Learning to write good (in Spanish!) with my bootcamp “frendos”

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.

Riding the bus

I didn’t ride the bus very much before moving to Mexico. Since Paco and I don’t have a car and we live in a very large urban area, learning how to use the bus system has been an essential part of becoming mobile here in Guadalajara. In general, public transportation in Mexico is very extensive and well-used, probably because a smaller proportion of the population owns cars. That said, there is always a lot of traffic!

A bus ride here costs 5 pesos, or about 38 cents. When you pay the driver, he hands you a tiny ticket printed on tissue paper. In fact, signs on the buses exhort passengers to demand their tickets. After amassing an enormous collection of these little slips that invariably ended up in dusty corners of the apartment, I finally asked Paco why the bus drivers insisted on giving the passengers their tickets. He explained that it’s insurance: if the bus has an accident, you will be covered, as long as you have that slip of paper. I’ve been trying to figure out a clever craft project to make use of my tiny insurance policies, but so far they’ve just been one more prey for our kitten, Canelo.

With my ticket in hand, my next objective is to find a seat. I’ve noticed a certain set of bus etiquette here that I’ve tried to adapt to. Most of the time, when people have open seats next to them, they stay in the aisle, even when another person wants to sit down. To me, it seems logical to scoot over, but apparently people are not expected to make that concession. Instead, they shift their knees to the side to let you walk past. I think aisle seats are desirable because they allow you to move toward the exit with less hassle.

But there is a code of gentility despite territoriality over the aisle side. When an older man or woman boards a crowded bus, someone always stands up to allow the señor or señora to sit down. Women with small children also get this treatment. In general, women will be invited to take an open seat before men (Paco is physically incapable of sitting down unless I am already seated).  People are considerate, and I’ve had men offer their seats to me when I was carrying heavy bags. Of course, with my good old U.S. training to reject all offers of help, I said “no” without thinking about it, dooming myself to spend the next half hour trying not to fall down or wound other passengers with the unwieldy bulletin board I was struggling to manage as the bus careened through the streets.

Public transportation here has a lot of character. Drivers decorate their buses as they see fit, and it isn’t uncommon to see a bus go by with the route number and main stops printed in a Halloween-type font on the windshield, or even hand-written with a fluorescent grease pencil. On the fiberglass divider between the driver’s seat and the rest of the bus, I’ve seen images of the Virgin Mary, and prayers to the patron saint of drivers asking for steady hands, good judgment, and protection from unsafe motorists. Other ways to personalize a bus are decorative fuzzy dice or fuzzy mirror covers, lighting details on the windshield, and changing the sound played when someone requests a stop. The “buzzer” can be anything from a piercing screech to a videogame-like electronic blip to a honking horn. It’s fun to wonder what strange noise I’ll hear when I request my stop.

There’s also a certain amount of humor in the stickers and decals drivers affix to their bus. “Soy más cabrón que bonito,” said one, “I’m more of a bastard than a pretty guy.” Today, I saw a sticker that said, “Niñas mayores que 34B pagan pasaje aun sentadas en las piernas.” Basically, it’s a play on the “Children over 4 must pay fare even when sitting in lap,” except it’s not about children.

When a bus driver’s friends get on for a free ride, you can bet there will be some intrigue. This morning, these enterprising friends insisted the driver make a few stops to allow them to run out into the middle of the road where a few plastic bottles of soda had just fallen from an overloaded truck ahead of us. All the passengers watched as they darted between traffic to grab some very bubbly generic cola rolling over the asphalt.

The driving itself is pretty aggressive, and when I’m standing up, less-than-stellar Guadalajara roads can make a bus ride feel like a roller coaster. I’m still learning how to keep my balance standing up. But when I have a seat, and it’s not too hot or humid in the bus, I’m usually a little disappointed when it’s my stop. There’s almost always something interesting going on. People get on the bus with guitars and play rancheras, Christian music, whatever, hoping for a few pesos in tips. Other vendors sell chocolates, CDs, books, and my least favorite, children’s videos with songs to learn multiplication tables. They preview audio and video with portable players. They don’t pay the bus fare, and they are always extremely polite and formal in the little speeches they make to sell their products. Once, a man addressed all of us simply asking for money, since he didn’t have anything to sell. He was more successful than the CD vendors with his appeal to charity.

I’ve taken the wrong bus, or the right bus in the wrong direction, I’ve missed my stop, and I’ve gotten off too early. But in the past two months riding the bus, I have learned a lot about the geography–urban and human–in this city.