Maintaining my Spanish

[jayeless]

So it's been almost a decade now since I started learning Spanish. Before that, I'd taken the compulsory language classes offered at primary and high school – seven years of Italian and three years of French – but because this is Australia and most schools do a really bad job actually teaching foreign languages to their students, I didn't really know that much of either one. I'd also dabbled in Esperanto, but I wanted to learn a language that was a bit more widely spoken than Esperanto, haha. So when I started university, I decided to shed my embarrassing monolingualness and enrol in introductory Spanish.

In real life, people regularly ask me why Spanish – or assume I must have grandparents from Spain or something, because why else would an Australian learn Spanish. Honestly I started because I was really interested in Latin American politics and history (and quickly realised that Spain was just as interesting)… and it helped that Spanish was one of the easier languages I could have learned (compared to, say, Chinese, which I thought would also be interesting, but I didn't have faith in myself to actually persist with it). But hey, a decade on (and my uni degree long over) and I'm still really interested in these countries' politics, histories, cultures, literature… it's been really worthwhile for me.

I think one thing I underestimated when I started on this journey is just how much learning a language becomes a lifelong task. The more you learn and can accomplish, the more you realise you have yet to learn and still can't accomplish, even though you're leagues ahead of where you used to be. I still feel too awkward to say I speak Spanish; I usually end up saying I speak some Spanish (even though this makes some people think you like, merely memorised the first page of a phrasebook), or add caveats, like “…but not perfectly though,” or “…but I find some accents easier to understand than others,” or whatever. Maybe it's better that way anyway, because people then end up pleasantly surprised that I'm better at Spanish than they thought I'd be. Not sure.

Anyway, because I do live in Australia (and not in a neighbourhood like Fitzroy), I kind of have to make my own opportunities to practise Spanish. And the thing I've found is that there are way more resources for absolute beginners in Spanish than there are for people like me, who are kind of intermediate – way beyond those beginner resources, but not quite good enough to "just" read books or watch TV/movies aimed at native speakers. So, that's what I wanted to talk about today – things I've been doing to bridge that gap.

One thing has been to watch TV shows and movies on Netflix, but to have the subtitles on in Spanish. I started doing this at a time when I just could not understand Spanish TV shows, but I knew my level of reading comprehension was way higher than my listening comprehension. My theory was – even though the words should be the exact same, I'm more likely to understand them in written form than spoken, and experiencing both at the same time will make me better at understanding that word when spoken in then future.

The /r/languagelearning subreddit has some posters who are really negative about this idea, claiming that having the subtitles there makes you “turn your ears off”. In my case, at least, I'd dispute this – I could see that having English subtitles there will not help you understand the spoken Spanish, but not if the subtitles and dialogue are in the same language. And at any rate, while watching the first season of La casa de papel did not make me feel like I'd got much better at Spanish by the end of it, what do you know? When I stumbled across the Spanish news on SBS after doing that, I understood almost every word (without subtitles!!!) whereas previously I'd understood a lot less.

I tried watching Las chicas del cable without subtitles, but ended up finding that while I understood most of it, the bits I missed could be important plot points that I really needed to not miss if I were going to keep watching the show. So, for me, for now, for long-form narratives, I need subtitles. But the good news is that there is another form of online video content that does not need subtitles for me to understand it… YouTube videos.

At the moment I follow two main YouTube channels. The first one was Experto Animal, because I'm a big animal lover, and YouTube recommendations in recent times have also led me to GENIAL, which does “interesting fact”-type videos on a range of topics (including, yes, lots of animal ones). I've found these pretty fun; it's also less intimidating to start a 5-to-10 minute YouTube video than an hour-long Netflix episode, which means I get into more of a routine with it, too.

The other main thing I do to practise is to read stuff (books and articles) through Readlang. At the moment I'm working through the fifth Harry Potter book (and yes I know there's no shortage of books originally written in Spanish, but I'm also enjoying the excuse to revisit these books that were a huge part of my childhood, so shhhh) – I read another chapter about 2–3 times a week and I log in every day to work through my vocabulary flashcards. I also sometimes use it to read a news article if it uses a lot of vocabulary I'm unfamiliar with (although that doesn't happen too often these days).

I feel like the real problem with my current regime is that it's basically all passive comprehension, and I'm not really practising my ability to speak or write Spanish. I definitely feel like my passive vocabulary (words I understand when I encounter them) is waaaaaaay bigger than my active vocabulary (words that leap to mind when I actually construct my own sentences). There are definitely Spanish/English language exchange meetups in my city, but I haven't really tried going to them because a) shy and b) they're all in the inner city where I don't live (although it wouldn't take more than 45ish minutes to get there). Still, doing something more than speaking Spanish to my cat (which I do do) would be pretty helpful here, I think.

