedro Almódovar films in the early stages of my trip, it was the poking around on Youtube that resulted in more substantial rewards. As recommended by some list of resources, there is a short sitcom (only about 10 episodes) called Extra en Español about an American in Barcelona. It’s a cheesy, but written with simpler Spanish and spoken slower because the target audience is learners of Spanish. Similarly, there was a telenovela called Destinos that uses almost only English in the introductory episode and builds with purely Spanish finale.
I had managed to work through most of the resources listed above by the end of 2019, and the combination of approaches paid rapid dividends. After two months of solid studying, I felt about as fluent in Spanish as I was in Chinese after two years. Not perfect, but comfortably fluent in most situations.
In January 2020, I had a flurry of reading in Cordoba because I stayed first at a Selena hostel where my dorm was next to the hostel library (yes, a whole library) then I stayed in an Airbnb with an absent host, who happened to be a kindergarten teacher. At the hostel, I read an illustrated abridge version of Around the World in 80 Days. In the airbnb, I read at least 100 kids books, which isn’t that many considering many of the books were 20 pages long with one sentence per page. Children’s books are challenging in their own way because the names of so many types of animals and fairies don’t really come up in adult-focused material. In the month of traveling between Cordoba and Mendoza, I made a habit frequenting cafés, where I could enjoy a coffee and the daily paper, which I could work my way through without having to look up so many words.
Quarantine
As the lockdown was going into effect, I snatched a young adult novel from the hostel’s paltry book exchange. The Two Marias is an Argentinian coming-of-age story about a girl who is reading the diary of her great-grandmother’s voyage from Italy. The diary is in Italian (with a few words changed into Spanish and an Italian-Spanish glossary in the back), so not the ideal reading material, but still technically my first Spanish-language original book. When we peeled off from the hostel into a house, I discovered my French roommate had a stack of choose-your-own-adventure books in Spanish (all translations of original English). I think I read three of them before moved into my own apartment and lost access to that treasure trove.
The first house had a Netflix account attached to the big screen smart TV, and apart from group viewings of 80s action films, I rewatched Extra en Español with the German to encourage his Spanish learning and watched the first two seasons of Money Heist (La Casa de Papel) with the Frenchman for pleasure. That’s also when I started to watch the original Colombian Ugly Betty (Yo soy Betty, La Fea). So, when we moved into a second house with a smart TV but no Netflix account, I decided it was worth setting up my own account.
Netflix
Apart from the two aforementioned shows (finishing episode 335 of Ugly Betty at the end of June), I have watched a lot of Spanish content on Netflix including both limited run sitcoms like Psiconautas (Argentina) and The Neighbor (Spain) as well as more Colombian telenovelas like The Good Bandit (63 episodes) and Bolívar (still only half way through the 60 episode program after four months).
The more impressive feat is the amount of cinema I’ve watched.
| Title | Date Watched | Year | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lusers | 6/27/2020 | 2015 | Arg/Chile/Peru |
| Esperando la carroza | 6/4/2020 | 1985 | Argentina |
| Pizza, Beer, & Smokes | 10/30/2020 | 1998 | Argentina |
| Caida del Cielo | 8/21/2020 | 2016 | Argentina |
| Mi Obra Maestra | 9/12/2020 | 2018 | Argentina |
| So Much Love to Give | 9/9/2020 | 2019 | Argentina |
| Attitude Test | 6/21/2020 | 2016 | Chile |
| No estoy loca | 6/11/2020 | 2018 | Chile |
| Mujeres arriba | 7/5/2020 | 2020 | Chile |
| Loving is Losing | 9/27/2020 | 2018 | Columbia |
| Santo Cachón | 7/3/2020 | 2018 | Columbia |
| Si saben cómo me pongo ¿pa’ qué me invitan? | 10/29/2020 | 2018 | Columbia |
| Feo pero sabroso | 6/17/2020 | 2019 | Columbia |
| Death Can Wait | 7/9/2020 | 2020 | Columbia |
| Instructions Not Included | 10/11/2020 | 2013 | Mexico |
| Elvira I Will Give You My Life but I’m Using It | 9/13/2020 | 2014 | Mexico |
| Grandma’s Birthday | 7/5/2020 | 2015 | Mexico |
| Warehoused | 9/5/2020 | 2015 | Mexico |
| El tamaño sí importa | 10/14/2020 | 2016 | Mexico |
| Macho | 10/19/2020 | 2016 | Mexico |
| No Manches Frida | 9/6/2020 | 2016 | Mexico |
| Un padre no tan padre | 7/8/2020 | 2016 | Mexico |
| ¿Cómo matar a un esposo muerto? | 10/15/2020 | 2017 | Mexico |
| Ana and Bruno | 12/15/2020 | 2017 | Mexico |
