Conversation Partner #4

      Monica, being the sweet soul that she is, always shows a genuine interest in helping me with my Spanish homework. While this is both very nice and helpful, it also reminds me how hard languages really are to learn. Obviously we think English is easy because we’ve grown up speaking it, but get us around and English speaker from Europe and suddenly things can become much more difficult. Unfortunately, that same concept applies to Spanish speakers from different nations. As much as the books would like to say there is, there is no “international Spanish” you can learn that will work perfectly everywhere. I am going on this rant because that’s exactly what Monica and I discovered during our last meeting. As I was showing her what I was studying for my upcoming test, she was constantly giving me “better” ways to say what was on the page from her perspective- the Venezuelan perspective. All of it made sense; it was just a matter of what sounded better to each of us. I know I’m kind of making this sound like we were arguing, but we weren’t. We actually ended up laughing at ourselves having 8574935743 different ways to say the same thing. Eventually, we ended up bonding over how difficult it is to get around languages simply because of slang and catchphrases. So many times we’ve caught each other saying some phrase that makes sense in one culture but not the other. Every time we explain it to the other and find out there’s a similar phrase in the other language that compares, but it’s just amazing how many of those we all have and how often we use them without even thinking about it. Let me give you some examples:

Catch-22- when there are two solutions to a problem but neither comes without a significant problem. I forget what her Spanish equivalent to this was, but as soon as I (poorly, I’m sure) explained what “Catch-22” meant, she fired her version right back at me.

Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. She’d been having an off day that week and as she was telling me about it I said something about it being Murphy’s Law that everything kept going awry. Again, she had no idea what Murphy’s Law was but knew exactly what I meant about when one thing goes wrong, everything else seems to follow suit.

This last one is slightly embarrassing, but yes, I did have to explain to my 50 something year old Conversation Partner what the Struggle Bus was. Being the typical catchphrase using college girl that I am, I accidently let that one slip in one of our conversations and it fascinated her. “But why are you on a bus?” was really her main question, but after some explaining and essentially saying “I don’t know, it doesn’t really make sense but we all seem to like to say it here” she become a converted fan. I’m currently waiting for her to throw it out in conversation during our next meeting. That would probably make my week. Even if she doesn’t, though, we both got a great laugh out of it at the time. Go catchphrases, amirite?