Whew, long entry! If you've made it this far, dear reader, I'd be curious to know: have you learnt any languages aside from your native one(s)? Is it widely spoken where you live, or do you – like me – really have to put effort into using your language? What do you do, if anything, to practise your skills?

I'm always happy to talk languages so if you have any other related thoughts this post has prompted, feel free to share ☺️

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

That's great! I majored in/completed a degree in Spanish (although... I don't use it anymore, which is uh... oops). There really is quite a lot to learn within all things language and culture, but Spanish is also so abundant in the global world that there are plenty of resources and such.

Watching shows in Spanish with Spanish subtitles is a really great way to become familiar with the sounds of the language and to train your brain to derive meaning from those sounds based on the meanings you derive from reading. Other things you could do along the reading route are read translations of books you're already familiar with, for example Harry Potter. It might also be worthwhile to try seeking out podcasts, news stations, music, or audiobooks that are in moderate-pace Spanish to wean yourself off subtitles and get more direct ear practice.

The speaking part is pretty difficult--especially if you don't have a lot of real world inventive to do it. It really is just a matter of practice and getting in those hours and hours of mouth/accent training. But being auditorally familiar with the language does help with your accent, because it makes it easier to identify when your own sounds are wrong, but developing the reflex to say certain words/phrases and building the muscles in your mouth to consistently form a different set of phonemes just takes lots of talking time. Make an effort to talk to yourself out loud in Spanish randomly, for example narrate chores, or make an attempt once a day to describe something you're looking at, or read poetry or news articles or short stories aloud.

I live in the US, so I wouldn't exactly be hurting for ways to practice my Spanish if I wanted to. I took one year of French in high school (simultaneously while continuing Spanish) because I'd originally wanted to take that for my language instead of Spanish, but my parents didn't want me to because Spanish is "more useful," so I decided the best way to circumvent that was to do both, although that proved pretty taxing on my brain and my class schedule, so I stopped, but I'm still surprisingly competent at it (mostly because of how similar it is to Spanish). In college, I took one year (two semesters) of American Sign Language because I'd always thought it was interesting and I had other friends taking it and it's also kind of a queer niche thing to do; I'm very out of practice, but I try to brush up on vocab that may be relevant to customer service so that at the very least I can be useful to Deaf customers as a professional (which has happened several times!). I've also dabbled very lightly into German, Italian, Esperanto, and Portuguese, but none of those stuck terribly well. I can also understand an okay amount of Mandarin because it's the heritage language I was raised around, but it ultimately stuck very poorly with me and I have a horrific accent if I try to speak it, and I can't read it.

[jayeless]

Ah, Spanish ended up as my major too! In my last year of undergrad, I also started learning Catalan, and my honours thesis was on a book in Catalan (although I certainly read a lot of journal articles in Spanish for research). Sadly my Catalan rusted much worse than my Spanish did, because for all you don't often come across much Spanish in Australia, Catalan is on another level. I've also dabbled in Portuguese, Italian, French, Esperanto and Indonesian… but if I don't keep it up anything I remember fades away fast. ASL sounds like a cool language to learn.

I've been reading Harry Potter in Spanish (getting close to the end of the fifth one!) and I do watch YouTube videos (including news) without subtitles, haha. Some accents are definitely much easier to understand for me than others, though. The speaking practice is really the tricky part – 99% of the practice I get is me speaking to my cat! When I've travelled in Spanish-speaking countries (although the most recent time is five years ago now, eek) I was able to have conversations, although my vocabulary was seriously lacking. I'm sure I've improved a lot since then, but it's still true that my passive vocabulary is much bigger than my active one. I can read Harry Potter no problem (hardly any words I can't guess from context) but if I carry on an internal monologue in Spanish I get lots of blanks. Maybe I should be more diligent about noting those blanks and actually looking them up in SpanishDict.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I keep dictionary apps on my phone so that whenever a stray train of thought draws up a word I can't remember in another language, I can just look it up and instantly satiate my curiosity. And then if a few minutes later I reflect on that moment and realize that it didn't stick, I can look it up again and keep repeating until I actually remember it in the future.

I'll also mentally run through how I would refer to things around me and try to identify gaps that way. Like if I wasn't too busy at work, I would look around and mentally quiz myself like "okay, do I know all the signs I need to be able to communicate [common customer sentiment]" in assorted languages? And that can also be done like at the grocery store or something, where, again, you just mentally narrate things.

Also you might be able to find language exchange-type groups online! At one point in high school, I had a keypal, which is like a penpal but over email, and I wrote to them in Spanish and they wrote to me in English. I would imagine that similar things now exist for skype or phone calls or such.