First off, hello! It has been a long time! Partly because I haven’t been in the mood, partly because I haven’t felt like I had any stories to tell. Now I have realized we have many stories that I never got around to telling!
Now to explain the title of the post and get to the heart of today’s story. For those of you that have known Teddy and I a long time, you will know that Teddy and I gallivanted (my preferred word) around Central and South America a year after getting married (so 2015). So, we should know Spanish. I took Spanish in college, we both buckled down with Duolingo before our trip, and then spent 3 months in Guatemala taking classes (and teaching English) at a language exchange school before continuing our trip. But, like, we never got good.
As we are consistently being reminded here in Japan, language learning is difficult, even when you are in an immersive environment (see being in Japan, THE country that speaks Japanese and almost exclusively speaks Japanese) because you will naturally surround yourself with other English speakers. You become overjoyed that there is someone you can easily communicate with! And then you only communicate with them… never speak the language you are in the country to learn… and learn an embarrassingly small amount of that language…
Or is that just me?
It isn’t. But the truth is even if we had gotten fluent in Spanish during that time, it was 10 years ago. And we have never spoken it since. I got some listening practice in at Starbucks, but there was always someone who natively spoke Spanish that could take orders for customers who needed it so I never, ever, ever spoke it. I haven’t spoken it for almost ten years.
Until Wednesday.
On Wednesday we met up with a potential English student (we have kind of become English tutors? That’s another story) for the first time. We were told beforehand that she only speaks Japanese and Spanish, and we might have a hard time communicating. Well, you gotta try.
Teddy and I sat at the table and then just stared at each other and eventually spoke the question we were both asking: What language do we even try? So I decided to not overthink it and just be willing to embarrass myself (which never happens and is the primary cause of my difficulty learning languages hahaha) and started speaking to her in Spanish not knowing what I’d been able to get out.
And Spanish came out. Good Spanish. Intelligible Spanish. I even had a better accent than I think I’ve even managed before. And she happily started chatting away in Spanish with us because she doesn’t get that much of an opportunity to speak Spanish in Japan. And Teddy joined in and started speaking Spanish with no troubles also. What? How?
When we told her that we hadn’t spoken Spanish in almost 10 years, she was stunned. She then told us a story from way back when she started learning Japanese (she’s lived here almost 3 decades). She told her instructor that she was worried she was starting to forget Spanish because she never had an opportunity to speak it anymore. Her instructor told her to never worry about that because it all sticks. And I guess he was right. Because here we are, 10 years after our last attempt at learning Spanish using it to communicate in Japan.
Life is crazy.
I honestly found that event so encouraging for learning Japanese too. Because I never thought my Spanish was good enough to communicate, but it was. I don’t feel even remotely close be being able to communicate in Japanese most days. But maybe I am closer than I thought. Maybe I am already there but I’m just too scared. We’ll find out more one day. But for now I can be confident that even if I don’t use the Japanese I know today, it might come in handy in a decade. And I really did not expect that to bring so much joy.
Hope you enjoyed story time with Cassie. Hopefully I’ll enthrall you with another soon. Toodles!