Back to school

“How did you get by without speaking the language?”. People frequently asked us this as we’ve travelled around the world.


It has certainly been challenge to navigate our way through many strange and often impenetrable languages; our eyes bewildered by strange square Cyrillic lettering, beautiful abstract kanji and psychedelic, swirly Thai, our ears twisted by harsh, gutteral Mandarin, soft, whispered Japanese and the long drawl of the American South West.

Yet somehow we managed. Though eating out in a Chinese restaurant often felt like Russian roulette, and coaxing answers in English out of a shy Japanese guesthouse owner, anxious not to loose face by ‘embarrassing themselves’ was like trying to avoid wearing slippers, we managed.

Once we left Asia behind and reached the shores of the Americas I thought it would get easier. It didn’t.

Indeed, for me at least, it was when we reached the new linguistic realm of Latin America that the language barrier, and the associated frustrations of not speaking or understanding the local language, has been at its greatest.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the language more than anywhere else that we’d been, rather it was that, for the first time, I was far behind, in linguistic terms, my fair travelling companion.

With a year in Ecuador under her belt, Lara speaks good Spanish, or rather Latin American. She can hold a conversation, decipher a bus timetable, read a menu.

I, on the other hand cannot. Rather I mumble away in dreadful Spanglish, gleaned from films, television and a fortnight’s glance at my little Spanish phrasebook during our trip across the Pacific.

I couldn’t stand it. I was reduced to the role of a mute bystander on the edge of every conversation, grinning sheepishly in this most machismo of worlds as Lara would happily rabbit on with waiters and bus drivers, hostel owners and even friends.

I’m sure she didn’t appreciate it either, having to shoulder the burden of full-time spokesperson, constantly having to translate for me.

After a month of this, verbally stumbling across Mexico I’d had enough. I decided was time to take things into my own hands. I had to take the plunge into a pool of new vocab, pronouns and verbs.


It was time to go back to school.

Antigua, the grand old former capital of colonial-era Guatemala, is the perfect place to learn Spanish.

It’s a beautiful location, where old cobbled streets are lined with low houses painted sky blue, peach and mustard yellow, their hues faded by the scorching sunshine.

There’s a grand old square bordered by a ruined old Cathedral (a victim of the many earthquakes that have struck the city), decaying old monasteries, and crumbling old churches dedicated to a whole host of saints.

Above the city loomed three massive volcanoes, brooding and very much active, which we could walk up, padding through paths of volcanic dust and gingerly stepping across the sharp fields of recently solidified lava.

Volcanoes and ruins aside the town also offers a huge range of language schools where, for a rock bottom price, gringos can cram in a week or two’s intensive Spanish lessons.

Many choose to do this before pressing further south, heading for other Latin American countries where they can put their newly-learned lingo to use, from San Salvador to Santiago.

We’re both studying at one of these language schools. Lara is ‘just brushing up on’ the pretorect and other difficult and impressive-sounding advanced things; I’m just hoping I can order a bus ticket by the end of the week.

I reckon I stand a fighting chance. After all, we couldn’t be studying in an environment more conducive to learning.

Our school is set in a pleasant courtyard, around which pupils and teachers sit in the open air.

It’s fresh and invigorating, albeit at this this altitude we face the stark choice of either shivering in the shade or sweltering in the sun.

Lessons are one-on-one teaching, four hours a day, which makes for intensive but highly productive learning.

Despite this the atmosphere remains highly relaxed and the courtyard echoes to peals of laughter amongst the strangled words.

Learning a new language can be very rewarding and it’s made all the more enjoyable when you get to mix with so many people, old and young, from across the world, all here to learn themselves and somehow, in the process find out about other countries and cultures.

And alongside the international pleasantries there’s some serious business to be done. I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck in, taking a nosedive straight into a new language.

My teacher is a lovely chap called Raphael, a charming retired farmer with a gentle manner and an infectious laugh. He’s no Mr Bronson, Grange Hill’s tyrannical French teacher, that's for sure. Rather he’s an immensely laid-back fellow, encouraging and - most crucially for me - patient.

On the first day we sat down to work and he spread out his teaching materials, tattered old books, held together with yellowing sellotape.

Straight away he was off, gabbling away in Spanish and scribbling indecipherable words on scraps of paper.

I was bemused at first and, as an absolute beginner, terribly lost, clumsy and awkward like a baby bird.

It was a shock to be back at school. After ten years lying somewhat dormant my part of the brain which is meant to absorb and learn things like new languages is rather dusty and unused. It took quite some effort to shake it back to life and coax it into absorbing a rather daunting-looking foreign language.

It was also intense; and after four hours of hard study I’m left reeling, my brain frying, my memory overloaded with verbs and definite articles.

I’m confused by conjugations and assaulted with adjectives, irked by infinitives and perplexed by pronouns.

Then there’s the pronounciation - all that seems to come out of my cakehole is a bizarre form of mangled Spanglish.

I have to relearn how to speak. I’m trying desperately to reprogramme my Anglo-Saxon genes so that I can replace my long English vowels and sharp BBC pronunciation with the ability to speak in one long, fast rolling sentences and to roll my ‘r’s like a rattling motorbike exhaust.

Raphael gave me a couple of tonguetwisters to get this process going - fiendishly difficult ones that reduced me to slathering, jibbering fool.

Try this one for instance:

Rapido corren los carros cargados de ferrocarril

See?

At first it seemed hopeless. How on earth, I thought, I am going to pick this up in five days? Is it really worth putting myself through this linguistic pain?

Lara can speak the lingo, and besides is it really worth it in a country where a sizeable proportion of people don’t even speak Spanish (the various indigenous peoples, descendents of the Maya, speaking 28 different languages and dialects of their own)? Surely I should be delving into the mysteries of K’iche, Kaqchikel or Mam.

Gradually things improved. A surprising amount of the words were familiar (thanks to everything from the Roman conquest of Britain to the films of Quentin Tarantino) and besides this was conversational Spanish I was after, not Don Quixote.

Now we jibber jabber along quite happily. It helped that, like many Guatemalans, Raphael speaks far slower and clearer then a Spaniard.

He’s a great one for gossip and greatly enjoys the tales I have to tale him of our homestay in a crumbling old casa in one of the nearby streets. It’s owned by an old lady with small darting eyes which nervously follow you round the room.

Raphael grinned when he recognised her name, and laughed out loud when I recounted to him our experiences of her food, or rather the extra ingredients she unwittingly added to each meal.

We seemed to take it in turns to be served a bug of some sort: spiders in our orange juice, flies on our pasta, even a couple of maggots in a chicken fillet (or was it fish?), our hostess provided them all.

Lara and I bravely ploughed on through the courses, determined to stay the course. Our fellow housemate, a game young Aussie fellow, did his best but, after numerous occasions it got too much - our hostess simply couldn’t understand why he eschewed her sena and started to eat out.

Back at school, as we sit under the avocado tree, learning verb endings, a large boom rolled out across the town.

Everyone looked up to see smoke rising from one of the 3000m beasties. A common occurrence, apparently, and one that doesn't seem to concern the locals at all.

It was enough to distract me though and my mind started wandering away from verb stems and pondering the fate of Pompeii.

Maybe I needed Mr Bronson after all.

You boy! Fewins! Pay attention in class!