Life is Learning

Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted from your goals in life. You get off course, you get sick for a week, you get involved in other things. For me this happens with studying Spanish in Spain. Of course I'm often speaking and hearing Spanish, but it's another thing to deliberately study and learn new things. I often get distracted by hanging out with friends, relaxing, planning lessons, and the daily chores of life – which are things that are all important part of my experience here. Since I've been living here for a year and a half, life is bound to include hanging up laundry, taking naps, and wasting time. It can become too easy to put improving my Spanish and studying grammar on the backburner. Because of this, I enrolled in a Spanish class in December, and this has been helping me a lot. It's three nights a week, involves two classes of grammar and one session of culture, and is taught by Spanish professors. I love being a student again, and being back on the other side of the classroom. It's helped to put me in more of the student/learning mindset here. However, you have to study on your own, and use all your resources to learn when living abroad - conversations, reading signs, reading novels in Spanish, listening to people on the metro, and really just paying attention to things you come across and writing new words down in a little blue notebook you carry around. When you do this- when you incorporate all medias of learning- you can have those incredible “ah hah!” moments when you learn a new word and later hear it or put it to use yourself. 

The current Spanish fiction novel I'm reading- an incredible magical realism
about human love and it's  complicated and inseparable connection with nature

Last week I had one of those light bulbs go off, one of those incredible moments when you connect your experiences here and get something tangible out of it (yes, I’m such a nerd!) This time, it was as simple as the word:

 Dicharachero (s.)– a witty person; amusing conversationalist; jokester

            Synonyms: humorista, gracioso, bromista

I was sitting on the packed metro, jammed with tired people on their way home from work, heading back to my apartment at 9 pm after an arduously long (yet enjoyable) day of work and tutoring. The only thing keeping me going at this point was the book in my hands, the world I had escaped to thanks for a Spanish friend who lent me the book. That, plus the thought of my weekly cozy Thursday night dinner and a movie tradition with Laura :) I was off in a world of narrative and characters when I read the phrase, “Eran dicharacheros." Dicharacheros! I knew that word! Suddenly, I was taken straight back to January 3^rd, 2013, a little over a month ago. I was sitting on an airplane next to Laura, flying over the Mediterranean Sea, en route to Morocco, and feeling nervous and excited about the near arrival to a new continent. 10 minutes into the trip we had begun speaking to the passenger next to us, a middle-aged Spaniard who was from Asturias in Northern Spain. It was his third time traveling to Marrakesh, and this time he was bringing his whole family with him. His elderly mother was even joining them, and he gestured to her across the aisle. She smiled dazedly back, knowing we were talking about her but not knowing exactly what was being said. And I remember thinking in my nervous state, "If she can do this trip, Laura and I can surely do it!” The man, who was named Julio, was very kind- he offered us hazelnuts from his orchard in Asturias, and even invited us to their country home by the end of the conversation! (Keep in mind that this is not an uncommon thing here, as many Spaniards have an apartment or house plus a summer/country house somewhere else in Spain!) We were able to talk to him about our trip to Northern Spain last November and our other travels in Spain. Julio was also a world traveler, and was telling us all about his trips over the US when he was young, even to San Diego! As he was telling us what he thought of the people he met there, he told us Californians were very friendly and joking, that they were dicharacheros (social, friendly, open people) just like Spaniards! At least that's his theory as to why he thinks Americans and Spaniards tend to get along so well. Laura and I had never heard that word, so we asked him to write it down for us on a yellow Ryanair napkin as he explained what it meant to us. He told us the definition, and noted and also explained that it was a very colloquial Spanish word. Who knew two months later I’d read it in a book by a Spanish author, and be brought back straight to this moment! It’s moments like these I love and that remind me why I’m in Spain- for the experiential learning, to be able to attach meaning and stories to what I learn about the language and culture here! I'm sure this has happened to me many times, I'm just not always consciously aware of how much I'm learning here. 

I’ve also had the opposite experience reading Tan Cerca al Aire, where I’ve learned new words from the text that I was later able to pick up on and notice in daily conversations. One word I had learned from reading I soon after heard used by the tour guide at the Prado Museum, where I was on a field trip with my 4^th grade students!

Finally, in the same book I also read the phrase “dormir profundamente” (to sleep soundly), a lexical combination I had just learned in Spanish class yesterday! We learned common phrases, called colocaciones, that our teacher said to look out for since they appear often in written and spoken Spanish. Here are some others I learned in class:

Diente de ajo – garlic clove

Banco de peces - school of fish

Frío siberiano- very cold, literally “siberian cold”

Sol cegador - a blinding sun

Pueblo fantasma- ghost town

Golpe bajo- a low blow/ someone betrays you
Onzas de chocolate- chocolate squares

Una tableta de chocolate- chocolate bar

     *Also the expression used for a person with very defined abs, like our phrase "6-pack" in English!