Thoughts on learning a new language...

When getting ready to move, many people asked us, "How's your Spanish?"  The answer to the question was usually, "asi asi"(so so).  All of us knew that a big part of this move would be working on learning (or remembering) a new language.

The kids' school is a bilingual school and 30% ish of their day is in Spanish.  Plus they take an extra class once a week from the Costa Rican woman who is their Spanish teacher at the school.  Honestly, I'm pretty jealous of them.  They've had good days and bad days in Spanish and at the beginning, Grace hated every minute of it and Charlie would say his "tummy hurt" during Spanish.  I think he was worried when he couldn't understand.  Both our kids inherited some pretty strong perfectionism genes from both parents, so they're doomed to stress about this kind of stuff, unfortunately.  But both of them have learned so much and when I told Grace that I found a babysitter for over their break who speaks Spanish and English, her response was "Good, I can keep learning Spanish during vacation!"  Definitely an improved response from what she would've said a month ago.

Kevin took Spanish in high school and remembers a little.  I took French in high school and college and that has done nothing but frustrate me!  At least some of the vocab is similar. 

The RPM world (that's the business we're partnering with) is definitely a bilingual world as well.  Many of our key employees are amazingly bilingual and that makes it easier.  But we have loads of employees as well as vendors, etc. who only speak Spanish.  One of the most frightening things to me is being in the office alone for a little while, sure the phone is going to ring with someone who can't/won't speak English!  Happens all the time - I've gotten good at asking them to call back in 15 minutes.  :)

But Kevin and I are very very motivated to learn Spanish and so we are struggling through our own lessons with an awesome surfer dude from Hawaii named Austin.  He's been great and we've learned so much.  There are days when are our brains just hurt, trying to remember all the vocab and verb conjugations, but we're getting there.  So here are my random thoughts on how it feels to learn a new language...

1. I really like to talk - I know this isn't news to any of you who know me, but boy it is so much more obvious to me when I can't communicate what I really want to say.
2. When you're in the States and around people speaking a different language, it's easy to assume they're not talking about anything important.  Maybe it's just me, but I think we naturally assume when we can't understand something, it must not make any sense to anyone else either.
3. Being the minority from a language perspective is very humbling.  Even when I try my newfound Spanish skills on someone, I always feel a little silly.  Makes me appreciate Lupe (my old house cleaning in Denver) and how hard she tried to speak to me in English.  Makes me wish I had tried to speak to her in Spanish!
4. When you're learning/speaking a new language, sometimes you forget how to say simple things in English.  Again, if you know me, you know I'm a bit of a fan of "words" - love vocab (thanks dad and Mrs. Easterly) and love writing.  So this is particularly frustrating as well!
5. I think the best way for me to learn is to pick up our employees hitch hiking or waiting for the bus on the side of the road and take them wherever they're going.  Don't worry, mom, I'm only picking up people I know, but this really forces me to speak Spanish!
6. Last of all - there is nothing more satisfying than rehearsing a sentence or two in your head for 5 or 10 minutes and then saying it and it actually making sense to who you're talking to!  The only problem is when they respond...can usually only understand about half of that!  :)

It's a lot of fun for all of us and we often have "todo espanol" dinners.  We'll get there!  It makes us all feel smarter and dumber at the same time - a good process in humility for everyone.