Learning La Lengua Loca

I’m not sure whether it’s easier or harder for a whole family to try to learn a new language together from scratch, but I can tell you it’s weirder for sure when each family member is at a different skill level in the language.

In the first few years of our relationship, Mike and I were at the peaks of our Spanish-speaking abilities. As with most things, once he decided to learn Spanish, he went all in. He was darn near close to fluent and somehow managed to get a great accent, even though he only started taking it in college and then did extensive traveling in Mexico and Costa Rica for a few years. I grew up mostly in Texas, so Spanish was a pretty regular part of my curriculum from about first grade on. I think people were pretty terrible at teaching languages back in the 80s though, so I could really only list colors, animals, and parts of houses. I’m not sure I even realized you could form sentences in Spanish, but I was really good at pointing out seis gatos rojos or whatever nonsense.

I moved to El Paso in high school, and that’s where more Spanish fell into place for me. I excelled in Spanglish and learned all the truly useful words, mostly in the locker room. (I took tennis class one semester and learned to shout “pinche pelota” anytime I hit the ball out of bounds. Good stuff.) I loved actually being able to string some words together, even if most of them were just calling my friends bad words and laughing. I ended up carrying on with it in college, and it turned into a minor in Spanish by graduation. I was never as close to fluency as Mike was, but by the time I’d joined him in some travel through Mexico, I was what I call “proficient.” To me that meant that if I’d been stranded alone in the country somehow, I would have been able to get around okay without any disasters and with only a moderate amount of acting things out like Charades.

Fast forward several years, and despite our best intentions, we just weren’t using much Spanish on a regular basis. We’d naively thought we’d speak Spanish to our kids, but it turns out that parenting makes your brain revert back to how you were parented. You sing lullabies your parents sang to you, and you read books you remember loving as a child. It’s really unnatural to do baby talk in a non-native language, even if you really want to.

So, we threw in some words here and there for Sagan, which is what my parents had done for me. I remember being a “pobrecita” with every scraped knee, for instance. (My kids will instead learn to yell “pinche mesa!” if they bang their knee into a table.) We put him in a Spanish preschool, and he was doing great with that…but just as he started getting comfortable with it, we moved to Colorado where the Spanish options were limited. They existed, but we had to prioritize some other things in getting him settled into elementary school in a new city.

Baby two came along, and that was even more hopeless than the first time around. Language immersion failure. We did attempt things, such as having Story go to a daycare run by this lovely woman from South America. So she got some native Spanish absorbed into her brain a little, and we did some after school classes when she started in elementary. But really, we didn’t even try to lie to ourselves that she was learning much.

But now we’re 8-9 months away from world travel, and my desire to rediscover Spanish is in high gear. Sagan is now in year two of a bilingual middle school program, and he did so well in year one that he’s been placed with native speakers. I’m on day 80-something of consecutive Duolingo lessons, and Mike has started it back up as well. Story is just a wee bit young to do Duolingo on her own yet, but she thinks it’s a treat to get to do it with us sometimes. The stars have aligned, and all four of us are at about the same interest level, if not the same skill levels, so I’m trying to run with that and keep it going.

We’re starting to use a little more Spanish randomly in the house. A sentence here or there. I’ve taped up some flash cards around the house - “el reloj” next to the clock, “la silla” on a chair. I let Story pick a few phrases to learn and use this week. She chose “stop,” “sit down,” and “come here.” And tonight we sorted stuffies and plastic toys into the animal names on various cards during dinner. We had to look up a few words for animals that weren’t on our list, so that was fun for all of us to figure out together.

I know we won’t be doing this every night, but I’m happy to have this stretch of time where we have a joint goal of learning. Even if we only learn or practice once every couple of weeks, I know it’ll hold more meaning for the kids when we arrive in countries like Spain, Chile, or Ecuador, and they aren’t at a total loss for palabras.