Kyle Hepp

April 15, 2011

The amazingly stylish and awesome travel blogger Oneika had a few questions the other day about mastering Spanish. In short, she’s a language nerd and I love her for it

She asked if I could detail my language journey and that right there is more than enough material for one post so I’ll get into it.

I took Spanish in high school and excelled at it. After I took Spanish I, I got an A and my mom said, “Great! You’re going on study abroad to Santiago, Chile. Look it up on a map.” And off I went. I think I was 13 or 14.

I didn’t speak very much Spanish before I left on the trip. What does anybody really know after Spanish I?

“Hello. My name is Kyle. I am 14 years old and my favorite is blue. Where’s the bathroom? Please!”

The first day I arrived, I was terrified. Let me rephrase that. I WAS TERRIFIED. When my host family picked me up at the airport they had a sign with my name on it so I found them easily. We walked to the car and drove the approximate hour home. They talked and talked the entire time and I had NO idea what they were saying. I mean, there was literally no communication. I couldn’t understand them and I was too scared to talk to them.

When we got to the house, they showed me my room. I opened my suitcase, found my pajamas, got in bed and then stayed there — for the next 24 hours (at least). I did not leave the room except to go to the bathroom at night, after I was certain that nobody was awake and nobody would see me and try to talk to me again.

Eventually I came out. Eventually I went to school. But, it was scary. I really didn’t understand much of anything going on for the first month. Some of the teachers were more understanding than others. I remember once, I walked in to the classroom and I smiled at the teacher, but didn’t say anything. He said, “Saludame!” and I just continued walking to my seat. He then got mad and started yelling at me because I hadn’t said hello. One of the other kids defended me and said, “But, Profe, she doesn’t understand what you’re saying!”

I didn’t learn any of this until later, at recess, when someone explained what had happened to me Very Slowly. I hadn’t even realized he was yelling specifically at me. I knew he was yelling. And I knew he was looking at me. But for all I know, he could’ve just been yelling at the classroom in general and just happened to single me out for eye contact. Teachers do that sometimes.

But to make a long story short, after about a month, I was understanding almost everything that people said to me. After two months I could communicate back. And after three months, I could understand 99%, communicate fairly fluently, and wasn’t exhausted at the end of the day. If you’ve ever studied abroad or been fully immersed in a new language, you know what I’m talking about. At the end of the day in a language you’re learning, you are mentally wiped out.

I went home after three months and obviously moved on to more advanced Spanish classes. I skipped ahead to Spanish III, which was literature and general culture. Then Spanish IV was more conversational than anything else. My senior year in high school I was able to take classes at a nearby college. I had to take a placement test and my level of fluency placed me into third year Spanish courses, which continued to be literature and cinema and culture and poetry sorts of classes. Then when I actually started college, I wasn’t allowed to take any Spanish classes at a lower level than classes I had already taken. So basically, I never took a grammar class more advanced than my high school Spanish 1 class.

I do feel like this has made some things difficult. I remember on study abroad, the teacher corrected a fellow student saying, “That’s the subjunctive rule.” And I was all:

“A, what is the subjunctive? And b, THERE ARE RULES?!”

When I learned in Chile when I was 13, I learned the way a baby learns to speak English — trial and error and deducing the rules, that I didn’t know were actual rules, through practice.

I would say, “Yo voy al supermercado. Pero…ayer! Ayer!” That’s “I’m going to the supermarket. But…yesterday! Yesterday!” When I wanted to speak in past tense (because obviously in Spanish I you only know how to conjugate a selective few amount of verbs in present tense), that’s how I did it — by adding, “Yesterday! Yesterday!” to the end of my sentences. And then someone would correct me and say, “Yo FUI al mercado,” or “I WENT to the supermarket.” I’d correct myself and add the past tense of “I go,” to my language arsenal.

So all I have to go off of is what sounds right to me, and what I’ve googled. Grammatical rules escape me because I never knew them to begin with.

Oneika’s next question is:

Do you mostly communicate with Seba and his family in Spanish?

I communicate with Seba’s family only in Spanish. They don’t speak English. His parents actually met in France (his mom is Paraguyan-French and his dad is Chilean) and speak French. I used to communicate with Seba 100% in Spanish. Then we tried to switch to 100% English so he could learn. That didn’t really work out — we were too used to speaking Spanish together — but ever since then we communicate in Spanglish. When we’re with my family or other English speakers, I’ll speak to him in English, in an attempt to be polite, and Seba will respond to me in Spanish, in no attempt to be polite

Part of that is also because, while I feel good about my abilities to speak well in both languages, I feel BAD about my abilities to switch back and forth with ease. There is no way in hell I could be an interpreter. My brain makes the switch to either Spanish or English…and then stays there until I switch it back. There’s no rapid fire going from one to the other! The other thing is that if I’m with native English speakers, I go back to English and then even if I’m trying to speak Spanish, sometimes I’ll start saying a sentence and then halfway through switch back to English without even realizing it. My brain is incapable of speaking Spanish when I’m with people that speak my native English.

Do you have a Chilena accent?

I do have a Chilena accent, but it’s still a Gringa accent with Chilean on top. What I mean by that, is if I’m in Chile, people know I’m gringa because of my strong accent. However, every time I’m in a Spanish speaking country outside of Chile, people ask me if I’m Chilean or they just get a really puzzled look on my face and say, “Where are you from?” like they’re confused because my accent makes them think that I might be gringa OR I might be Chilean and just speak really weird Spanish. Because Chilean do. Speak really weird Spanish, that is.

Do you dream in the language or have troubles speaking English since you living in a Spanish-speaking country?

I don’t dream very much in any language, but when I do sometimes it’s all in Spanish, sometimes all in English and sometimes it’ll be a very strange mix of both.

And YES. I definitely have trouble speaking English! I forget words that I used to know, I feel like my vocabulary isn’t what it used to be. Sometimes I can’t remember how to say a simple word in Spanish or in English. And sometimes I can only remember the word in Spanish, even though I know it’s a word I know in English. I constantly feel like I have words on the tip of my tongue that I can’t quite grasp. It’s better now that I’ve started reading again in English. Books are what gave me a healthy vocabulary to begin with, and like I said,having a Kindle has changed my life. And when my vocabulary is bigger in English, I then use words that are lying somewhere in the recesses of my brain when I speak Spanish too. Win/win all around!

If you have any more questions (about anything, not just language in particular) leave them in the comments or shoot me an email! I don’t have much to blog about while we’re in Michigan so I’m happy for any and all ideas!