el crispito

Do not spend all your time with your peers.

If you have come in a group from your home country, or have met up with a bunch of people from there after you arrive, try to reach an agreement that you will not speak in your native language. That is trickier than it sounds because the tendency is to 'fall back' on your native language when you encounter difficulty in relating to each other in the second language. If a wide range of capabilities exist between the members of your group, it becomes difficult because the advanced speakers get tired of waiting for five minutes to understand one thought finally generated by a lesser-advanced speaker. That brings us to the next point.

Be sensitive to your status as a learner within their culture.

We find that speaking even a little Spanish gets you a lot of credit here in Mexico, as opposed to speaking a little English the United States. There, all too often, people learning English are given no credit for their attempts to speak the language and are often told, "Learn English! You're in America." No, people in the United States do not seem to be all that excited to help those learning English in their efforts, feeling that everyone that comes to the country should be fluent before touching that sacred ground.

In contrast, in Mexico, people are much more patient with gringos (and others) trying to learn Spanish, and they will often try to help you by gently correcting you or offering you pointers. However, it would be wrong to paint all Mexicans as jovial folk that are only too delighted to help Gringo figure out his por and his para.

Often, you will get a taste of what those learning English have to go through in the United States, with Mexicans that are not amused by your broken Spanish and the fact that they do not understand what you are trying to say. They will be obviously annoyed and angry that you are wasting their time. I have found that in some cases, even though I can probably deal with a situation okay, it is better to ask a friend along that is more fluent than I am, so that if this situation comes up, I have someone there to help out (or even take over for me) if I become flustered.

This will most often happen when you get off the beaten track trampled by tourists to the country, and deal with the more mundane things that you have to do when you stay for an extended period of time: paying the gas bill, trying to get a particular kind of medicine at the pharmacy or riding on the bus. ¡Ay! Riding on the bus... From my experience, that's where you will find Mexicans on their worst behavior, but that's a topic for another entry.

Yet it does help illustrate my point. On the bus, people are busy doing the most mundane of daily chores, doing one of the more unpleasant things they must do during the day to just get along. In situations like that, the foreign language learner abroad should be prepared to find native speakers less helpful. I have run into this in places where usually I am treated kindly despite my language difficulties, like at the grocery store down the street or the music store in the mall. Who knows what kind of a day the person you are dealing with has had by the time you get to them? You may be the last straw of a pile that has been building up on their back all day, or even weeks.

Whenever possible, try to practice your conversation with people that are in situations where they are not a lot of pressure to get something done or to get somewhere quickly. Parties, for example, are more likely to have people willing to take the time to help you, than are places like the bureaucratic office that deals with drivers' licenses.

Sometimes it is not appropriate to talk at all.

We have no car down here, so we take a lot of cabs. In general, when riding with others, Shawn prefers to sit in the front seat and I tend to prefer sitting in the back. This works out for us with taxis, because I put Shawn in charge of dealing with the taxi drivers when we first moved down here, so that he could have some relatively consistent, basic interaction with people for which he could practice in advance. He would follow a basic routine, approaching the taxi driver, asking if they were available, asking them if their meter worked, giving the street and number, and as necessary, detailing any local landmarks.

I am very pleased that a year later, he has improved so much that he usually engages the cab driver in pleasant small talk on a number of things, and he can even respond to novel conversations initiated by the drivers themselves. With this, he occasionaly needs help, and in those cases, I can chime in from the back seat. However, it is often a delight to just sit back and enjoy the view, while Shawn handles the chit-chat about the inevitable questions: where we are from, how long we will be visiting, why we prefer living here, etc.

Yet there are times when the cab driver really is not in a mood to be chatty, or maybe that particular driver never feels like chatting. A good sign is when they do not answer the second or third time that you ask them, "¿Cómo está?" or when their response to your questions or comments is to turn up the radio to a conversation-suffocating volume. That is when maybe you should sit back and just relax, respecting the fact that silence can be golden.

Obviously there are other times where it is not appropriate to talk, like during the middle of a film, even if you are doing it in the local language. Those things tend to be more universal, and you will know when to keep your trap shut then. Yet just bear in mind that there are situations that you get used to having be 'talking situations,' and once in a while, people will not agree with your assessment. Do not be hurt or offended by this.

