When I was a first-year, I took a leap and registered for the elementary Hispanic studies course having never learned Spanish before. And, as I sat in a class surrounded by students who had nearly all taken at least high school Spanish, I was pretty sure I’d made a mistake.
A thousand miles from home, I was already nervous sitting in college classes taught in English. Not understanding anything my professor was saying added a whole other level of stress. But I stuck with it, mainly because I found friends who spoke just as little Spanish as me.
Slowly, I improved and in my junior year I got the opportunity to study abroad in Santiago, Chile. On the plane there I listened to the Marias and practiced a bunch of phrases I could say to my host mom, which were quickly shown to be deeply insufficient.
And while it’s true that I didn’t understand what my host mom was saying to me for the first month (maybe three), I eventually used up all of my embarrassment and became comfortable speaking with her.
While there, I took three classes at a local university and by some miracle I didn’t fail. One class was an early Chilean literature course (imagine reading a Jane Austen book in Spanish every week) with a rather passionate professor who would come to class everyday and shout, “This is the best book ever!” Then I had a figure drawing class with an old art teacher who would occasionally ask the exchange students what percent of the class they understood (100% is the only correct answer) and sang the theme song from Chicago the musical to me (my hometown). My last class was a philosophy course that was a little less memorable except for the dozens of fedoras that the professor cycled through during the semester.
Back in the United States, Spanish became increasingly a part of my life – as I’ve used it for interviews in my reporting, found podcasts which I listen to daily (I highly recommend “Volvamonos Verde”) and began tutoring a Spanish speaker in English over the summer.
Learning a language to fluency can seem like a daunting and never ending task, but my Spanish is far from perfect. If you can get over the relative embarrassment of speaking as a beginner, then the investment pays off much quicker.
So, I have two takeaways from this journey. First, practice speaking as a beginner, people are kind and communication is the point of learning a language. And second, you don’t need to study abroad or work abroad to learn a language, especially if it’s as common as Spanish.
