MTC Week 5- Learning to Speak Spanish

Hello Everyone,

My time in the MTC is almost over. I’ll be leaving on the 17th. Then it’s the real thing. I don’t know what to expect when I get out there, so I’m neither nervous nor excited. It is what it is, and since I don’t know what it is, I feel no particular way about it. I’ll let you know how I feel when I know what it is.

Anyway, this week was another very formulaic week. Nothing really interesting happened. So I guess I’ll talk about the Spanish language. I’ve been learning and practicing for a while now, and seeing as I’m about to end my formal learning and start practicing really hard, I suppose this is a good time to record where I’m at.

Structurally, English and Spanish are very much the same. There are some differences in the details, but both languages being Latin derived, they are fundamentally similar. The differences are enough though, that I haven’t had a problem with accidentally mixing English and Spanish. My brain is able to distinguish between them and separate them without any conscious effort. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but it seems to be the case.

Another consequence of English and Spanish sharing a Latin origin is that there are a lot of cognate words; that is, words that sound the same in Spanish as they do in English (eg. ‘investigator’ in Spanish is ‘investigador’) I hate these words. A word like ‘leer’, which means ‘to read’, I can essentially learn as a new word, and make a connection from that word directly to the abstracted idea of the action reading. But with congates, I can’t help but hear the English word, and use that word’s connection to the abstraction, rather than forming a new one. And then without that connection, I can’t reliably recall it. So I’ll be talking, and I’ll try to say ‘situation’, for example, and I won’t be able to think of the word. And then it turns out it’s just ‘situación’ and I looked really stupid.

The other thing about cognates is that you can’t trust them to mean what they sound like. For example, the word ‘realizar’ (a verb). It sounds like it means ‘to realize’, right? If you had to guess, you might assume it was that. What it actually means is ‘to perform’, or ‘to carry out’. So you would be kind of right. People use the English word that way sometimes, like as in to realize a goal. But the connection isn’t what it sounds like at first.

Actually this discrepancy is a good thing; it makes you learn the word as its own word, rather than relying solely on its similarity to another known word. So the problem I described with cognates doesn’t apply to the ones with only semidirectly similar to an English word.

In Spanish, there are only five vowel sounds. Each vowel is pronounced the same every time, and dipthongs are not very common. Also, spelling is almost perfectly phonetic, so reading out loud is pretty easy, even if you don’t know what you’re saying.

It can sometimes be hard to read though, because Spanish words are long. Seven or eight syllable words come up all the time. I don’t have any actual numbers on the syllable distribution of Spanish words, but it seems to be higher than English. And that does make sense given the smaller variety of vowel sounds. If true, this would suggest that Spanish phrases and sentences may be much longer than their English equivalents.

Another thing though, is that there are way more conjugations in Spanish than in English. Each verb has over 30 distinct conjugations that I know of, and maybe there are more. Adjectives also change depending subject. What this means is that there’s potentially a lot of redundant information in a Spanish sentence translated directly from English, and the ideal phrasing would be able to omit many words. This might balance out with the longer words I mentioned before, and result in Spanish sentences and phrases being closer to the same length as their English equivalents.

Even though I’ve gotten better at following it, spoken Spanish still sounds very fast to me. I have done a little bit of research, and it seems that English is spoken at about 6.2 syllables per second on average, compared to about 7.8 for Spanish. So that perception isn’t just becase Spanish is foreign to me; spoken Spanish is actually faster than spoken English. This may indicate that the effects of the previous two paragraphs don’t completely balance, and Spanish phrases and sentences are a little bit longer than English ones. This is all just hypothesizing though. I’d need to learn a lot more and do some actual research before concluding anything; these are just my observations and thoughts.

In order to understand which forms of words to use, I’ve had to learn more about how grammar works. I’ve never been a fan of grammar before, but for the past few weeks I’ve really enjoyed learning about it. I know about things like noun clauses, adjective clauses, adverb clauses, past participles, and gerunds, and it’s all very interesting stuff. I actually know the difference between direct and indirect object pronouns now. I’ve been using a scene from The Office to help me remember that one (I don’t know what episode it’s from; sorry I can’t reference you to it). I’m glad to see that the hours I spent watching that show are now proving to be time well spent.

I definitely feel like I’ve been blessed to understand these things more easily than I normally would. It really hasn’t been as hard to learn as I expected. Not that I’ve got it down or anything. I’m sure I’ll become very aware of how little I know when I get out in the field. But I’ve got a feeling that it will be fine. I guess we’ll see.

I hope my explanations of Spanish made sense. I don’t necessarily subjectively feel like I’m loosing my ability to speak articulately in English, but there are imperical clues to suggest that I might be. That may be because I’m learning Spanish, though if so it’s probably just because I’m mentally tired from the effort, and not because Spanish is actually replacing English in my brain. Whatever the case, I’ll try to figure out the cause and see what I can do to mitigate it.

Once again, these are just my observations and thoughts. I’m sure they aren’t complete, and I don’t know how accurate they are. I’ve read the abstracts and looked at the graphs of a few research papers that do deep analyses of and comparisons between languages; things like distribution of phoneme complexity, and information rate. Unfortunately I don’t have time to read them in their entirety, or gain a through understanding of the topic, but they look really interesting. Reading them is definitely something I’ll to add to my list of things to do when I get back. Also watching Dunkirk. 

I’ll probably do more updates on how my Spanish is doing in the future. Hopefully in my next email, I’ll have some interesting stuff to talk about. Till then.

Your Friend,
Elder Wadsworth