Mas despacio por favor!

A different language is a different vision of life.  ~Federico Fellini

Whoever happens to have the misfortune of falling in love with me has to accept one thing: my first love is the English language. Like many, or few, writing and speaking and reading, the English language creates for me a feeling of right-ness in the world. Nothing I have encountered on this earth gives me the same feeling or takes me to the same place as English does. It has nuances that I can almost see and when I finally get the right combination of words to express both fact and feeling when I am writing I almost hear a clicking noise.

Although I am half Japanese, half caucasian American I am, rather sadly, only fluent in one language…English. I came here to Spain, in part, to remedy that.

When I first arrived here there was a lot to adjust to. From the size of the highways to the food I ate, I encountered differences everywhere I looked. But the hardest, and most complicated, to get used to was, and continues to be, the language.

But the more I get to know the language of Spain the better I am able to understand her people, her culture and another perspective of the world and of life as a whole. Just as English is the language I would choose to express my soul, so Spanish is for those who grew up in it.

I realize that to those that are perhaps better traveled, or smarter than I am, this might seem obvious. I should tell you that sometimes, in my more discouraged moments, I feel resentful toward the people on television because I feel like they’re showing off their perfect Spanish while mine is only just above that of a cave man, and only that good because I am cuter than a cave man.

I’m not sure what it says about my global perspective that it was not until I came Spain that I even considered how my own Spanish must sound to those fluent in it. I guess that, in many cases, the need to communicate took precedence. But now a lot of my life is centered around learning to speak the language fluently and it I find two elements of language, communication and structure, sacrificed to one another in the struggle.

I just joined a local chorus in the pueblo I live in and on my first day (last Tuesday) we sang from an enormous collection of Christmas songs in preparation for, well, Christmas! It wasn’t the tunes so much as the words that I kept tripping over as both unfamiliar melodies and words kept jumbling themselves up in my mouth.

I was a bit relieved when we turned to “White Christmas” or “Whyeet Krrreesmas” which the chorus was singing in English. It was also then that I began to smile, then chuckle. Honestly, it wasn’t just the chorus I was laughing at, but myself a bit too. That must be what my Spanish sounds like to them!

So you might have gathered that my Spanish has a rather long way to go before arriving at fluency, but nonetheless I find myself almost enjoying the trip. The similarities between English and Spanish are all well and good, but the differences show me more of the culture, and grant me an inkling of a completely different perspective, a whole other world view. That, I think is the hardest part of language to learn and get used to.

I have been thinking of that the newer, the harder, the stranger the experiences one has, the more a person’s heart and perspective must grow. That is what I hope to accomplish here in Spain.

Have a great weekend,

Kika