Be careful! Even native speakers make mistakes.

I had some great teachers. I had teachers from different countries where Spanish was spoken and some countries are more strict about their Spanish than others. Not that they will turn you away from the border if you use the direct object pronoun where you should use the indirect object pronoun, but there are places where such 'modifications in everyday usage' are more culturally accepted than they are in others.

In Mexico, I hear native speakers make mistakes. I hear them put plural verbs with singular nouns or use the wrong pronouns. This takes very careful listening, but it also takes some tactful handling. Nobody likes a language snob, so you do not want to make a big deal of that kind of thing if it happens. Your best bet is to remember what you heard, and then later confirm whether your suspicion that the person said something incorrectly is right or not.

I have, on a couple of occasions, with cute guys that are very excited to help me practice my Spanish (that's really sexy, by the way folks), corrected them by asking (in Spanish), "Wait - don't you mean...." with a sly smile. That usually gets them to laugh, smile and correct themselves, and it gives me the chance to smile back and say (in Spanish), "Don't worry about it! English speakers make a very similar mistake all the time..."

Mexicans enjoy a little teasing, so this can be a good way to get them to laugh at themselves. And Mexican guys can be so cute when they smile. Yet again, that is probably best kept for a different entry.

The thing that bugs me most about Mexican Spanish is that they all (around here anyway) seem to make decades plural, as we do in English. According to my upbringing, this is the worst of Spanish gaffes. You say los sesenta (literally in English, "the seventy") and NOT what they say here, "los sesentas. This drives me nuts. I can hardly hold my tongue when I hear it, but unless I am conversing with someone I know very well, I do not say anything. Not only is it rude, but the person is going to turn to a nearby native speaker and ask, "Hey, it's los sesentas, not los sesenta, right?" (in Spanish), and of course she will agree, making you now look like a rude jackass that does not know what he is talking about.

People will presume you speak better than you do.

It is nice when you get good enough that you can achieve some conversational flow. It first starts to happen around subjects that you talk about a lot, like with the cab drivers that ask the same basic things of gringo tourists. Then you start to have conversations at parties that start off similarly (Where are you from? How long will you stay?), and ones competence in answering those questions implies that you have a pretty darn good grasp of the language. People will compliment you on how well you speak, and it will go to your head a bit before you come crashing down when they start talking faster, about things like avant-garde baking and its relation to domestic stocking production and why that is the number one criteria for voters that prefer to bathe themselves in kneecaps. Or at least that is what it suddenly seems they are talking about.

This will happen to you eventually once you are immersed long enough in a culture, so be ready with a little speech to tell people that while you may have mastered certain basic things, you are completely lost about what they have just said. It does not pay to act like you know what people are saying when you really have no idea. It is one thing to try and fill in the blanks with context, but you will know when you hit the point that you are completely lost when all of a sudden the person talking to you is waiting for a response and you are still trying to figure out if they are talking about bats or tariffs or short-shorts.

Even people that correct you will not always correct you.

Conversation in real life is not always about speaking correctly. It is about communication, and communication relies on many different aspects besides just proper grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. All that is required for communication to take place is that one person tries to express something to another, and the other person has some understanding of it. Of course, the accuracy of the understanding on the part of the recipient will vary with many different factors, but often ideas are communicated sufficiently without all the component parts of the expression being performed accurately. In other words, sometimes people understand what you are talking about even when you make a lot of mistakes in saying it.

Therefore, when you are involved in a conversation in a foreign language, you may make a lot of mistakes that the native speakers with whom you are talking do not correct for you. This is especially true if they have a lot of exposure to people from your native land that speak the same native language as you do and tend to make the same exact mistakes you do. This happens for English speakers a lot in Mexico (and I suspect in Spain), because they tend to be exposed to a lot of English speakers. If you make the mistake of saying you were really embarazada when your skirt blew off when that strong wind hit, people may not tell you that what you actually just said you were pregnant when the wind came along. They know that English speakers make that mistake a lot, even if they do not know it is because for us, the word "embarrassed" is a false cognate.

