How’s the Spanish you ask?

Lets not talk about it. It so sad, actually it’s laziness! That’s what I’ll call it.  I said it out loud, just pointed the finger at myself.  Here’s why my spanish is still horribly wrong after driving through Mexico, Central and now South America, about six months.

Here’s a scenario, other than saying to the gas attendant  “llenar por favor” (fill up) I got nothing else. I mean now here’s one guy I should be chatting it up with right, “mucho practicar, si!”. We’ve got time, just standing there watching the gas pump run. But nope, can’t even talk about the weather. Yeap, sad like I said. However as we stand there, inevitably he’ll ask where I’m from “de donde eres”?  Then it takes me an actual minute to figure out what he said in spanish, translate what he said  into english, then translate the english response to spanish  without getting any German words mixed in. I was stationed in Germany for many years and speak German, but that’s another story. See it’s even difficult to explain. I’m sure hoping that I’m not the only person that has this problem.

I know my Spanish is bad, it’s the most horrible choked up Spanish that you’ll ever hear, I promise. Honestly, I think native Spanish speakers feel so sorry for me, so they try their English on me and then it all becomes Spanglish or Esperanto to whoever is listening nearby.

Now here’s the hard part, once they start speaking to me in broken english we continue the conversation and never revert back to to spanish, thus my english is getting worse.

But, I digress, there is a little light on at the end of the tunnel and it’s not a train. I’ve decided to learn Latin now. That should help right? Latin is the root of all the romance languages and Spanish is 90%  Latin, I think. Either way I’ll keep you posted.

Felizmente bien!

Bernard