This is a post that originally appeared on my blog about living in Mexico. I wrote it around the time that we first got our residence visas in Mexico. My Spanish has improved since then, but I do still make mistakes frequently! Luckily, the pleasure of communicating has somewhat overcome my pride and perfectionism. I reprint this article here in the hopes that it will help you too.
I have to admit I have my pride. I am not fond of sounding like an idiot — in any language.
I’m a perfectionist to a fault, too. I do think I’ve become a bit better about this gradually. Often perfectionism is a game that isn’t worth the candle.
But I often fear that in Spanish I am coming across something like this:
“Eet are a well day, ees eet not? And who are you today? Weer is you goink?”
Okay, I exaggerate to make my point. But let me try to tell a story in the past and it comes out along these lines:
“Yesterday we are going to Queretaro. We have ride the bus and we tooken a taxi to the National Office of Immigration. The taxi driver are speaking very fast and with his radio on and neither Kelly nor me are understanding. So I did ask him to turn his radio upside down and to speak more leisurely. Then I am telling him that we likes his city. We did have a well conversation about politics and finances and he tells us that he works twelve daily hours and six days per weekly. He is a very nice man.”
I often think that my pride and my perfectionism, call that hatred of sounding stupid, are the biggest barriers to learning better Spanish. I haven’t quite figured out yet how to turn them into a motivation to spend more time with grammar drills.
Many people know grammar but are shy to speak another language… we met many Mexicans like that. But conversations are my strong point… after all, you did understand my little story, didn’t you? And Mexicans do get my drift a good percentage of the time.
So what will it take for studying a little Spanish daily to become an ingrained habit?
Hmm, I think that’s a key: make it a little Spanish every day, and it’s a much easier habit to really follow through on.
I do like blogging about this, as some unknown number of people are knowing that I was thinking of what doing practice improvement making me language!
