Éxitos y fracasos mezclados juntos

Today was a mixed day, as far as language goes. But it’s ended on a very good note, and so I’ll go to sleep satisfied.

This week, with the start of my advanced Spanish grammar/vocabulary class (just generalized Spanish language class), I’ve gotten very pessimistic very quickly about the language and me. How so? Well, the class is very challenging—which is good! I always want to be challenged, and I’m certainly going to learn a lot. But it's depressing to just see how much farther, ever further, there is to go; to picture, for example, the graph of a logarithmic function and know that you, on the curve, are long past the days of exponential improvement, and are now slowly, painfully inching towards that asymptote that is perfection.

I understand so much (certain people’s accents are what can trip me up, not particularly the content itself); I can read so much (including Lorca, as yet pretty easily without a dictionary); and yet producing the content myself is so hard. I can communicate what I need/want to; I can write fairly eloquently; and yet there are still (it feels like) a billion grammatical structures/words I “should” know (or else feel like I don’t really need to know, something like “grasshopper,” for instance, but this is the pursuit of perfection, and suddenly every word becomes necessary knowledge) that are still completely occult to me, that I haven’t even glimpsed or dreamt of. I can understand the higher-level language, but I can't come up with it myself. Even though I’m learning new words all the time, even though I’m certainly learning quite a lot in general, it feels like I’ve come up against a huge roadblock. I know, given time, I can reach the level of mastery of Spanish that I want. But how much time that might require I can’t imagine, and from this side of the wall I can’t fathom what scaling it will look or feel like intellectually. It’s a level of language I’ve never reached before, and every new level I've passed through, every new, essential breakthrough along the way has felt completely transformative.

I remind myself I’ve faced greater linguistic hurdles before, and more acutely, such as, well, basically teaching myself Slovak and learning everything on-the-fly. (To use a melodramatic metaphor, my Slovak difficulties could be related to a momentary depression triggered by a traumatic event, as opposed to this, which is like the more numbing ache of a low-grade existential crisis.) Not to mention the utter, devastating feeling of ineptitude I remember being overwhelmed by the night I suddenly grasped the magnitude of declension in Slovak. I had finally grasped the whole overarching design, and it horrified me, tore me between what seemed to me to be two simple, irrevocable facts: one, I could never do this, and it was impossible; and two, despite knowing it was impossible, I was still going to try. Knowing that I was going to give it my all was horrifying in and of itself, because in light of Fact #1, Fact #2 was going to see me wear myself ragged trying to break down something as certain and immovable as infinity, that would be completely unknowing and uncaring of my tiny human struggles. Yes, it’s laughably melodramatic, but I really felt that way.

I feel a bit the same again now, but I remind myself it’s not as bad as all that, and no matter how much I may want to skate into fluency, there’s a timescale for everything that no amount of wishing is going to accelerate. I’m studying voraciously, soaking up every last drop of information that I can, and that’s all that I can ask of myself, and all that I can duly provide.

One more unfortunate conclusion that this all brings to my mind is what I’m going to do about Arabic. Though part of me wishes I would just realize my total, undivided devotion towards Spanish, so I could focus on Spanish and have an easier time at figuring out grad school options, I can’t deny how my pulse quickens when, as happened yesterday, I wander into a Moroccan-owned store (there are dozens) to browse and hear the shopkeepers bantering in Arabic, or go down the strip of Arab-themed stores in the Albayzín and listen to the Arab pop music pumping out of them. Arabic still has me enthralled. But Spanish is one of the easiest languages there is. Arabic is well-known to be one of the hardest. If, after so many years of Spanish studies (admittedly, very slow-paced) I still have so much further to go, how can I ever expect to be fluent on a native-speaker level in Arabic? It just seems simply impossible. And yet I know it’s done. Still, even if I didn't have the example of thousands of other native English speakers who have successfully mastered Arabic, I know myself, and know that (even when I half-wish I could operate differently) I’m always going to try.

So, this is all to say, these were my depressed musings as I walked the city streets this afternoon, out after siesta on an errand to pick up a language book for class. On my way to the bookstore, I saw a gaggle of old women (I think that’s the appropriate word for the plural) milling around at the corner, obviously lost and muttering to each other, “Eh, where is it? We should ask for directions—” Observing in that split-second instant that I was the only person nearby, I quickly readied myself for what came immediately after: one of the more assertive of the abuelitas directed herself towards me, and asked, “We’re looking for the church of Nuestra Señora de San Agustín. Can you give us directions?” (I’m not going to flatter myself to think that I come off as a local—I think my blonde hair and facial features will forever be foreign. I think they just asked me because I was the closest person on-hand.) I did know where the church was, and I told the woman; but I stumbled nervously in my words, and by the way she cocked her eyebrow skeptically I’m willing to bet anything she promptly asked someone else for some real directions. I took my leave of her and continued down the street feeling like I’d failed.

Well, I was in for a greater failure shortly thereafter, once I got to the bookstore. I told the shopkeeper the title I needed and she quickly retrieved it for me; I paid, and she said “gracias” to me, and, meaning to reply “hasta luego” (‘goodbye’) as I left, instead, completely inexplicably, “de nada” (‘you’re welcome’) popped out of my mouth. I apologized awkwardly and made a speedy exit. I could actually feel the heat flooding my cheeks—I was mortified. And I dwelled on my faux pas for several blocks more than was necessary. There's nothing to do but move on!

