We arrived home safely from Guatemala after a couple days of long travel. We left class at 12:15 pm last Friday and took a 5 hour bus ride from Xela back to Guatemala City. Saturday morning was a comedy of errors of sorts. We asked the front desk of our hotel for a 5:00 am wake-up call and breakfast in our room at 5:30 so we could make our 8:00 flight. Later, we found out on the airlines website that the flight had been pushed back 40 minutes, which meant we could sleep a little later and catch the 6:00 am buffet before leaving. So we canceled the room service and pushed the wakeup call to 5:30. Or so we thought. We ended up with a 5:15 am wakeup call (splitting the difference between 5:00 and 5:30?) and breakfast at our door at 5:30. The hotel is undoubtedly high class but it doesn’t run like a well-oiled machine.
Guatemala City’s airport was stunningly efficient. We left without any problems and arrived in Dallas to endure a three-hour layover, and after arriving in Chicago, we caught the 7:00 bus to Racine (about an hour) to pick up our car to drive another hour to Amy’s parents and the tearful reunion with the dog, who cried for a good five minutes upon seeing us. A long day, to say the least.
I feel like my ability to speak or understand Spanish has departed me completely, which isn’t true. It always took a good 15 minutes in the morning to get the brain switched over to Spanish and, since everyone in Xela spoke Spanish, it was more or less necessary. I’ve been deprived of a Spanish-speaking environment for 48 hours now and the “if you don’t use it, you lose rule” feels like it’s kicking in already.
I’ve got pictures almost ready to be posted but I thought I’d post a few things I’ve learned from this experience while they are still fresh in my mind.
1) There’s a massive difference between being able communicate effectively and being proficient in a foreign language:
I was hoping to leave Guatemala as a proficient Spanish speaker. Didn’t happen. I learned that I speak Spanish passably well, and speaking it for 5+ hours a day definitely helped me speak faster. And, at times, I can actually speak more like a native in by choosing the “more correct” past tense (imperfect vs. preterit) depending on the situation, and it always makes me happy to correctly use object pronouns and the subjunctive. This doesn’t come naturally or easily though, and I still stall out on conjugating tricky verbs on the fly. However, it was a very rare occurrence that I couldn’t successfully express myself or get a point across.
2) Spanish spoken at a normal, native speed is still impossible to understand:
Understanding television is out, and I usually needed to say “otra vez, por favor” a couple times before locals would scale back and speak at a rate I could understand. Which, generally speaking, is still pretty fast but nowhere near two locals chatting it up. I really need to focus to comprehend what’s being said, too, so understanding half-heard conversations is out too.
3) Besides sheer speed, vocabulary is the next biggest obstacle:
One of my daily exercises was having an advice column read to me. My teacher would read the problem and I would have to give the advice. One was about a jealous boyfriend, but I didn’t know the word for jealous (celoso, in case you’re wondering). “Jealous” is a pretty specific word and it shades the information you’re being given; not knowing that the central problem was jealousy made the rest of column difficult to understand, especially when my brain got snagged on that one word and by the time I thought “Do I know that word?” I was missing more and more of the story. In casual conversation, I could usually get the general gist of what was being said and could hold up my end of the discussion. But in certain situations, not knowing a key word or two resulted in complete confusion. Try to find another word for “jealous” in English that someone learning the language might know. Right. Failing that, now see how long it takes you to try and explain “jealousy” using only words that a beginner would know. It’s not that it’s impossible to communicate the meaning of “jealousy,” but rather that needing to explain a single word can grind a conversation to a halt.
4) Writing and reading are relatively easy; listening and speaking are much harder:
It all has to do with processing speed of the brain. Writing and reading allow you to move at whatever pace necessary in order to comprehend, including looking up words. Listening is tougher and speaking correctly is tougher yet. My favorite exercises were the ones where I had to read a paragraph and fill in the blanks with the correctly conjugated verb. Your brain is forced into managing several things at once: proper pronunciation, pace, comprehension of what’s being read, and quick decision making about what would be correct answer given the context. It takes some brain power to do this in English, much less Spanish.
5) Becoming proficient in a foreign language takes a very, very long time:
There is no magic to any of this. It’s a long process, made longer by the fact that all the enthusiasm in the world doesn’t change the fact that the brain gets tired and can only absorb so much in a day. As of right now, I think it would take me between six weeks and two months in an immersion course for me to be proficient. There’s hardly any more Spanish grammar for me to learn; what I need is days and weeks on end of being immersed in Spanish. Two weeks was good—eight weeks would be better.
6) It is almost impossible to tell whether you’re improving:
It feels like there are two levels to language acquisition—proficient and not-proficient. This isn’t reality, but it sure feels that way. As stated, the process is very long and the vast majority of the time is spent being either outright wrong or not quite right. Being right only once in awhile, or being wrong in new and more complicated ways, is little consolation.
7) Knowing all of the above about Spanish, the clearest options are: throwing in the towel, finding peace with being a well-rounded amateur, or swearing upon all that is holy to one day be able to express oneself better than an uneducated 8-year-old:
I’m going for that last one.
I would do the Spanish immersion program in Xela again in a heartbeat. I’m sure I learned more than I probably even realize at the moment. I would say, however, that I wish we’d had more time—even though it would have been painful. There was only one student at the school who was more advanced than I was, and he’d been in Guatemala for nine weeks. He was awarded the “Master” level, and even then he said he could only understand about half of what was being said at any given time.
Like I says, it’s a long road. But I’m still enjoying it.
Current Mood: Tired | 
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