As it turns out, I learned a lot of helpful things during my time in Argentina and Peru.
For one thing, my extremely latent Spanish vocabulary — meaning the fifteen words of Spanish I learned by watching Sesame Street from 1978 to 1984 — emerged more or less unscathed by the ravages of time.
This method of language acquisition has plusses and minuses.
On the plus side, it's much less painful than starting a second language at the tender age of 33.
Also on the plus side? I can somewhat reliably count to ten in Spanish.
On the minus side: in order to remember which Spanish number is which, I have to count through the numbers on my fingers until I get to the right one. Even ones that are low in order and might seem obvious, like three.
And when it's 7, 8 or 9, it takes some time to count up to that number, which is sort of embarassing when someone who actually speaks Spanish is standing there, waiting for you to say something.
Also: depending on the currency and the inflation thereof, counting to ten was is only marginally helpful to me as a person with cash in my wallet and the desire to purchase things.
I did much better with telling time — though only in the sense that when paired with the handy word medio, which I picked up somewhere along the way, any of my ten numbers could be deployed to specify time, even down to the half hour.
However, I still don't know the Spanish words for eleven and twelve, which meant that I had to pretend like four hours of the day didn't exist relative to when I might want to take a taxi to an airport.
Another minus to the whole learning Spanish via Sesame Street approach is the strong temptation to say everything using the patois of a Muppet.
(You smirk, but I would be willing to bet that there are entire dissertations devoted to the patois of the Muppet.)
"Abieeerto..." "Cerrado!"
"Abieeerto..." "Cerrado!"
"Abieeerto..." "Cerrado!"
Fellow children of the 70s, you know what I'm talkin' about.
For the rest of you? There's YouTube:
I'm not saying that I could carry on any sort of conversation en español, but using a few key words, there were moments — especially when I was left to fend for myself — when I was able to accomplish something using a vocabulary of hello, good day, please, thank you, is it possible, more, good, half, water, totally, only, airport, goodbye and unodostrescuatrocincoseissieteochonuevediez.
(See how nicely they all fit together in my mind?)
But, there were also moments in which my faking-it Spanish failed me.
Such as when I permanently confused buenas noches (good night) and buenas tardes (good afternoon) and started wishing everyone after about 4 p.m. "buenas nardes".
I don't know what a narde is, but it's probably not the kind of thing you should go around wishing on people.
This may just be hubris on my part, but having survived on Spanish-baby-Muppet-talk, I now feel like I can and should learn Spanish.
It has the attractive feature of being spoken by more than 22 million people.
It is also not, in the paraphrased-because-I'm-too-lazy-to-go-hunting words of David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas and other outrageously good books) a language that resembles sucking on mud.
And maybe it's the Muppet factor creeping in again, but Spanish also seems significantly less complicated than Dutch.
But in addition to learning how much Spanish I didn't know I knew, I also learned that there's one positive side to my semi-tortured Dutch-speaking existence: I now feel a little more comfortable traipsing around and using only the barest skeleton of a language to get by.
I'm not saying this is a better strategy than, say, actually learning the language in a given country. But I do think it's kind of great that my newfound ability to basically not care when I sound like an idiot (emphasis here on basically) is more or less transferrable.
Another key learning from my recent in flagrante español-o is the overwhelming and unexpected sense of relief that washed over me the minute I came back to the Netherlands and started speaking Dutch again.
It's easy! I can understand what people are saying! I don't have to use my fingers to count!
Relatively speaking, speaking in het Nederlands is a total piece of cake.
As unbelievable as it sounds, I might even go so far as to call it appletje, eitje.