It is more fun for native speakers to have a conversation with someone learning their language than it is for them to play the role of a teacher and correct them on every single mistake. It is more fun for you too, but there will be times where you later realize mistakes you made in talking to people, and belive me, you will be plenty embarazada. Do not let it get to you. Just try to figure out a way to remember the right way to say it, and try to do it right the next time.

Immersion is not limited to conversation.

I have been told on a couple of occasions here that my pronunciation is my strongest point when it comes to Spanish. (God knows it's not my conjugation.) I think a big reason for this is that, even though I do not get out and about all the time, I tend to watch TV and listen to music that is in Spanish, even when I have no idea as to what is being said. We are lucky to have many channels that broadcast old Mexican films from the 50s and 60s here, and I love to watch them for the way they look, even if I cannot understand everything going on. I also love old Mexican music, so I will often put on some Trio Los Panchos while I am cleaning the house or cooking lunch.

The point here is this: you can learn a lot from just hearing the foreign language, even if you are not listening to it. A whole different kind of learning takes place when you are following along, trying to figure out the words and understand their relation to each other. Yet even if you are mindlessly making up a shopping list while you have Molotov on in the background, that mere exposure can help you.

I do not have any scientific evidence to back this up, but I think it really does help. Plus, you get cultural exposure that is also good to have. All of a sudden one day, you realize that you know that song on the radio, or you hear a voice coming from the TV and without looking up, you know it is María Félix. This is a kind of cultural learning that really enriches your language learning because you can start talking about the stuff that people speaking the foreign language actually talk about.

Mexico is a splendid, living example that language has deep historic roots that shape its development. A proper study of Mexico and her history is integral to your coursework so that you can classify words that have been integrated into what is considered Spanish (or at least acceptable in daily use of Spanish in Mexico). It is a big part of what makes Mexican Spanish different from all the other forms.

Mexican Spanish is crazy different from other forms of Spanish.

If at least to the extent that it merits its own phrasebooks and dictionaries, Mexican Spanish differs from Spanish used in Spain as well as Latin American Spanish. Even within the country it varies, as Spanish spoken in the Yucután incorporates sounds and words from Mayan, making it much different from the Spanish spoken everywhere else. In Veracruz, they pronounce words more like Spanish-speakers of the Caribbean. Near the border with Guatemala, they supposedly even use el voseo.

Here I tend to notice mostly the influence of Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs, mostly in terms of vocabulary.

This is not to say that other countries do not have indigenous influences or regional variations, but the ones present in Mexico are unique. If you intend to work on your Spanish here in Mexico, you will quickly notice a lot of things that make it different from the general Spanish taught in classrooms.

Pobre México, tan lejos de Dios, y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.

In my Spanish classes in the United States, we were frequently told that we would see used words that were not really Spanish, but rather English loanwords that have crept into Spanish. Depending on who was telling us about it, the feeling about this ranged from respect for the dynamic nature of language to absolute disgust.

Mexico might well be the biggest violator, being so near the United States and getting so much media from there. For example, we do not alquiler our apartment, we rentar it. If you return something to a store, you need to bring along your ticket, because a recibo is something else. And if you need to go up several stories and do not want to take the stairs, you would take the elevador not the ascensor (again, that means something else here). This is not to say these words are wrong, but just that they have been assimilated into Mexican Spanish in the strange ways these things work with languages.

Whether or not you bristle when you hear it, you should get used to hearing versions of words in Mexican Spanish that sound more similar to their English counterparts than the words you learned in Spanish class. On occasion, with certain words, the forms that are not common in Mexico will still be understood, but you cannot really count on that always being the case everywhere.

The formal is too formal.

Another thing I was taught in school was to always use the formal form of address in certain situations. With new acquaintances, I would tend to use the formal address until it was either ridiculous to do so or the other person told me that I could use informal address. With certain people, like teachers or older people, I would use it always.

That is not done in Mexico. In fact, it is considered strange and verging on rude to use the formal address with most people. In many situations, people will walk up to you and use the informal form of address right off the bat.

The thing that bugs me most about it is that advertisements always use informal address, and for some reason, that just drives me nuts.