Spanglish With Owls

Yo hablo some Spanish. More Spanglish than Spanish, since the most useful words I learned wee in hallway and locker room conversations with friends at my high school in El Paso, Texas. I moved there as a teenager so had to jump into the local language. To this day, I still feel warm and fuzzy when I hear a sentence like, ¨He’s cute, pero I don’t know…no me gustan his chanclas.” I honestly think if you live in El Paso and don’t pick up some Spanish, you’re really having to work at avoiding it. Signs and billboards are in both languages. You hear both spoken everywhere, all the time. I would have full conversations where I spoke English, and my classmate spoke Spanish. We both understood each other, but speaking was easiest in our native tongues. (Side note: I love this about El Paso. I wish more Americans could have this experience so they’d understand it’s all upside, living immersed in different cultures and being exposed to multiple languages. I cannot even fathom being bothered by people around me knowing more or different words than me. I wish I could go back in time to having a younger, spongier brain and learn all the languages!)

So, getting back on topic, I learned Spanglish. I also learned actual Spanish in classes. I often scored the highest on tests in my class, only to have classmates leave the room and chatter away in full Spanish conversations I couldn’t understand. Book smarts aren’t everything, folks!

In college I eventually minored in Spanish too, because I hit the turning point where it got easier and more fun to keep going. Plus, I met Mike along the way, who at the time was calling himself “Mexico Miguel” and spending more and more time in the country he fell in love with. Today we’d call that some hardcore cultural appropriation, but we never met a single Mexican who didn’t love that he was trying to fit in. At our peak, Mike was damn near fluent in Spanish, and I was proficient enough that if I got dropped in the middle of Mexico, I could get myself what and where I needed, with no problem. We tooled around the country in his mostly-functional camper van and had tons of fun hanging with the locals.

Fast forward a bit, and we discovered that there is truth to the saying “use it or lose it.” We got busy running a business, having kids, and living life nowhere near the border. As hard as we tried, there just weren’t organic conversations happening in Spanish anymore. We meant to speak Spanish to our kids, but it turns out that you parent mostly like you were parented. Lullabies and little sayings come out of your mouth the way you heard them when you were little. I didn’t know Itsy Bitsy Spider in Spanish or whatever the equivalent might be. We did send Sagan to a Spanish immersion preschool, which was wonderful. But then we moved to a state where you don’t hear as much Spanish in normal daily life, so we just had to hope that some of it was left in the wrinkles of his brain for later use. (Another side note: He did learn/re-learn quite a bit in a middle school partial immersion program. Whew! Not all the preschool money was wasted.)

We discovered Duolingo a few years back (thanks to Sagan, actually), and that has been a really fun way to reawaken some of the synapses that hold our old knowledge. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a free app and website that teaches you foreign languages through simple exercises and stories. You can do as little as one lesson a day or go on a competitive streak and try to become a legend in the diamond league. (I did that once, and boy howdy, do you see the competitive side of people when you try that. Worth it, though!) You can follow friends and cheer each other on. They even have a podcast to help you get used to listening to native speakers. I really like the podcast because it feels Spanglishy to me, like my old high school days.

So, I love Duolingo. It won’t make you fluent, but it’s really great and fun enough to keep you going. I had to force myself to stop when I hit my 1,001st day in a row, because I was worried I’d lock myself mentally into hitting a 2,000 day streak. Of course, I’m already back up to 60-something days straight because that little owl is very cute and persuasive.