I’ve been living in the United States now for about seven months since I returned from Madrid, Spain, where I lived for about fifteen. But even though the American sway of things has returned to its natural preeminence, I still have that lingering residue of a life abroad, experienced for the first time in all its vibrant and novel colors.
On reflection, I’ve realized that the experience was more enriching even than I could have realized while in the country, not only for my language learning aptitude and my linguistic awareness but for who I’ve become as a human being. I feel that I’ve laid some permanent groundwork so that I can continue improving my knowledge of the Spanish language–and especially the peninsular variant–making it more and more an undeniable part of my identity.
Now on to the practical advice. I hope you can take away something for your language learning from what I’ve been able to experience. In my peculiar case, the most ample source of authentic conversation and experience with the language was in taxis: taxis galore, taxis every day, ranging from dirty and smelly taxis and taxis that make you sweat to the most wonderfully homey taxis that seduce you with an under-the-radar appeal to comfort, silence, and newly installed air conditioning.
I estimate that I took somewhere between 150-200 taxis during my time in Madrid, all of them lasting at least 5 minutes. I didn’t necessarily have substantial conversations in all of them, but I did speak with nearly all the taxi drivers. Some observations:
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I’ve experienced a huge variety of accents from speakers coming from different parts of the Spanish-speaking world–Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic, Spain, Costa Rica–and from many non-native speakers of Spanish as well.
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The most salient thing I’ve noticed is that the intelligibility of the speaker depends more on the speaker’s intonation and speed than on the accent as such. All accents are clearly intelligible–but not all speakers. But all told, there were very few that I had trouble understanding, and these might also have been attributable in part to the conditions in the taxi: my most difficult conversation was trying to listen to a man speaking through a mask and a plastic partition (installed in all taxis) with the window open and the radio blaring. It hardly need be said that my listening improved immensely while there.
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An important observation that I can make about the nature of conversation and fluency in a foreign language, and the one that is my greatest takeaway, is that true eloquence is extremely rare in a speaker, native or otherwise. Most of the hundreds of native speakers I’ve met are not eloquent in the sense that might mythically come to mind when the word fluency is bandied about. In this sense, the speech of the fluent native speaker is different from what you experience with media in the language–on Netflix, or on the news, or even on YouTube. In all of these (with the exception of more spontaneous YouTube videos) the dialogue is prepared, very often scripted by professional writers, at the very least someone is always talking about something with which they have a degree of familiarity and so the sense of what constitutes native speech is often warped. In other words, the fluency standard of content on the internet is very often greater than in real life, in a sense hyper-real. This is great for learning, of course, but not for getting an accurate idea of the language as used in real life. Hence the importance of speaking with actual native speakers, or at least listening to real conversations (podcasts can be good for this).
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Because of this experience, my idea of fluency has been forever altered, and it is a lower bar than what I had initially conceived some years ago when I first got into language learning. My conversational ideal is no longer fluency but wit, which is naturally more difficult to pull off. Fluency is also a highly cumbersome, imprecise term, since conversations are highly variable and you often don’t have the chance to lay into some long juicy sentences. Sometimes just a few words here and there will do, and this doesn’t make you less fluent. But if you can shift subtly and communicate on a dime, even if this is in a few words–especially if it is, since this a requisite of wit–then you can claim something beyond the flashy word fluency. This takes time (not quite there yet myself, but getting there) and a high degree of literacy.
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I’ve also become convinced that extensive comprehensible input over a long period of time, with some output in a lesser proportion, is the way to the highest possible stages of language learning (let’s say C2 and beyond). I myself don’t see any limits, given enough time (except for in speaking, which depends also on a talent for mimicry and on unpredictable social elements).
This has been the long and arduous formation of my Spanish identity, una apuesta por lo que al final se ha convertido en una de las grandes pasiones de mi vida. Because of its lasting effect, I find that I’m eternally grateful for both the opportunity and the hardships of living abroad during this period of my life. I wouldn’t alter the details even if I were given the chance–and I say let it function as a precedent for the travels to come. Who knows anymore what they’ll bring me.
