When high school Spanish comes back to haunt you.

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved.

¿hablas español?

For a brief moment in high school, I took a Spanish class with about eight other students. We were a small school, and the internet wasn’t a thing, so each week, we’d watch the VHS tape mailed to the school by our instructor, Leonora Sillers, and then try to do our homework. We’d send it all back to NDSU, where Sillers was located, though she has probably long moved away, most likely because of our class.

It went poorly. Fue mal.

We tried at first. About five minutes in, when we realized the whole male and female gender of words, things began to crumble.

“What do you mean a pencil is male?”

(You can imagine some of the jokes and gestures at this point.)

“Masculine. It’s masculine.”

(The gestures tripled.)

The Spanish class became a thing of dread. There was Sillers, plodding along and lecturing through grainy VHS. There was our class, huddled in the office around the secretary’s speaker phone telling her we no comprendo.

We met in the library, and I remember some of the last times our little class met to have been very disrespectful to several of the books on the shelves and very little Spanish acquired. We all ended up begging the school to let us drop it. But to be fair, I think we all also remember at least one of our practice phrases. It came from this memorized dialogue:

Y como se llama su amiga?

Mi amiga se llama Alicia Fuentes Alonzo.

That first line became a ridiculous anthem of sorts, and we’d march around the school hallway between classes or before band hollering it out. Pretty soon everyone was curious as to the name of the female friend. Somewhere, a real Alicia Fuentes Alonzo exists, and I hope she knows how we lifted her name high during the fall of 1989.

I learned Spanish during my mission trips to Nicaragua, picking up more practical phrases such as the classic “Where are the bathrooms?” and “I’m very confused,” along with “I’m very sorry, my Spanish is very bad.” The first one, regarding the bathrooms, became legend after one of our team members ate a sketchy nacatamal from a street vendor.

A young gal with the missions team had a bear puppet and walked around an entire day saying nothing more than “El oso no es peligroso!” to the point of making some of the young children try to hide the puppet out of frustration that the Americans could only talk about gentle bears.

I also made one of the young Nica girls burst out in laughter when, as we watched a group leader reaching behind and tugging at his underwear, I simply said, “Tesoro.”

We were warned, however, to avoid learning much of our Spanish from listening around us in Nicaragua because it was sloppy. That seemed a little rude, though I noticed the ends of words were mushed. Different accents at play, I guess, though nothing confuses me as much as a NASA rocket engineer with thick Texas twang.

Few things regarding Spanish language confusion make me laugh harder than a trip around South America. My friend’s parents were with us in a Starbucks in Santiago, Chile. Two of us were ordering hot chocolates (chocolate caliente), but things were getting lost in the translation.

There are different ways you can say chocolate and cocaine and derivatives therein. Some similarities exist. As confusion grew about the order, my friend’s father began saying things more loudly, and since it sounded a bit like he was ordering cocaine, I hid behind the rack of mugs and prayed I wouldn’t end up in a Chilean prison.

“No, Dad, no, that’s not it! We already placed the order,” my friend said, looking over his shoulder for drug cartels.

I often think of that moment, and in between laughs, I try to remember what it’s like to be in a country where you don’t speak the language. At least there’s a familiarity with Spanish, in part thanks to Lowes and their bilingual signs that have taught me important things about tools, lumber, and slippery floors. My trips to Germany have left me completely at a loss, the cacophony and incredibly long words with random capitalization leaving me able to do nothing but order an orange juice (Orangensaft), lemon cake (Zitronenkuchen), and spew the various insults my German sister Sabine has taught me over the years.

“Why are you teaching me these insults?” I asked her once, carefully practicing the crisp German methods of how to say, “You are a disgusting pig” and “I have to fart.”

“You never know when you’ll need them,” she explained, no doubt inspired by her awful experience of being seated next to a man on her flight from Hamburg to Minneapolis in which he kept grabbing her knee and she had to fend him off.

In similar befuddlement, as beautiful as Wales is, I have seen their words and cannot fathom either the gorgeous scenery or all the letters in the Welsh words and how many years it must take to ask for directions.

I now help my sister book appointments at her business, and the Spanish-speaking clientele is growing. I don’t know where I’d be without Google Translate to help make this happen, but I do know that I absolutely can’t rely on my high school Spanish.

On my own, my Spanish quickly devolves into English with a fake accent and adding -o or -a to genderize the words, much like my fluency in Italian, which consists of saying various pasta dishes as if I were Luciano Pavarotti. My friend’s high school Spanish relegates him to asking for two beers and a pencil sharpener in the library.

My all-time favorite TV show is Psych, and since there is an episode for every situation in life…enjoy.

Este post de blog tiene muy poco sentido, pero aún lo lees.