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Thursday, April 30, 1998 By Diana Nelson Jones
Hola! That's not the first Spanish word I learned, but it's more appropriate here than estupido. I called my brother that when we were little. El gato was our old cat. Loco and tonto was everyone else.
It seemed so easy then.
Now, a few decades later, I am four months into private lessons, free falling through a wild plunge into Spanish verbs. They are lying in my consciousness like debris all over the ground after a tornado. You spot "fui" and you know it belongs as "I went" in a coherent sentence, but it takes a while to find the sentence. "Fui" is the reason I can no longer settle for "I go yesterday."
Not until you begin learning a second language have you any idea of the number and variation of verbs you take for granted in your own. In our first language, the first verbs we learn are be, want, like, have, know, come, go, do, make, work, live, see, read, walk, run and a few others. Same with our second language.
I thought I was well on my way to communicating in Spanish when I had these verbs down cold in the present tense and knew enough nouns to make sentences with them.
"Me gusta este libro," I told my teacher one day early in my lessons. That means "I like this book."
As an English speaker, I would probably never say "I like this book." I would say, "This book was sooo compelling," or "I couldn't put this book down," or "This novel is a derivative dungheap of shallow thinking."
If you were learning English, and you learned how to say "Rush hour was terrible this morning," you would never again say, "There were many cars in the roads in this morning."
Now that I am knee-deep in it, I curse the day I decided I loved Spanish enough to actually learn it. The more you learn, the more you must learn. That's the rule that makes ignorance such an attractive lifestyle. Plus I have homework. Bleccch!
Anyone who writes knows how hard a first language is. You can spend your whole life trying to be a better writer in a language you're extremely adept at and die without having satisfied yourself. English is supposed to be my lifetime pursuit, so how sane am I to take on a second language? It's like an affair. I know I can't commit to it or leave home for it, even though I have threatened to move to Puerto Rico. I know it will be useful in fits and starts, at best, and that's if it doesn't get rusty. Classes can't go on forever.
But I will do it because I have been lucky enough to be inspired.
My Spanish is still pathetic, but in those first heady weeks of lessons, I felt in a way I had never felt before learning anything. English remained my best friend, but I loved Spanish.
I resented having to go to work because within moments there, English washed out all the small Spanish enclaves that had taken up residence in my head. I would drive from my lesson to work and make a beeline through the word factory to get to Jonathan Silver, a reporter and a friend who speaks Spanish. It was important to me that my first exchange in the word factory be in Spanish.
Where other people at work take smoking breaks, I take my breaks computer-messaging in Spanish to the Spanish speakers in the newsroom, my little Cassell's Compact Spanish Dictionary at my side.
At home, where two cats swirl around my ankles in the evenings, I speak Spanish to them as I prepare their dinner. And when they look up from their untasted morsels, I ask them, "Por que ellos no comen?"
I think what they're saying back is, "Because, estupida, we're sick of liver-flavored kibble."
You can reach Walkabout by e-mailing DJones@post-gazette.com
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