Found in translation: A love letter to language learning

“Those who know many languages live as many lives as the languages they know.”

— Czech proverb

It’s a brisk Monday morning in Buenos Aires—my first Monday in the city—and the sky is the color of silver. Outside, a bracing late-winter wind sweeps through the streets; coats cannot be zipped up high enough. Gratefully, I’m sequestered indoors, seated at a wide table, with a fresh notebook open in front of me. Its blank, white pages conjure both dread and anticipation.

For more than five years now, whenever I land in a new city—no matter where I happen to be in the world—the first book I open and begin to fill is my sketchbook. But the book laying in front of me now, handmade by my dear friend Cara in San Francisco, is decidedly not for sketching.

Instead of watercolor paper, this book is comprised of standard white printer paper. Instead of drawing pens or brushes, a standard ballpoint pen lays next to my notebook on the table. And instead of sketches—or notes about the encounters that might’ve unfolded through a certain sketch—this book is about to hold notes of a far different nature.

For the first time in five years, I’m going back to school—Spanish school, to be exact.

*   *   *

My recent journey to the southern half of South America had a few catalysts—inspiring new friendships, the draw of experiencing a new part of the world—but one catalyst was not entirely new: It would be, I decided earlier this year, a perfect opportunity to study Spanish again.

Having just turned 30 in June, it’s crazy to think I’ve now known some degree of Spanish for more than half my life. I started studying the language when I was 14 and kept it up throughout high school. As a naïvely ambitious college freshman, I even wanted to minor in the language—until the amount of writing in higher-level Spanish classes became too much to juggle with my English major’s already-sizable writing requirements.

But while my formal Spanish education ceased in my junior year of university, I was grateful that a foundational knowledge of the language never really went away. Every time I traveled in Spain or to a new part of Latin America, I was delighted to have basic phrases ready for retrieval from the dusty back corners of my mind.

I could make sure this or that bus was the one I needed. I could ask for directions without gesticulating like an ecstatic mime. Most importantly, I could ask for someone’s name; learn about their life; say goodbye with a bit of their story now a part of mine.

*   *   *

Here’s the problem, though—I never went deeper.

I never learned more Spanish than what I already knew.

I never resumed building on that preexisting foundation of the language.

Finally, once my flight to Buenos Aires had been booked this summer, I decided it was time for a change. And so I turned to that which fate has so often used to direct the course of my life—i.e. hello, Google!—and typed in “Spanish school in Buenos Aires.” 

I read reviews. I compared costs. I studied schedules and locations and websites. At last, the perfect choice for me seemed to present itself—El Pasaje Spanish School. It would be but a 20-minute walk from my apartment in the neighborhood of San Telmo. For 20 hours of intensive group instruction per week, the fee was but $175. And I especially loved their colorful website and Instagram account, and the excitement they appeared to genuinely feel for their students.

En route to Buenos Aires—on the seven-hour layover in El Salvador I wrote about last week—I sat in an airport café, completing my entrance exam for El Pasaje, feeling my pulse race with palpable excitement for what this new chapter was about to hold.

*   *   *

It’s now been two weeks since I arrived in Buenos Aires and, by this time tomorrow afternoon, I will have completed 40 hours of classes at El Pasaje—or, nearly the equivalent of an entire college semester’s worth of instruction.

And with those 40 hours of classes now behind me, there are so many things I want to share with you today. I want to tell you about my professor Santiago, and how much I adore his style of teaching—about how clearly he’s explained topics that once made me want to all but tear my hair out (pretérito indefinido vs. imperfecto, I’m looking at you…).

I want to tell you about how my class has only three students in it, myself included, and how it has been just a lot of downright fun to sit around the table with them each day, so much so that I often forget I’m with two fellow students and our teacher—and not only laughing and conversing with three fun new friends.

And yet what I most want to tell you about—and what I’m going to devote the rest of this story to—are not the great breakthroughs that have occurred at El Pasaje, but the little eureka moments of comprehension that have happened outside of class.

Moments like—the morning I was walking to class, and I had to pause on a street corner while the light was red. As I stood there, a local bus roared past me in a huff of fumes and exhaust, but as it slowed to make a turn, I had just enough time to read the ad on its side, which was apparently promoting a brand of hygiene product:

Lo mejor de tu vida pasa en el baño.

