studying in español

I thought I'd write about what it's like studying in another language. This is my first time since my study abroad experience in Chile that I've had to participate in academic conversations, produce academic written work, and read texts written in academic language. Even then, it's tough to compare- in Chile, I spent the morning in Spanish class learning some basic/intermediate vocabulary, and learning other seemingly unnecessary, but always useful words, like "fairy godmother" and "cuddle". I spent the afteroons in seminars given by notable speakers, but in retrospect, I think I just got the main ideas, rather than understanding every single word. Writing my Independent Research Project was difficult, but luckily I got to include lots of quotes from my interviews with ice cream sellers, so even then I was including words like "cachai" and "mi'jo" in an academic work. My Spanish had also improved drastically by that point. At UPS I took several literature classes after returning from Chile (and later, Ecuador), but conversations in class usually revolved around discussions of "civilización y barbarie", which is markedly different from political discourse about populism, imperialism, neoliberalism, and all the other semi-vague "ism"s that we regularly discuss.

Here, sadly, no one uses "cachai" in or out of academic situations, and the work is significantly more intense. I'm no longer granted the luxury of a Spanish teacher, and I'm on my own for reading, writing, and especially conversing.* Still, I'm lucky- Ecuadorian spoken Spanish is known for being well-enunciated and without the same number of local slang words as Chile. It took me a bit of time to get used to how each professor speaks, but going to class really isn't an issue for me- I understand 99.9% of what the professors say, to the point where I can pull out single words that I don't understand from their lectures. Of course, these words are usually easily defined based on context clues, but I usually just write the words at the top of my notebook page to check on exact English translations when I get home. I definitely couldn't have picked out single words that I didn't understand in Chile- instead, I was picking up main ideas and missing out on lots of words. If the word continues to be a major theme, I can usually ask someone sitting next to me about what it means to make sure.

Reading is a different story, mostly because the language is even more formal and academic. I had a hard time figuring out the best way to do my readings here- do I do them next to the computer and look up all of the words that I don't know immediately in a Spanish-English dictionary online (I left my tangible dictionary at home)? Do I just read through without interrupting everything to look up words? Should I write down all the words to come back for? I've settled on a sort of mix- I read through the whole text, underlining important things and writing commentaries in the margins, and circling words that I don't understand. If the word is repeated or it seems to be absolutely critical to the comprehension of the sentence, I'll look it up, but usually I go through the article when I finish and write the word definitions in the margins later.

Oddly, I find that academic conversations are the most difficult for me. While I can ramble away for significant periods of time about the absurdity of the amount of rain we've been getting, about what I made for lunch three days ago, or even do extensive impressions of teenage Chilean girls, academic conversations are more challenging! This is probably because I've really never been expected to produce an academic discourse on the spot before. In Chile, Spanish classes were informal and all other classes were similarly casual, and our Spanish levels were all much lower so less was expected. Puget Sound classes again didn't require much of a political vocabulary, or really much discussion that wasn't based on literature themes (or occasionally hidden sexuality in Harry's classes). So here when I'm suddenly required to pretend to be a mediator and paraphrase the Hydroelectric company's complaint to the local Municipality in legal language, it's a bit of a challenge. Mostly, it means that I prefer to hold my academic conversations in small, study groups than in front of the entire class, but I'm getting better at sounding like I know what I'm talking about and using formal sentence structures, rather than ending every sentence with "cierto, weon?" (right, dude?)

All in all, my transition from sounding hip and cool on the streets to sounding sophisticated and well-learned in the classroom is going more smoothly than I expected. But still...I'd like to be able to incorporate more words like "fome" and "la raja" into the classroom. I guess I'm just waiting for the perfect moment...

*This is only partially true- I have a fantastic proofreader in Chile who makes sure that I'm never on my own for writing, and regularly checks to make sure that I don't use too informal of language in academic papers.