On Second Languages

What´s tricky about a second language is that it is the most unreliable friend you can have. Before heading south, I thought I had made some sort of silent pact with the Spanish language:  I´d remember all of the irregular, nearly unrecognizable conjugations of the verb ir and in return, the language would be patient with me, supplying me with vocab words and grammatical structures at my most desperate hours. But when those desperate hours arrive, my Spanish flakes on me.  And then, typical of any audacious friend who´s prone to disappoint, it comes back to me in fluent spurts of friendship, never acknowledging its previous betrayal. 

You might be thinking that the flakiness of my Spanish is not a reflection on the language itself, but rather my understanding of it. That´s likely true.  My seven years of study have prepared me for lengthy discussions about literature—the metáforas of a Neruda poem, the influence of modernismo and simbolismo in Borges´ work—but leave me at an utter loss when it comes to describing the time I fell off my backyard swingset and broke my arm.  My fumbling description of the Liberty Bell as a must-see historic site in Pennsylvania also leaves something to be desired. (Mainly the word ¨bell¨--try describing the Liberty Bell in Spanish without that word.  Here´s what I came up with: Churches have them? They ring? And finally: the sound they make caused Quasimodo to become deaf? Always falling back on the literary…)

Despite the awkwardness and discomfort of these scenarios, the unexpected upside is that I´m using language more creatively than I ever have before. Fluency might remain on the tip of my tongue, just about ready to roll its first r (but not quite)—and that may not be such a bad thing, especially for an aspiring writer.  Often we take first languages for granted, spewing off any hackneyed phrase or nondescript vocabulary word that comes to mind. But a second language just beyond our comprehension forces us to see the world differently, to make connections we might not otherwise. 

Kitchen counter plate tectonics. 

Take, for example, a conversation my roommate and I had with one of our Peruvian friends while preparing dinner last night. We were discussing (in English) the tremor we felt yesterday here in Lima, and our friend was trying to describe why Lima is particularly seismic. Fumbling for the exact words in English, he used our kitchen counter for a makeshift lesson on plate tectonics. The coastline of Peru, Lima included, sits on the edge of two plates—the South American Plate and the Nazca Plate, the latter of which is sinking underneath the former. In our kitchen plate tectonic scenario, the top counter represented Lima, the bottom represented the ocean. He demonstrated that because the plates moving below Lima continue to collide, scientists fear that Lima will eventually just break off into the ocean.  The distance of the fall was represented by the gap between our two counters. Genius.