Every day when I study and try to speak Spanish, I’m humbled.
Learning a new language—it’s hard. My brain hurts after I spend 25 minutes speaking entirely in Spanish to my teacher, Paulina, making mistakes, correcting them. We laugh—third time’s a charm—because it usually takes me that many times to conjugate a verb correctly.
I’m not used to it. I’m used to being fluent: expressing my thoughts and speaking with ease, reading and writing with ease.
Not so much in Spanish.
I often feel like I’m underwater, snorkeling without a mask.
First, el and la. Why is la mano feminine but el mapa masculine? And el problema? Of course problems are masculine. Figures. Everything is gendered, nada is non-binary. A they’s nightmare.
Then there’s ser vs. estar. Am I soy confundida (always confused) or estoy confundida (just right now)? The answer is sí.
Irregular verbs? They’re like feral animals—untrainable, running wild, biting me when I least expect it. Sentence construction feels like piecing together scrambled eggs—a hopeless exercise where syntax slides off the fork before it hits the plate. And pronunciation? My rrr’s sound like a blender with a broken motor. When I open my mouth, I sometimes get blank, or mildly disgusted looks. A clumsy language interloper with a wonky accent.
And slang—¡ay, cabrón!—slang is another language. ¡Qué padre!means “cool,” güey can mean “friend” or “idiot,” ni modo is “too bad, get over it,” and ahorita? That one can mean “now,” “later,” or “mañana… o nunca.” Bienvenidos a México.
In May, one of our vecinas, Susan, kindly organized a week-long Spanish class at the Cabo Pulmo Learning Center, just a short walk from our casa. Our teacher, Paulina—a warm, light-hearted Mexican woman who had spent a few years living in Canada—divided us into levels. Patricia landed in the beginner’s group, and I got placed in the intermediate one.
On about the third day, Paulina pulled me aside.
“Your wife,” she said gently, “she is very quiet. Very timid. She doesn’t say much. Is she… from England?”
I nearly spit out my water. “England? Mi esposa? Someone must have kidnapped her or she has suddenly developed multiple personality disorder. The Pat I know hasn’t a shy bone in her body and talks more before breakfast than I do all week.
When I told Pat later, she howled. “Timid?!” she said. “British? God knows what kind of accent I’m using..”
And that’s the thing—trying to speak a language you don’t know can make even the boldest soul sound like a mumbling imposter. It’s intimidating. It’s exhausting.
And in Pat’s case, it briefly transformed her into a muted Mary Poppins—minus the confidence and la or is it el paraguas.
I give myself a little credit for trying to use my Spanish whenever I can. I stumble through pained conversations with Enrique outside his bike shop—he patiently nods while I mess up verb endings, as if I’m a flat tire he has to patch again and again.
I attempt loftier topics with Olga when we walk the playas, aiming for philosophy but usually landing closer to toddler-speak.
“La vida es bueno a veces pero duró también,” I declare, sounding like a five-year-old who’s just discovered existentialism.
Olga smiles kindly, but after a few minutes I usually cave and switch back to English—just to remind myself that I am, in fact, an adult capable of forming complete sentences and complex thoughts.
I’ve completed over 500 consecutive days on Duolingo, the somewhat entertaining app that turns language learning into a video game. For a while, I got ridiculously competitive about it. I don’t know if my Spanish actually improved, but I became obsessed with finishing in the top three of the Diamond League—as if that meant anything in the real world.
There I was, sweating bullets at midnight, desperately conjugating verbs so I wouldn’t lose to Juanita123 from Bogotá or DragonSlayer99 in Ohio. Every ding, every cartoonish cheer felt like life or death. Forget Nobel Prizes or Pulitzers—my greatest ambition was impressing a green owl plotting my murder if I skipped a lesson.
But, I refuse to give up—haunted as I am by memories of Mrs. Ross’s junior high Spanish class, where she presided over a glass jar filled with repugnant wads of gum. “Pon tu chicle en el frasco ahora mismo!” she barked, as if sentencing us to a sticky hell.
I think of my dad, watching telenovelas in Spanish, hoping to improve his Spanish so he could talk with customers at the drugstore where he worked in Arizona. “What in the hell are you watching?” my mother would yell at him. “I’m not sure,” he’d say, “but the rich widow just discovered her chauffeur is actually her half-brother—and also the secret lover of her sister-in-law’s son. And I still can’t say, ‘Take two pills with food.’
I’m committed to working on my Spanish and dream someday of asking for ice (hielo) without being handed thread (hilo), chatting with Olga about life without sounding like a refrigerator magnet, and swearing in fluent Spanish when Beto smashes a ping-pong ball past me—otra vez.