After a series of confusing Spanish class-related incidents (”No Ma’am, I’m sorry but I don’t know where the biblioteca is”) left me wondering about my abilities as a speaker, I decided it was time for some extra help.
Following one particularly puzzling incident where my teacher asked students to raise their hands one by one to sign up for something (that something could have been anything, but I’m pretty sure it somehow involved a baby) my friend intervened.
“Why not try this Changing Hands Bookstore Spanish-speaking event?” she suggested casually. So I snagged my fellow Spanish-speaking roommate and headed out.
First impressions weren’t exactly as I had pictured them. We were led into a back room by an employee where seven middle- to old-aged people were sitting in a circle discussing their days in Spanish. The leader of the group looked up at me and my roommate like we may have been in the wrong room, and for a second I suspected that we were. “Hi are you here for the Spanish conversation?” she asked us in Spanish.
“Si!” I responded with gusto.
Then came time for introductions.
We went around the circle and if you were new to the group, you told everyone a little about yourself. “Hello, my name is Colin,” I said. I wasn’t so sure where to go after that, but saying where I was from sounded like a good jumping-off point. If I could only get the past tense right.
“No no. I live in Tempe, but I live in Ahwatukee,” I explained to the woman sitting next to me. The leader politely corrected me, and I was thankful I wouldn’t be making the same mistake the next day in class.
As we went around the circle, everyone talked a little about how his or her week had been, but the highlight came when one women attempted to describe how to keep warm in an emergency using a candle and a can of tuna. At first I thought I misinterpreted her, but as she went on I realized I caught the words but not the process.
“Wait, I don’t understand,” my roommate said. “Why does it have to be tuna?”
Apparently, it doesn’t. She explained that by heating up an empty can with a candle, you can generate enough heat to keep warm in a life-or-death situation. The physics behind this still doesn’t really add up to me, but I made a note of it in case I’m ever caught in a Russian winter with a candle and a finished can of baked beans.
The two of us gained some confidence after this, and one of the women even had something in common with me. We had both been to a comedy-concert the previous night.
“It’s like, music for…” the women searched for the word, “geeks” she said in English.
“Nerdos” the teacher corrected.
All right, so maybe it wasn’t a word I could use in every circumstance, much less in class, but I was making some headway.
By the end I had added a few more practical words to my vocabulary. Bell, candle, comedy, empty, and some grammar I needed help with were all within my grasp by the end. The teacher even tipped us off to some online programs we could join, and let us know about spanish movies playing in Tempe the following week.
All in all, I was a little out-of-place, but at least felt more confident in my abilities once the conversation was over. I might give it a shot again, even.
If you’re interested in giving a Spanish conversation class a shot, you can try the one I did at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, March 27.
Contact the reporter at clecher@asu.edu.
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