Our recent addition to the Boot Camp schedule is Advanced Writing, an intensive workshop-style class. The teachers want us to write concisely, clearly, and concretely, in Spanish, of course. Spanish grammar, though much more reliable and more often logical than English grammar, so easily becomes a wordy, convoluted mess when trying to explain something complex. This grammar, paired with the over-reliance on jargon and pretentious stock phrases that taints academic texts in all languages, makes bad writing in Spanish just as incomprehensible as bad writing in English.
Of course, I’m at a serious disadvantage in any writing situation here because my native language is English, not Spanish. My vocabulary is smaller, my grammatical instincts less certain. Yesterday, the teachers told us to use verbs related to carpentry, listed on the board, in a short paragraph. I didn’t know the meaning of half of the verbs on the chart! We never had a “carpentry vocab unit” when I took Spanish in college–and as long as topic doesn’t come up often, it’s easy to never learn whole sets of words that are irrelevant to my daily life. As I attempted the exercise, I realized that all the words I did know, I had learned from Paco as we fixed up our apartment in August–sanding shelves, using the screwdriver, painting the walls. You do something, you learn the words for the tools you use. “Can you hand me that thing? You know, the stick thing with the rolly-thing on the end?” doesn’t get the point across nearly so well as asking for the paint roller (rodillo, for those of you keeping score).
On the other hand, I have an enormous advantage when trying to write in Spanish–I don’t have all those bad habits picked up over years of schooling in a language. The Spanish equivalents of phrases like “heretofore” or “as such” or “be that as it may,” phrases that slow down a sentence and add little meaning, don’t even occur to me when I’m writing. Their uselessness is precisely why they aren’t on my radar. Every phrase I use in Spanish is deliberate because I produce it consciously.
Grammatical topics are especially bizarre to encounter in this setting. Many of my classmates are extremely confused by passive voice, for example, and they can’t identify it or produce it accurately. But for me, it’s very easy–it was only a few years ago that I was in Spanish class explicitly being taught how to form passive voice (bonus point if you caught the passive voice in this sentence!). Hearing the professors enjoin us not to use the passive voice, so soon after having learned it, is amusing. I got the grammatical foundations in Spanish before ever approximating anything like fluid speech. No Spanish grammar is innate to me: it’s all patterns, rules, and memorization that are sort of natural, but only enough to help me talk faster.
The entire course of a lifetime of learning how to write in English, starting simple (elementary school), learning complexity and structure (junior high and high school), then unlearning confusing flourishes and rigidity (college)–it’s all happening so fast in Spanish! The Spanish transitional phrases I so dutifully looked up and proudly added to my essays just a year ago, like “consequently” and “nevertheless” and “in conclusion,” are turning out to be only crutches, clichés and redundancies that I’m supposed to avoid. My classmates insert these phrases out a habit they now have to break. I inserted them with pride!
But more than my classmates, I can question the necessity of phrases and constructions in Spanish because they aren’t natural to me. Familiar, perhaps, but nothing is sacred in a language that only occasionally appears in my dreams. Of course, that lack of an “ear” leads me astray, too, when I write or edit. Though much of this class’s content reminds me of lessons in English grammar long since burned into my brain (thanks, Mom!), I incorrectly identified a “misplaced modifier” in last night’s class–turns out that in Spanish, you CAN put modifiers next to things they don’t modify. I felt stupid afterward for having prefaced my wrong comment with “well, in English it’s like this, so I wondered…” Or maybe I just don’t like being wrong (pretty sure I don’t like being wrong, actually).
My classmates tell me that their English class is hard, that English is hard, that I’m lucky not to have to take English. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them because they get to speak their native language all day long, unlike me! I know exactly what their struggle is, but I also know that if they’d had opportunities like I did for immersion, they’d be doing better and like it more. Of course, I also have the ultimate motivation: my fiancé speaks Spanish. Even with all that, it’s still difficult.
I have many hopes for this master’s program (#1: get accepted!). But the challenge of being intellectual, academic, theoretical and comprehensible in another language–that is something I’d like to achieve, and I think the rigor of a master’s program could guide me toward that goal.
Meanwhile, I’m going to write off my deficiencies as entertainment for the rest of the class. Today, the class elected me to read aloud a text in Spanish called “Anglicismos” (English-isms). It phonetically tried to approximate English using pronunciation suggested by the Spanish spelling: a Spanish speaker’s rendering of the sound of English. Needless to say, it was extremely difficult to sound out English in Spanish, and the attempt about broke my brain. I also could not stop laughing after reading aloud the word “frendo” which no one else found particularly funny. This happened after I thought I’d successfully avoided the teacher’s pointing hand to make me read aloud–I should have gone for the actual Spanish selections while I had the chance. But I’m fine with humor at my own expense. It’s the only kind of humor I generate, so I’ll take what I can get.
