I will apologise in advance because these blog entries will become, I imagine, quite dull for the next couple of weeks, given that our cultural experience of Chile for now will be more or less entirely through the medium of learning its language. The course is immersive in every possible way. Classes are taught entirely in Spanish and we are encouraged to talk amongst ourselves also in Spanish. Martin and I speak a kind of Spanglish to each other even on our own and the evenings are filled with social events arranged by the school for us to practice our Spanish with other students. Today we have lessons all day followed by a 'Spanglish' event at a bar. It is exhausting. We fall into bed after midnight because the bar is am hours walk from our hostel and because we have got talking to some lovely spanish speaking people from Mexico, and lost track of the time.
"I feel destroyed", says M.
Me too.
The best part of the day though, was our first one to one session. We each have a separate session with our teacher, to allow for the fact that each if us believes we would hold back the other!
When I first start my class and the teacher begins to ask me questions in Spanish I freeze, panic and am finding it hard to hear the basic questions she is asking me because in my mind begins a constant barrage of 'see, you have no ability to learn a language, you are too bad at this, it is a waste, now you have no classmates you cannot hide.' The scarily rapid advance of this sort of conviction is drowning out her words.
Perhaps she sees this because she changes tack. (The teachers here are really very good). Abandoning the 'how old are you, how would you say hello', line of questioning, she asks instead about our travels. When it transpires that 1) we are on quite a journey and 2) I have lost some of my reticence in my enthusiasm about this subject, she pursues this line of questioning and hey presto, we have semi fluent spanglish emanating gloriously, if nor entirely correctly conjugated, out of my mouth. I forget that I am in a classroom situation, I neglect to think about whether I am giving the right answer, whether she might be thinking that I haven't got a hope of learning Spanish, what my grade will be, how embarrassing it might be to get it wrong - in short, when I stop thinking I am at school, I relax. And when I relax Spanish becomes, once again, a way to communicate cool things to nice people. I even get the grammar right more often because I forget to remember to over think it.
I bounce out of my lesson, abandoning my previous mentally prepared speech to M 'it was OK but I think I was right the first time about being no good at languages', and replace it with 'that was amazing. I loved it. I actually said things!'
The psychology is self evident, but I do owe our teacher a debt in that she can anticipate this and put a stop to my mental escalation. Interestingly we sometimes have another teacher in our classroom, who takes certain sections of the lesson, while our teacher leads it for the majority. My theory is that she is a trainee. Her style is notably different. Where our usual teacher is bouncy and energetic, laughing when we make mistakes, teasing us gently to help us remember, and making little exclamations of pure joy every time we get a tiny thing right, the other teacher is immensely serious, takes a correct answer as a cue to move on rather than as a reason to basically crack open the champagne, and has a terrifying tendency to suddenly point at you and ask you something in rapid Spanish. In short, she treats us as though she is a teacher and we are in school. Which in turn, despite being true, has the result that I clam up, my mind goes blank in panic and I am more aware of the other nine, (perfectly friendly) people in the room than I am of what the question was, let alone the answer.
So yes. I am certifiably low in the self belief department, especially where it comes to foreign languages.
But what I have learned is that the key to being good at languages, is to somehow convince yourself you are good at languages. And if that means your teacher needs to pass out in sheer awe every time you manage to remember not to say 'work' when you are trying to say 'travel' ('trabajar' and 'viaja' - they are quite similar - well at least in my mind they are), well, so be it.
Buenas noches mis amigos, soy muy cansada pero muy feliz.
I will collect my medal later.
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