Just the day before, Santiago had taught us about a certain grammatical construction in Spanish. In English, it’s common to say, “The good thing about X is…” or “The interesting thing is…”, but in Spanish, ‘thing’—or cosa—goes unspoken. You need only say “Lo bueno es…” or “Lo interesante es…” or “Lo mejor es…” (“The best thing is…”).

It’s one thing to learn something in a classroom; it’s quite another thing to see it out in the real world, and to be standing on an unassuming street corner in Buenos Aires, suddenly capable of reading the ad on the side of a bus (though whether or not you agree with said ad is a different story…):

The best part of your life happens in the bathroom.

Then there was the moment at lunch with a dear friend in Recoleta, a downtown neighborhood famous for its historic cemetery.

It was a gloriously warm afternoon—the late-winter winds having finally abated for once—and we had feasted on our own personal table-top grill, or parrilla, laden with mouth-watering skewers of chicken and pork. Afterwards, our stomachs about to burst, we asked the waitress if we could pay for our bill by card.

Por supuesto, she said—of course. We offered her a card, she ran it through the machine, and once the receipt was printed, she searched through her pockets for a pen—not coming up with one. When she motioned to one of her colleagues across the restaurant, asking him to bring her a pen, I saw I had one sitting in front of me and offered it to her.

“Gracias,” she said, and then called to her colleague again, saying she didn’t need a pen anymore. “Me acaba de prestar.”

I cannot adequately express the excitement I felt in this moment. Again, on one of our first days of class, Santiago had explained a particular form of verb construction—that using the phrase acabarse de with the infinitive form of another verb translates as, “to just X…”. For example, to say, “Acabo de terminar clase,” translates as, “I just finished class,” or “Acabo de llegar del aeropuerto” means “I just arrived from the airport.”

It was for only this reason that I understood our waitress that sun-soaked afternoon in Recoleta, when she called out to her colleague and said I had just given her a pen. I felt the same flush of satisfaction I’d felt after reading the bus ad on that street corner—knowing I’d just made sense of something that would have once slipped right past me.

And finally, there was a moment at my very first milonga, or tango club, in Buenos Aires.

One of my fellow classmates, a lovely German girl named Wiebke, is a former professional ballroom dancer and absolute tango fanatic. Throughout our first week of class, she had shared story after story of nights spent dancing into the early hours of the morning. Last Friday night, I had the chance to join her at one of her favorite milongas in San Telmo, Chanta 4.

Later in the night, we were sitting and waiting for a live tango orchestra to begin playing, when our friend Juan turned to me and said, “Candace, me duermo.”

Before my time at El Pasaje, I’m sure I would have heard the word duermo, translated it literally as “I sleep,” and could have only assumed he meant it was time for him to leave and get some sleep. But as it just so happened, that very morning Santiago had taught us the difference between dormir and dormirse—and explained that while the former word means “to sleep,” the latter is a reflexive version of the word that means, “to fall asleep.”

“You’re falling asleep!” I said excitedly to Juan, before turning to Wiebke to share in my excitement with her. “Wiebke! Juan just said me duermo—he’s falling asleep!!”

*   *   *

These moments are not in any way hugely significant—but you wouldn’t know that by the utter rush of joy I felt each time.

In every situation, something clicked into place in my mind that absolutely would never have clicked had I not spent these last two weeks studying Spanish so intensely. More and more, I’m realizing these little moments are one way of marking our progress in a foreign language—they are the tiny minnows that would have otherwise swum right through our net.

I leave Buenos Aires for Uruguay on Monday, but I will always be grateful for how this journey began—by returning to a language I’ve long loved, collecting every eureka moment of understanding, and filling a new kind of notebook to its entirety.

I can’t wait to pick up my sketchbook again soon—but just for now, the sketches can wait…

*   *   *

How to connect with El Pasaje Spanish School:

• El Pasaje is located at 83 Piedras Street, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Telmo.
• Visit their website at www.elpasajespanish.com, or send an email to [email protected] (and please tell them I say hola!).