Yo Hablo Español?

One of the main reasons that I departed U.S. shores and made my way down south was my desire to speak fluent Spanish. A lot of Americans have this ambition at one time or another, and my reasons (like those of most, I suspect) veer toward the romantic rather than the practical. It seems rather clear that I could remain in the U.S. speaking only English and live a rich and fulfilling life. Anyone with whom I'll ever need to communicate will either speak English or be able to quickly find someone who speaks English to intermediate. It's unlikely that I'll ever work a job in which Spanish is required, although knowing Spanish could certainly be a bonus. Yet, there's something almost magical about being able to speak another language of which I very much want to be a part. Maybe it's the idea that knowing two languages places your thinking somehow outside of a linguistic prison. You're free to jog back and forth between tongues, and you become aware that thinking is possible outside of English.

I'm not sure if any of these things are true, because at this point my Spanish is conversational, not conceptual. My biggest fear from my first week in Buenos Aires is that it will stay that way.

Walking around the city the other day, I realized that an English speaker moving to Buenos Aires to learn Spanish, is not that different from a Spanish speaker moving to New York to learn English. (Socioeconomic differences clearly excluded. The dollar goes far in Argentina, and it would be preposterous for me to claim that my experience was like that of a Central or South American immigrant to New York in anything more than language acquisition.) In New York, a Spanish speaker can insert himself into a well-trodden part of society in which he will never need English to get by. A Spanish speaker could easily eat at restaurants where language would be no impediment, live with other Spanish speakers, and work in a job that required no facility in English.

Adjust your gaze south to Argentina, and I'm living with an American, working for an English-language newspaper, and while I have yet to speak English to a waiter at a restaurant, ordering food hardly constitutes fluency. I've just churned out a couple hundred English words in this blog entry, keep up with sports and news in English, and chat online with friends in English. To say this is no way to go about learning a language would be a gross understatement.

The only way out of this English vortex seems to be a couple of Argentines whom I've met, who speak limited English, and seem very willing to engage me in Spanish—the more of them the better. Before I left the U.S., I resolved to remain away from the States until I felt that I was fluent in Spanish. Let's hope that Theodor Herzl's famous Zionist rallying cry, so memorably echoed by the great Walter Sobchak, will prove a truism in Argentina—"if you will it, Dude, it is no dream." Otherwise, this may be a long exile...