In my high school (which was small and had no foreign language instruction), a handful of students (including me) decided to take Spanish by correspondence through NDSU. This was back in the day where we didn’t have a TV connection where the instructor could teach multiple locations through a live hookup, but instead, we were mailed out VHS tapes of our instructor, Leonora Sillers, attempting to teach us Spanish.
Since she wasn’t able to see what was going on in the room, we mainly over-pronounced things and screwed around. Test time was traumatic.
If you took foreign languages in high school, you know how it goes. You memorize dialogs about libraries and pencil sharpeners. I still kind of remember the first dialog we learned. I was so ready for my name to be Lupe.
Hola Lupe. Que tal? Como estas?
Muy bien, gracies. Y tu?
Then there was some other stuff, until the dialog closed with what became our Spanish class’s motto.
Y, Como se llama su amiga?
Mi amiga se llama Alicia Fuentes Alonzo.
If I could only describe to you the many ways you could pimp the phrase “Y, Como se llama su amiga?”
Various emphasis could be placed on different words, for example. You could use it as a response to any question, just for the sake of sounding bilingual in class. Or, as Shawn was prone to doing, the words could be dragged out for an extended period of time at an increased volume as he walked down the hallway between classes, replying to teachers who asked him to pipe down that he was “practicing his second language.”
My greatest concern, during the half semester this class lasted, wasn’t the name of my female friend, but was instead trying to grasp the concept of nouns having gender. I quickly formed a small psychosis trying to come to terms with what the inventors of the Spanish language were trying to say by which nouns were assigned as male and which were assigned as female.
As my friend and I were talking late last year, in preparation for a trip which would take us to a Spanish-speaking country, the dialogs we learned in these classes were humorous. How often on your trips to Cancun and Acapulco, for example, are you looking for the library? Not often, I’m guessing, unless the local library is serving margaritas.
My friend seemed to be able to do little else than talk about pencil sharpeners.
“People don’t even use pencils anymore,” I grumped. “Do you really think you’ll be needing to find pencil sharpeners on this trip?”
“Yo no se,” he responded lightly.
It reminds me of how each exchange student that stayed with us, having learned British English, would inevitably ask a teacher or classmate at school for a rubber. It’s unfortunate that we lean toward the word “eraser” and have assigned something quite different to the word “rubber.”
We had an English teacher in high school who would holler out “schnell!” periodically. Though I didn’t know what it meant at the time, it threw me into a sufficient panic and I imagined scenes from WWII. Sabine, my German “sister”, taught me several handy phrases in German which, as it turned out, were all insults.
“This is for when the man sitting next to you on the plane grabs your leg and you don’t want him to,” she said.
“That seems really specific.”
“It happened to me,” she replied.
My next two flights to Germany were tense, but I was ready.
My rule of thumb for any foreign language and travel to any foreign land is that you need to know how to say but one thing: where is the toilet? My trips to Nicaragua over the past six years have made me very thankful for the ability to locate the restroom, as well as leaving me with a butchered kind of Spanish that functions to the screeching linguistic pain of the locals.
With fondness, though, do I remember my brief foray into learning Spanish in high school.
Frankly, I probably learned more useful Spanish from a Taco Bell commercial.
