The Spanish Inquisition

So, how is your llama?

Bob! Snap out of it, man! Why are you sitting here chanting in the Plaza?
I'm not chanting, I'm practicing my Spanish. I've been taking classes for a few months now. "¿Dónde está el baño?" means, "Where is the bank?"

Bank? No, I'm pretty sure baño means bathroom, so good luck ever getting your currency changed. Where are you studying?
I go once a week to the Travel Bug with some other students, and we sit around a table in the corner and look for new ways to embarrass ourselves. We come up with useful sentences in English, and then we have to translate them into Spanish.

Useful sentences?
Yeah, you know, like, "Pardon me, your goat is eating my pico de gallo!" Or, "Please take this cilantro back to the laundry room." Or, "That yodeling gives me the creeps!" It'll be good to have those when I go abroad.

I'm sure. How is that study method working out for you?
Not great. When it's my turn to translate, my brain freezes, flop sweat cascades down my forehead, steam shoots from my ears and I have an out-of-body experience until the Spanish teacher moves on to the next poor soul.

Do you still remember the very first sentence you learned?
Si
. It was "¿Cómo se llama?"

Which means?
"How is your llama?"

Sigh. I'm going to guess you're not at the top of your class?
No. I'm clawing my way down to the very bottom of the class. My only real competition for that slot is this woman who went into a coma during the Truman administration. Most weeks, I'm better than she is, so far.

Is there homework?
You bet! Every week, we listen to an hour of new CD lessons at home, to add building blocks to our vocabulary. On the CDs, a man and a woman have conversations in Spanish, and then we repeat after them.

Are these real-life situations?
It depends on what you consider real life. The course seems to be aimed at businesspeople, but on the discs, we meet the sort of characters you might find at a seedy bar in Tijuana. Lonely sad sacks seeking human companionship for the long, dreary night ahead.

Do tell!
It's like this. Juan and Maria meet, they discuss how much the beers cost, she asks if he has money, he says yes but it's back at his hotel and she dumps him with an abrupt, "Adiós, Juan." It's kind of tawdry. Sometimes, the male character asks the female if her husband is in town. We can all guess why he wants to know.

Maybe these tableaus will get a little classier as the course progresses?
I hope so. At first, all they discussed was beer, but at least they've now graduated to glasses of vino. Juan is now able to carry money with him out of the hotel, although a lot of good it does him. He still hasn't even gotten to second base with Maria, but maybe in the next lesson…

Learning is so much fun, isn’t it?
No. It was fun, until I found out Spanish doesn’t just have the present tense. After that, the language turned into a dark, downward spiral of senseless conjugation.

But surely you see the need for a language to have past, present and future tenses? And the imperfect subjunctive, and the conditional, and the imperative, and…
Nope, present tense is plenty good enough for this country boy. I'm just fine with, "I go bowling yesterday, and I eating my succotash next Wednesday."

Well, keep at it, amigo!
I will! ¡Hasta lumbego!

Uh, you do know that's not…Oh, never mind…
¡Hasta lumbago
!

Robert Basler’s humor column runs twice monthly in SFR. Email the author: bluecorn@sfreporter.com

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