Southpaw Grammar
Full of fear and intention
And, if you think that they're listening
Well, you've got to be joking”
- Morrissey
Thus, more than a month has past by, the 10-week training program is near complete, and soon I will be assigned the department (state) and city that I will live in for two years. Now in my current state, one would assume that my Spanish skills would (certainly) have improved by now. What with such a cultural immersion, surely I would be near fluency by now. But alas, nothing can be farther from the truth…well, in part, and thus your humble narrator will explain. Before I begin, I need to add this little prologue: I was warned before arriving, and I have all been to familiar with the dreaded curse that is grammar. More specifically, when a person of some familiarity with a language learns the grammatical structure, more than not they are doomed to a little bit of limbo I like to call, The Regression. It is true that all Latinos fail Spanish class, at least in my experience at UCI and this may hold true for many of you if you’ve been in similar situations. In my current state, I feel as if I am regressing back to an equivalent to grade school English.
Learning grammar has greatly devastated my Spanish speaking abilities. It’s funny when we have class and everyone is speaking of adverbs, pronouns, subjunctive tenses and the differences of le, la, su, etc. I’ve always spoken in what I think sounds right, and thus far, I’ve been pretty much right. Of course I’ll mess up with “la” or “el”, “una” and “un”, but the confidence I had in the language has greatly diminished.
The worse was the other day when they stuck me in advance grammar class, and I had no choice but to remain silent the whole class time. I just didn’t know what the f*ck they were talking about! Because I just can’t stand (“I TELLS YOU I CAN’T STANZ IT”) sitting back and being upset (let alone feel myself becoming dumbed-down by this stupid grammar) I made arrangement to have advance level conversation Spanish (because I’m the sh*t when it comes to fluidity and accentuation) and private classes for grammar. Yesterday we started from scratch…that’s right: the present and we went all the way to preterit/imperfect. Tomorrow (which is today) we will/would have worked up to future.
All is not lost friends, I need to put more effort in learning this dammed grammatical structure of a language I simply spoke from memory. Really, we only have about 2 more weeks of class. Next tuesday I’ll have the name of my site for the next two years. Puchica! Can you believe it? I’ve developed the habit of reading an article and translating it, and doing the exercises in the book, well see if it helps. But, on the flip side of everything I’ve written so far, it’s also good to hear that in reality, outside the realm of grammar, my Spanish conversational skills really have improved. I don’t have the “pena” (not to be confused with “pene”, hehe) I use to with the language (ther than one insident I had a week ago where a woman did not understand what I said and in English I said some pretty nasty things) I’ve had no problem communicating with the people here. Outside the classroom, among staff and outside the walls of Peace Corps, I’ve received some praise for my Spanish. For this I thank my family (in LA) for talking among themselves in the mother tongue, but not to me, nor encouraging it. HAHA, I wish I could see the look on my parents when they read this. Thats right, I said it again!
On another note, I’ve decided to add a new segment to my blog called Blue Ball Baboon. In this section, but a paragraph or two, I will share a term and the relation in which I learned it, referring to sex of course, because everything here is so highly sexualized, I doubt I’ll run out of material.
I’d like to acknowledge machismo for making this segment possible. Machismo: “because I’m a man, I’m better than you (woman).”
Blue Ball Baboon:
So, don’t use “cojer”, as I mistakenly used on my first day here, ‘cause it means to have sex (crazy dirty monkey style). I forgot to mention this before, but I used this word on my first day. The sentence was: Quero que necessito a cojer el bus para irme a Guadalupe, I think I need to have sex with the bus to get to Guadalupe.
Yesss. You know, when you’re excited about something, you make a fist with your hand, raise it above your head and swiftly bring it down as a sign of some sort of accomplishment. No no, not in this society, as I learned just last week that it too is a sign for masturbation. The equivalent “yesss” is to punch the air on a horizontal plane.