I thought I knew…

 

Having grown up in a community full of immigrants it was commonplace to interact with people who had learned English as a second language and spoke it to an extremely high level, albeit with their quirky mispronunciations and randomly misused phrases.   Their journey to English fluency very rarely comes up in conversation as we (monolingual English speakers) typically just assume that after living in the US for a certain amount of time, the English language just sort of soaks into you.    When moving abroad, it’s easy to assume that your experience with a new language will be much the same.  Simply by breathing in the Spanish air, you’ll be speaking like the natives in no time flat.  After all, they say that immersion is the best way to learn a new language and there’s no better way to immerse yourself in a language than by moving abroad … right? 

 

This was certainly the attitude that I had when I first boarded that one-way flight to Madrid in February of 2012.  I assumed that by the end of that summer, after having been in the Spanish capital for 6 whole months, my Spanish would be indistinguishable from that of a native madrleño.  Boy was I wrong! 

 

Off to a good start …. or so I thought

 

It started out well.  I took a few Spanish classes and genuinely made an effort to learn the language.   I studied all the grammar rules, tried to watch TV and listen to the radio in Spanish and even made a few Spanish Speaking friends.  I assumed that I was on the path to fluency and it FELT like I was learning Spanish.   About 6 months into my expat adventure I realized that I wasn’t quite making the progress that I thought I should be making.   When I would overhear conversations amongst natives on the street, it still sounded like gibberish,  I was still doing a lot of pointing at things when ordering food in bars, and the prospect of being thrown into a social situation where I’d be forced to actually communicate in Spanish was fucking terrifying!  I then overheard a conversation that completely changed everything. 

Wait…What?!

 

My roommate at the time was a lovely British girl who had been living in Madrid herself for the past 4 years.   We didn’t actually see each other that often since our work / social schedules rarely had both of us in the apartment at the same time.  One afternoon, while I was sitting at the kitchen table preparing one of the English classes I had to teach the following day, she received a phone call.   She went into the kitchen to take the call, but in a small central Madrid apartment, you’re never really more than a few meters away from anyone, so I was able to listen in.   I didn’t know or particularly care who the call was from or what it was about, but I heard her answer the phone with the typical Spanish “Alo, dígame” and I was curious to hear what she sounded like in Spanish.  At the time, my Spanish was still fairly basic but I was shocked to realize that hers was only marginally more advanced than mine! 

 

All this time, even though we had always spoken to each other in English, I assumed that after having lived in Madrid for so long, she would be practically bilingual.  About 30 seconds into that conversion, I realized that my assumption was dead wrong.  Being the nice, polite person that I am, I wasn’t about to approach with “How is it possible that your Spanish is such shit?” but I was curious about how it was possible for someone to live in a country for so long without picking up very much of the language.  So for the next few days, whenever we crossed paths in the apartment I would drop subtle little inquiries about how she went about learning the language, what was the most difficult part of learning Spanish for her, etc. It turned out that she was pretty open about the fact that she never really bothered learning much Spanish since she was able to get by with English.   Her friend group was mostly comprised of other English speaking expats and Spaniards with high levels of English with her closest friend being a multilingual German/Spanish girl with a near native level of English who was more than happy to be her personal translator whenever necessary. 

 

A fresh outlook 

A few months later I would move out of that apartment and into my own place with a brand new perspective on the topic of language learning and expat life in general.  From that point forward, I was determined not to follow in the footsteps of my monolingual former roomy and the countless expats that I’ve come across since then.