La Lengua

In Spanish, lengua means both “language” and “tongue.” Interesting that they should be the same word, because my tongue-lengua has still not been able to settle comfortably into this goddamn Spanish-lengua. On the one hand, I have seen encouraging improvements in my accent and vocabulary - but on the other hand, my grammar remains stubbornly deficient. That is to say, most days I would rather waste an extra five minutes in pointless, roundabout sentences than conjugate in the subjunctive. Or sometimes my mouth gets carried away with itself and starts pulling pluperfect conjugations out of thin air and sprinkling them nonsensically throughout otherwise-perfectly-comprehensible sentences.

Other times I will be waiting in line somewhere, knowing that momentarily I will have to ask for something in Spanish, and when the time comes for me to recite my grammatically-flawless question, I will get flustered, forget my carefully practiced (and embarrassingly simple) phrase, and open my mouth to utter some ugly form of American-tourist-gobbledegook. Of course everyone in Madrid speaks American-tourist-gobbledegook, so I will still get what I am asking for, but at the expense of my language-learning pride. They have a word for this here: vergüenza – it means shame or embarrassment. So at least I can go home to my host family and adequately describe my post-shopping emotional state. That’s progress.

So there is the grammar – what I like to call “textbook” Spanish, because you have to know it, even though nobody really speaks it. It is so frustrating, because I need to learn textbook Spanish so that I can NOT speak it and instead speak real Spanish – la lengua corriente. Literally, this means: “the current language.” I get this confused with la lengua “corriendo” which would mean (if such a phrase actually existed) “the running language.” To me this just seems much more appropriate, because real Spanish is hard to keep up with and always seems to make me feel out of breath.

When I first got to Madrid, my experience of real Spanish was something along the lines of: “…mmm mmmmmm con los mmmmmm mm quedado mmm mmmmmm. Diego mmmmmm, ¡mmmmm mm puta madre! ¡¡Mmmmmm teléfono mmmmm mm mmm Vodafone mmmm mmm mmmmm mmmm!! ¿¿Qué mmmm mmmm?? Mmm no creo mmmmmmm - ¡mmmmm mmm jamás! ¡¡Jamás!!”

Trying to figure out the words in between the few that I knew felt like an extended game of hangman - which I always lost. However, after a couple weeks of spending up to 7 hours a day (Tuesdays = death) in classes in which only Spanish is spoken – and is often spoken rapid-fire by native speakers – I am now able to win my perpetual game of hangman about half of the time. I’ll take what I can get.

It is quiet exciting, actually, to notice that I am reading faster and understanding more, and asking people to repeat themselves fewer times. And it is a particular relief to have fewer of those moments where I will be talking to someone in Spanish, nodding and making “mmhmm” sounds because I really don’t understand most of what they are saying, and all of a sudden they will give me a funny look – I have apparently “mmhmm”-ed where an “mmhmm” is not appropriate, and now it is painfully clear that I have no clue what they are saying to me. Ay, the vergüenza!

I think I just have to get over that – the vergüenza, I mean. I don’t see Spaniards moping around because they’ve muddled up an English sentence (Ha! They could care less). I am determined to learn this feisty little lengua – and so the vergüenza has just got to go.