Today I want to write about some of the learning I have been doing during our trip this year. Since we have been predominantly traveling in Spanish speaking countries, one of the main things I have been learning is how to communicate in a foreign language. This is a large topic, so I want to start by talking about how I have gone about learning Spanish.
I started to try to learn more Spanish several months before our trip began. Initially, I played with Duolingo and Rosetta Stone to try and figure out which I preferred and found most helpful. I also dabbled with Babel, and a variety of lesser known names in the language learning space, but I found Duolingo and Rosetta Stone the most useful off the bat. It was a bit difficult to tell what was helping most at first, because I had no real feedback loop, by which I mean I didn’t really have anyone to speak with in Spanish. I also wasn’t properly motivated to spend time studying since everywhere I went people spoke English. Our trip was a theoretical thing in my mind, and the challenges of not being able to communicate with people I met daily didn’t exist.
When we first arrived in Guatemala in January I immediately started receiving feedback in the form of regular attempts to communicate with people in Spanish. This offered me a pretty stark view of my ability to speak Spanish. It turns out that 3 years of Spanish in high school, and occasional bursts of practice on Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, and other learning formats had done little to prepare me for actually talking with people. I could make myself understood reasonably well in some very specific circumstances, like ordering food in a restaurant, or asking about prices in a store, and that was about it. This level of knowledge gave me enough understanding to realize how much I couldn’t understand, or speak about coherently, which in turn gave me a hell of a lot of incentive to learn more as quickly as I could manage.
For me, Duolingo has turned out to be the best tool for gaining a greater vocabulary and improving my understanding and usage of grammar. Rosetta Stone seemed to be more geared towards teaching Spanish phrases that help for quick trips, but I found it hard to gain a better overall understanding of the language. Part of this is likely due to the differences in formats between the two programs. Duolingo is a game. It uses short lessons that build upon each other and offer a ton of repetition. You also get the satisfaction of increasing levels, maintaining your daily learning streak, competing with other users, and completing learning challenges with friends. While this could be irritating for some people, I find the gamification of the app to be motivating when coupled with the daily experience of wanting to be able to talk to people more effectively. Rosetta Stone has no comparable features, and ultimately I found myself ignoring it in favor of spending more time on Duolingo.
The thing that has helped me most is actually speaking and listening to Spanish daily. At first, I was pretty happy when I thought I could understand about 50% of what was being said to me. This seemed pretty good until I started to realize how easy it is to misunderstand the core of a conversation when I was missing 50% of the context. In San Marcos la Laguna there are a large number of people who speak at least a little bit of English, so understanding 50% of what I was hearing coupled with a bit of hand gesturing and a couple of English words thrown in worked ok. When we arrived in Mexico it was a whole different story. Most of the people we encountered spoke Spanish, and many people didn’t know any English. So, I started finding myself in situations where my rudimentary Spanish was all I had available to me to get by. For example, in Chetumal, we went to a Telcel store to buy local SIM cards, and we had to spend about 40 minutes talking with a very nice lady who helped us make our purchase. After that exchange my brain hurt. I was pleased that I was able to navigate the conversation, more or less, but it was also very obvious that I was guessing at her meaning about as often as I was really grokking the conversation. This was pretty common for our time in Mexico, and I found myself more and more desperate to be able to communicate more efficiently. So, I spent several hours every day playing Duolingo, and trying to speak to people at every opportunity. It was common for me to have a conversation with someone and then replay bits of the conversation for hours afterwards recognizing places where I had misunderstood, or misused words, or phrases. While this was disheartening sometimes it really set a fire under my ass to keep learning and practicing.
In addition to Duolingo I started using an app called BrainPop Espanol, which offers a free daily video, completely in Spanish, on a wide variety of topics. The videos are about 5 to 10 minutes in length, and after watching them you can take a 10 question quiz, in Spanish, which lets you benchmark your understanding of the video. My early quiz results in the app reflected my guess that I was only understanding about 50% of what I was hearing, and being asked. The fact that the quiz questions are completely in Spanish meant that I not only had to understand the video contents, I also had to understand what I was being asked, and what each answer meant. After several months of using this app in addition to Duolingo, and regular conversations with Spanish speakers, I have been pleased to find that my comprehension is much closer to 75%.
Actually speaking Spanish with people is certainly the best means of learning that I have found. I don’t think conversation alone would have gotten me to where I am today, because I find it difficult to learn new words and understand grammatical errors when I am desperately trying to follow a conversation. That said, the experience of talking with someone in a foreign language has given me the greatest understanding of my shortcomings, and it’s amazingly rewarding to have gone from being able to make simple requests to being able to actually hold 10 minute conversations about simple topics with people. I get a huge boost in confidence and motivation every time I can make myself understood. It makes me want to practice more, and I really enjoy being able to talk with people.
Talking with people still requires a lot of time spent mentally translating what is being said to me in Spanish into English, and translating my responses from English back into Spanish. This process is slow, and error prone, but it’s a start. I now spend time every day trying to think in Spanish. Most of those thoughts are simple, but again, it’s a start towards a more complete understanding of the language. I think this practice is paying dividends, because on our return to San Marcos I was able to text with some local friends in Spanish without using Google translate, and I sat down and had a 10 minute conversation about our travels with an acquaintance I ran into at one of our favorite local restaurants. Texting in Spanish is particularly nice because I don’t have to stand around feeling foolish while I think about what something means, or how to respond, while another person is staring at me. However, I think the experience of holding a face to face conversation is more instructive and rewarding, because I get immediate feedback, and helpful corrections when I misspeak.
Overall, I have found learning a new language to be one of the most rewarding experiences I have had this year. It’s fun to really feel the progress I have made by being able to speak more and more with people. It can also be incredibly challenging and frustrating. I regularly have months of struggling with the difference in the way that Spanish and English format phrases or sentences, but ultimately when I start to “get it” I feel so much more excited for having worked so hard. As I continue to learn I will write some additional posts about what has worked for me. I’ll also continue to describe more about how the process of learning a language feels to me.
If we continue to spend more time in Guatemala this year I would like to start to learn Kaqchikel, one of the two Mayan languages commonly spoken around Lake Atitlan. I hope that learning new languages will remain a lifelong pursuit. I find it very impressive to meet people who speak multiple languages, and I’d love to be one of them. For now, I’ll keep studying Spanish, and see where that takes me.