OK, so in preparation for our trip to Costa Rica, I did what any person of moderate intelligence would do. I embarked on a mission to learn Espanol. After purchasing a couple of dictionaries, a high school text book, a Learn-to-Speak-Spanish instruction book, and an 8 hour audio instruction program downloaded from the internet, I calculated as how I was on the road to fluency in Spanish. I think I failed to mention that all of this was prior to our FIRST trip to Central America, just one fly-by type year ago.
The significance of clarifying this timeframe is to point out the obvious….I have now had well over a year to study my various instruction-aides plus the month and a half of living in Costa Rica last winter, to achieve the fluency of my desire. Logic would dictate: mission accomplished. But wait! It turns out my “mission accomplished” would turn out to be about as valid as former President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1, 2003.
Now it is true, I have listened to different segments of my audio course using my MP3 player for close to an hour each and every day for at least 15 months. And I have completed the text book course at least once and another instruction book three or four times. I have learned hundreds upon hundreds of vocabulary words, verb conjugations of both the regular and highly irregular type, mostly proper grammatical structure, and nearly perfect pronunciation technique.
As a result, I can put together simple sentences (in the present tense only), ask questions, write with a reasonable degree of accuracy and read uncomplicated newspaper articles, etc. with approximately 70% rate of comprehension due to limited vocabulary and verb construction which wanders beyond the present tense. These efforts are most effective when not under the pressure of another Spanish speaking person waiting for me to remember the words needed to construct my sentence and/or question. It also turns out that speakers and writers of Spanish tend to use a lot of words that are not among the many I have learned.
The problem is this. Even when I am satisfied I have delivered a perfectly constructed question or comment and the person to whom I am speaking demonstrates total understanding, I find that when that person responds, I am clueless to figure out what has just been said. It is not only because native Spanish speakers run their words together so that an entire sentence or even a whole paragraph comes out as one long word, I believe there is a short circuit between my ear and my brain that garbles transmission and renders it all as jibber jabber. Which in turn unleashes a near panic attack inside of me that temporarily robs my memory of all things previously learned. So there I stand, looking like a person who is clearly not even of moderate intelligence.
I mean REALLY !!! It’s like the other person is speaking a foreign language !
Proving once again that being able to listen is the true key to understanding. Esa es vida!!!
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