2023-06-12 | Blog 018

I decided to speak only Spanish with my girlfriend for an entire day. I saved every use of Google Translate and have reproduced it below.

Why did I go about this? Well, said girlfriend is from Spain, we’ve been dating for over 5 years now, and I can’t speak Spanish. I would say the majority of people are surprised when they learn this. The typical comment is “why don’t you just only speak Spanish when you’re at home?”. I could rant about how naive a statement this is but I shall just respond with a hypothetical situation which puts this question in context. Imagine this for your next conversation;

• You can’t use any nouns starting with the letters P, C, L, or K.
• If you hear any word starting with those letters from the person, you don’t know what it means.
• You understand the context of prepositions (e.g. to, from, before, after, above..), but you don’t which way they specifically mean. And the same for when you try to say them.

Let’s say your friend says “today I went to the library to return a book”. This becomes “today I [went to/came from?] the ???? to [return/give/collect?] a book”. You start by trying to ask if they’re talking about the library: “you went to the library]? Ah.. the word for the place with the books. Ah.. (I can’t say place) the zone with all the books? Not the bookstore… the free one with the card. (what’s the word for card?) The thing in your wallet!”. And that’s just working out the word for library. Now you have to work out if they dropped off or picked up a book…

If you want to make it harder, add in more realistic rules. And for any word with 4 syllables or more there is a 50/50 chance you’ll hear it as 2 words (or more). And there’s about a 15% chance you’ll just forget a word you do know. And you learnt Latin American Spanish rather than European Spanish so there’s a 1/20 chance you’ll say the wrong word, and given your pronunciation is terrible, it’ll take the other person a few moments to work out what you mean. Even more realistically, you only know verbs in the present tense. And you only know about 30 verbs in total. And if “ll” ever appears in a word you hear “yih” instead (“the bill” becomes “the bi-yih”).

I hope that puts things into context. It is exhausting to try and communicate like this. It’s also isolating, you can’t express anything but the simplest information and you can’t inject your own personality. Even worse, if they keep having to repeat the same thing over and over and you simply cannot understand then a horrible sinking feeling develops in your stomach and feelings of inadequacy take over.

In summary, please be considerate of this when asking someone why they haven’t learnt their partner’s language.

Anyway! These are the words from today. Note that we only spend the morning, a bit of lunch, and a bit after work together (maybe 2.5hrs total).

English to Spanish

• Wood (material) = madera
• Necklace = collar (there must be some connection there…)
• Ring = anillo
• Trash = basura
• Shit = mierda
• Neighbour = vecino (like vicinity?)
• Oven = horno
• The future = el futuro
• Meet up = reunirse (reunite?)
• Lottery = lotería
• Gold = oro
• Company = compañía
• Blonde = rubio
• Jersey = sweater (you have to say it with a Spanish accent)
• Deal = trato
• I am proud = estoy orgulloso
• For reference = para referencia (could have guessed this one)
• Sweetcorn = maize dulce

Spanish to English

• Cenicienta = Cinderella
• Pedir = to ask

Looking at the lengths of the two lists above, you would think that my listening skills are very good. But, in reality, the opposite is true. I know there are many words I don’t understand when I’m hearing Spanish, but the sound of the language is still very foreign to me, hence I’m usually unable to guess the spelling of said word and search for it. This is compounded by hearing two words as one, or vice versa.

On reflection, the day was a real struggle but on the cusp of being tolerable. My vocabulary quantifiably improved and (I hope) the brain pathways were strengthened up. It will be something I do again in the future but I wouldn't recommend it until you have a pretty solid understanding of the basics. Notable variations could be only person speaks entirely in Spanish, whilst the other keeps using English.

Adios,

Rory