My faith in my language abilities, somewhat shaken by my rough afternoon, improved a few hours later, however. The Universidad de Granada (UGR), which is an enormous school with 60,000 students, includes several thousand foreign students in its ranks (the number I have jotted down in my notebook is 10,000—although that seems shockingly high to me, it may well be the case). With that in mind, the UGR hosted several events this week for its foreign students as a welcoming. Most of the events weren’t really pertinent to me, but tonight they put on a theater performance, and five of us IES kids went.

It was a fun, because long, walk just getting to the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras where the performance was held. (The UGR is spread out among many buildings all around the city.) We had to climb a long hill to the very top, and were rewarded with a sparkling view of the city lights by night. The building itself felt very large and monolithic, in a way I like: the awing, impressive, impartiality of higher education— sixties-or-seventies architecture with all high ceilings and almost-excessively wide halls, marble floors, and floor-to-ceiling windows.

The performance was very modern, very experimental. I absolutely love avant-garde theater when it’s done right (though it's oh-so-very easy to do wrong) and was excited. In general I did really enjoy the performance, in terms of entertainment: there was a lot of movement, a lot of choreography. All of the spoken lines were rubbish, the pseudo-intellectual, wannabe-deep nonsense that nearly all experimental theater I’ve seen has suffered from. But hey, I understood almost everything, which was a nice bout of affirmation, and I don’t care if the script was devoid of real meaning: I hadn’t been looking for it going in, and the physical performance was still a lot of fun to watch (as is typical of experimental theater, it featured an ensemble cast with everyone acting very purposefully as they performed random, nonsense actions, like throwing a hundred folding chairs in a pile, whipping the ground with a rope, and pontificating in French at odd intervals).

My second cosmic pat-on-the-back came after the theater, when I came to dinner and was stunned to find myself utterly alone in the dining room. I checked my watch again, just to be sure I hadn’t gotten the time wrong, but no, it was definitely dinnertime, and the women working in the kitchen gave me some food. (I still have no idea where everyone was. Had it been Saturday I might have assumed they were eating out on the town, but I feel like Thursday, as the start-of-the-long-weekend/party night isn’t that big of a deal here—not really a “thirsty Thursday,” as it’s known to the collegiate U.S.) Not long after, three Spanish students came in and joined me at the table, and I had a really nice dinner talking to them, and understood everything they said. (It can be interesting accent-wise in the residencia, because students come from all over to go to UGR. So there’s a total mix of accents from all over the country and even from outside it, and some are easy to understand and some leave me completely at a loss. I’m sure it’s also a matter of the individual speaker, though, too.)

On a totally different topic, here’s an interesting linguistic note. In Spanish, to give one’s opinion, one can say “pienso que…” (I think [that]…) or “creo que…” (literally: “I believe [that]…,” but equivalent in usage to English’s “I think”). I’ve known for a while that “creo que” is more common in Spanish, but it’s hard for me to break the “pienso que” habit, which is easier to revert to because it translates out neatly in my mind. I’m also more reluctant to use “creo que” because, even though I try not to translate it literally into English, I can't help but think of it as "I believe," and so it feels off to me, just so much more sure and determined than what to me sounds more tentative or subjective, open to change, the “I think” of “pienso que.” The latter to me just seems more apt when one is giving one’s personal impression of the moment. A belief is so much more firmly-held and essential than a thought, right? But as I've said, this thinking on my part is really just a fallacy of translation (when the two essentially mean the same thing), which I may be aware of consciously but still have trouble shaking when it comes to my subconscious feelings. Regardless, I know I need to convert to “creo que” eventually.

My perspective on this was shifted a bit today in class. A teacher mentioned the “pienso que” vs. “creo que” distinction—as in, essentially the same, but “creo que” being more commonly used—and then went on to note why she thought this was so culturally: to “believe” is more faith- and intuition-based, in fitting with the Spanish way of processing; to “think” is about logic, the head over the heart (she noted, too, that in French as well as English the “I think” equivalent prevails: she sees this as the legacy of Descartes). I don’t know whether her view is founded in anything other than, well, her belief, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless, and a completely different way of looking at the distinction between these words from my own.

I'll end on a tidbit of irony. Walk around many tourist shops in Granada and you’ll see the green-and-blue-painted pottery unique to the city (each Spanish city/region has its own characteristic color scheme). Many of these plates and other dishes also have a little picture or quote in the middle; a very common one is the saying “Dale limosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada.” Roughly translated, it means “Give him alms, lady, for there is no greater pain in life than being blind in Granada”—in the context of a third-party observer who is watching a woman pass by a blind beggar. Obviously the quote’s trying to illustrate how richly beautiful Granada is to behold. But in a twisted bit of irony, even as I see this saying on bowls and plates all over town, I concurrently have noticed an incredible preponderance of blind and/or seeing-impaired people here. I’ve seen several dozen: with seeing eye dogs, with their poles in front of them (once I saw a blind couple, arm-in-arm, both tapping with their sticks); there’s also an incredibly nice guy who’s blind in my residencia whom I’ve talked with a few times. It’s just very ironic, that I’ve never seen such a concentration of blind people in my life, and here there’s this ugly quote popping up at every turn. 

At least two more blog posts on their way soon. Stay tuned. 

Much love.