| Camino a Marte | 10/16/2020 | 2017 | Mexico |
| Malacopa | 1/1/2021 | 2018 | Mexico |
| Ni tú ni yo | 12/19/2020 | 2018 | Mexico |
| ROMA | 6/6/2020 | 2018 | Mexico |
| Como caído del cielo | 6/30/2020 | 2019 | Mexico |
| Grandma’s Wedding | 7/10/2020 | 2019 | Mexico |
| Grandma’s Last Wishes | 12/30/2020 | 2020 | Mexico |
| Mutiny of the Worker Bees | 6/20/2020 | 2020 | Mexico |
| Don’t Call Me Spinster | 10/28/2020 | 2018 | Peru |
| How to Get Over a Breakup | 6/14/2020 | 2018 | Peru |
| Sí, Mi Amor | 8/5/2020 | 2020 | Peru |
| Off Course | 9/20/2020 | 2015 | Spain |
| Spy Time | 4/26/2020 | 2015 | Spain |
| For Your Own Good | 9/17/2020 | 2017 | Spain |
| The Bar | 9/22/2020 | 2017 | Spain |
| Thi Mai | 10/20/2020 | 2017 | Spain |
| Jefe | 9/27/2020 | 2018 | Spain |
| Superlopez | 7/18/2020 | 2018 | Spain |
| Yucatán | 10/4/2020 | 2018 | Spain |
<abbr title="With Jean Reno speaking Spanish">4L</abbr> | 9/23/2020 | 2019 | Spain |
| The Platform | 5/9/2020 | 2019 | Spain |
| I love you, stupid | 7/7/2020 | 2020 | Spain |
| Whisky | 12/21/2020 | 2004 | Uruguay |
| Porno para principiantes | 6/13/2020 | 2018 | Uruguay |
<abbr title="Will Ferrel learned Spanish for this role">Casa de mi Padre</abbr> | 7/4/2020 | 2012 | USA |
Subtitles
I should note that I am not at a listening level where I can turn off the subtitles. I watch some things with English and some with Spanish. I like the variety and I think it helps to do both. With Spanish subtitles, because they are for the hearing impaired, you get extra vocabulary telling you about creaking doors, the names of songs, and [engine starting]. With stronger reading skills, I can use my eyes to support my ears in order to understand what was said. On the other hand, with English, reading is so fast and effortless, I can actually focus more attention on what I am hearing. Plus, the sometimes idiomatic translation expands my understanding of the subtleties of language use.
Of course, I’ve probably watched ten times as much content in English, but the nice perk about Netflix is I can turn on Spanish subtitles and practice reading while bingewatching which ever show.
Literature
It took moving into an Airbnb with a (small) collection of books to get me reading again. From that shelf, I read Siddhartha, The Hobbit, and Prince Caspian in translation at which point it occured to me to look up Spanish language books in my library app. I had looked periodically beginning in October, but didn’t hit the magical point of literacy + competency to find things worth reading. Apart from a smattering of kids books, I read several substantial YA books (100 pages, zero pictures) and The Magician’s Nephew. Unfortunately that was the only available book in the Chronicles of Narnia, but the entire Harry Potter series was available and that kept me busy from July through December.
| Book | Reading Time |
|---|---|
| Sorcerer’s Stone | 9:38 |
| Chamber of Secretes | 10:32 |
| Prisoner of Azkaban | 13:42 |
| Goblet of Fire | 23:15 |
| Order of the Phoenix | 31:45 |
| Half Blood Prince | 19:17 |
| Deathly Hallows | 25:42 |
Meanwhile, I inhereted the Frenchman’s library of books (which were originally borrowed from one of his Argentinian friends) via some sort of tontine, and can add a couple more Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and a R.L. Stein book to the reading list.
All told, it’s a lot of reading, and while I may still have doubts about my fluency, I can confidently claim to be literate in Spanish. Strangely enough, with the one exception mentioned above, every book I read was translated from English into Spanish. In other words, I hadn’t read any actual Spanish literature. I had picked up and put down Cien Años de Soledad, but ultimately decided I needed more reading practice with the more accesible YA lit.
2021 will be different. I am done with the second hand works. It is my resolution to make this the year of Spanish Literature. While most people wanting to read more aim at a book a month, my goal will be 16 novels. Since I can check out books for 3 weeks at a time, I should be a little faster than a book a month. As mentioned at the beginning of this novelistic blog post, I’ve already finished my first book, Laura Esquivel’s Como Agua Para Chocolate in a week and a half. I don’t expect every book to be so short, but after the later Harry Potter novels, long books aren’t so intimidating. Nonetheless, I’m going to leave Garcia-Marquez for later in the year. I believe my next book will be Isabel Allende’s La Casa de los Espíritus and the final book should, of course, be Don Quixote. By that time, I think I can close the book on Spanish, and start seriously working on language #4 (unless it’s time to go back and read the Four Great Classics of Chinese Literature).