Esfranglais.
As soon as we found out in November where we were going, I ordered The Ultimate Spanish Review and Practice and Read & Think Spanish! I figured they’d be a good way to start blowing out the cobwebs that have accumulated from 16 years of disuse (broken only briefly by a 10-day jaunt through Andalucía almost a decade ago).
The books arrived the second week of December maybe?
I finally opened them last week.
I could say that I had plenty on my plate that kept me from brushing up before then and that would be true. But it wouldn’t be the whole truth.
The truth — as I found out last weekend during a coaching session with one of my program peers — is that I had been avoiding the books for fear that they would show me just how much I didn’t know anymore (or maybe never did). That perhaps opening them would tell me that moving to Santo Domingo and trying to navigate daily life while Joe is at the office was going to be as hard as it was here in Brussels where I landed with approximately 8.5 phrases in French. And that the stakes feel so, so much higher now that there’s a baby involved.
Perhaps it’s a testament to coaching’s power (and to my classmate’s abilities) that it only took 20 minutes for me to not only figure out that my fear and some slightly unrealistic expectations were holding me back but to also come up with a doable action plan to just do the damn thing. I suppose it didn’t hurt that my classmate was coaching in a second language of her own. (Empathy is a powerful thing.) And it certainly helped to have a couple of our peers jump in after the session with suggestions for learning platforms.
A week later, I can give myself a solid B+ for my efforts: I’ve cracked the books for 30 minutes each day and shifted my Spotify listening to be heavy on the Latin American and Caribbean beats.
But I’m also giving myself extra credit because I booked and took my first Verbling.com lesson with a Dominican teacher based in Santo Domingo. On Thursday, I held my own for 30 minutes entirely in Spanish. Sure, there were missed words and a few incorrectly conjugated verbs but I remembered enough to convince my teacher and myself that I do indeed actually speak Spanish. (We won’t talk about the hour long nap I needed that afternoon.)
Which isn’t to say I’m ready to move tomorrow. The Spanish I studied from seventh grade through senior year of college laid good foundations but I’ve never actually needed it to navigate la vida cotidiana. I can tell you how much I love going to discotecas and eating helado con mis amigos but I’m not entirely sure I could explain to one of Nicolas’s daycare teachers the exact color of his grumpiness following a sleepless night.
That said, realizing what I do remember has had the unexpected consequence of boosting my confidence by helping me see just how well I fared here with only A2 French. For goodness sake, I managed to completely understand (and convey that I understood) a consultation with Nicolas’s anesthesiologist before his surgery a month ago. And my French is certainly much, much poorer than my Spanish will be after a few weeks of diligent effort.
So I guess the only real problem I have now is dealing with the mix of Esfranglais currently swimming in my head. It’s a soupy mess of Spanish nouns, French verbs, and English expressions. But I suppose that’s to be expected in this time between here and there.
