Mission Spanish: Impossible.

Let's talk about: Spanish. Specifically, how difficult the acquisition of Spanish is proving to be for me, and how excluded I often feel as a result.

Why should spanish be so hard for me to learn? After all, I moved to a spanish-speaking country. Logically, this should make it easier to learn spanish. Constant exposure combined with near-constant humiliation for saying the wrong thing. What a recipe for rapid learning! Additionally, logic dictates that with such an abundance of spanish speakers, it should be a breeze to convince someone to tutor me a couple of hours a week. Right? I mean, logically, that makes sense...

Unfortunately, this has not been the case for me. Not even close. While the constant exposure has certainly forced me to pick up a lot of new words and learn a small selection of interactive speech, I feel woefully lost whenever I attempt to hold a basic conversation with someone. Add to this the general impatience of the people here, and I often find that people simply walk off in frustration while I am still trying to form an appropriate response to their question(s). So although I can now order food, buy a sweater, or ask directions with relative competency, I am utterly incapable of engaging the waiter, salesgirl, or fellow pedestrian/busdriver/loitering teenagers in a conversation.

My first response to this situation was to study more on my own. My friend Sabrina gifted me her spanish textbook when she left Argentina to return home to Europe, and I started to studying whenever I had free time. For those of you who know me well, this is pretty typical behavior. Whatever you want to call this tactic, it isn't working for me.

Here's why: the crappy part about learning a language is that you have to speak it. This makes conversation far and away the hardest aspect of a language to learn. Because to become conversational, you have to have a conversation. Actually, you have to have A LOT of conversations. About stupid stuff, about meaningful stuff, about any kind of stuff really. And yet I feel pressed up against this brick wall, because no matter how many verb tenses and vocab lists I study, what I really need is an obligatory listener. That's right: I need someone who has no choice but to listen to my bad spanish and wait patiently through my awkward pauses and then, preferably, to correct that whole mumble-jumble of hogwash until it sounds remotely like something intelligible. Unfortunately, I have yet to find my own obligatory listener. Of the roughly 1 million fluent inhabitants of Mendoza, I have yet to find one person who I can PAY to listen to me! That is just not logical.

So my next response was to look beyond myself: spanish school! This week, I sent 14 emails to the 14 spanish schools and institutes listed in Mendoza. To all, I asked the same question: Can I take spanish just once or twice a week, in a group or with a tutor? From all I received the same response: Sure, no problem, that will be $35-40 US DOLLARS an hour. That is roughly six times what I make an hour. And what the hell? I live, work, and study in Argentina- not the US- why are you charging US dollars? But apparently it doesn't matter that my zip code, phone number, and place of employment are local, as a foreigner, I am still subject to foreign prices. And that is the flipside to learning spanish in an exclusively spanish-speaking country: there is so little demand for cheap spanish lessons that they simply don't exist. The whole industry is targeted toward short-term tourists, panicked backpackers, and rich americans/europeans who are willing to spend over US$1,000 for one week of spanish classes in Argentina, not including the airfare to fly a few thousand miles south.

So if the crappy part of learning a new language is the necessity of a patient listener and some demand for cheap lessons, then the crappy part of living in a place where you don't speak the language is the necessity of friends. If not for this nagging need for friendship, I would be fine spending all my free time buried in my spanish textbook. Yet, I am a social creature in the end, and after 3 months of isolation, I am longing in a really dreadful way to join in the lively and animated conversations all around me. I am longing to laugh at the jokes, to meet my girlfriend for cafe and a friendly chat about our boyfriends, to meet my friends for drinks after the sun goes down. In truth, there are thousands (if not millions) of expats living all over the world in countries where they don't speak (or speak very little) of the native language. Many expats choose to surround themselves with other expats, people who share their mother-tongue, and avoid the whole inconvenience of learning the language. I am not criticizing this tendency at all. But first, I have to find some expats that I like. Because to me, there has to be more than just a common mother-tongue to forge a friendship with someone. Even if you are living in isolation a world away from everything familiar.

So there you have it: Spanish and I are at a standstill. Given that learning Spanish was one of my main objectives in moving down here, I am more than a little frustrated with the situation. Any suggestions?