Learning a Language as it's Spoken
Hello, all. I came across this article on NPR this morning and it reminded me of Spanish. It's really about learning English and French and, despite a knowledge of grammar, being totally unable to communicate with ordinary speakers, but it really applies to learning any language from books/tapes, etc.
My struggle with this particular aspect of learning Spanish was alleviated somewhat by going to a Spanish-immersion elementary school where I was exposed to spoken Spanish first, but this did have the unintended consequence of creating a fifth-grader who could ramble on in Spanish but with an understanding of grammar which would most charitably be described as 'abstract'. This notion that grammar was relatively unimportant was reinforced by the fact that none of my friends had much grammar either and we got on just fine among ourselves. This situation has since been rectified, but it was only after a rude awakening when I got to high school and was informed that tenses and moods were actually pretty rigid and required more than passing attention! However, I definitely have a long way to go toward understanding a lot of Spanish slang. (Please know that when I say "you have a language rich in horrifying and vivid expletives," I mean it with the greatest fondness and affection.) I know what the author of the NPR article means when she says that
[...] given the opportunity, I would be able to hold my own with Maurice Chevalier, but I wanted to be able to eavesdrop in the metro stations. I wanted to learn gritty French, the French spoken by those guys who burn cars.
I watch TV shows in Spanish to try to pick up on Spanish as it's spoken by everyday people under 30. So far, I haven't had the chance to go to a Spanish-speaking country, though. What do you guys do?
Anyway, I thought the article might resonate with some of you, especially if you've studied Spanish for a while and then gone to a Spanish-speaking country and been totally overwhelmed. Even if you haven't, it's still a good read.
4 Answers
I think it likely that a careful listener/researcher could go into any large city (population > 400,000, say) and come up with 50-100 words (and several hundred phrases) that would not be understood/used in any other area. There are at least 100 cities of that size in the Spanish speaking world. So you go out and master the 50,000 words and 100,000 expressions and where are you? What you learned in one place is useful in 1% of the places that you researched. How long would it take to visit each of these cities (long enough to acquire all this knowledge)? By the time you get to the end of the list, the inhabitants of the cities earlier on the list will have mostly been replaced by a younger generation and they will have been industriously inventing new slang words/expressions.
The "life expectancy" of most slang is only a few years. Some, of course, do, actually, make it into the language but most fall out of fashion fairly quickly (they have about the same level of staying power as the clothes fashions of teenagers).
Yup! I had some Spanish lessons around 1955 and thought I knew something about the language. Then in 1967, off I went to Argentina and was totally baffled. It's sort of reminiscent of "engage brain before releasing mouth"; that's the easy one, but how do you engage understanding before your ears are assaulted by strange, garbled/gabbled sounds? So first you have to tune in; no way can you understand if you can't hear and distinguish what those strange sounds represent.
As for "everyday" speech, ungrammatical, idiomatic and profane, you may never get it all without the help of patient and understanding friends on the other side of the language fence, Here's where you can only bridge that understanding gap with both ears and mind tuned in. "I hear the words but I don't know what they mean" gangs up with "I can't distinguish the words because I have no mental referents for them". This is a very strong combination.
However, time and practice and lots of help will work it out in the end. You hope. 
For example, I learnt mountains of techy stuff but never could cuss someone out at all well.
I would say you learned the best way, basically no different than the way we learn our native tongue. Is your experience really any different than the rest of ours in English? We ramble on in English just fine thank you and then we get to school and all of a sudden we need an English teacher who has to "instruct" us in English grammar and the "rules" of grammar -- and we can easily get the test wrong even though we keep on yapping just fine (and usually unwittingly observing the grammar rules we don't "know") - all the while not worrying about moods, tenses and whatnot.
This is really not so much about slang but about the manner we are going about packing a 2nd language into our craniums.
Have you read linguist Stephen Krashen, or about him? If not, this site does a good job of giving you an overview of his ideas: http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html
Krashen makes the argument that most language education has been all about making us to "learn" (kind of a "brute force" approach) whereas what we really want to do is "acquire. We acquire through exposure to authentic content (that is, produced by and for native speakers) that actually interests us -- so that we focus on the message on not on the means of conveyance.
"Learning" grammar and grammar rules can later reinforce what we "acquire," but most language education we get goes about this the other way around -- trying to reinforce our rule memorization with the rare bit of authentic content (if, in fact, they facilitate any "acquiring" at all).
The thing about authentic content is that you have to find examples that suit your current level (authentic media is not all of equal difficulty) -- and you may need other tools to make it "accessible" and useful to you. The term Krashen uses is "comprehensible input" -- which is linguistic speak for material that isn't so hard and/or so totally unmediated that it only frustrates you.
I work for LoMásTv.com . We are all about providing a vast supply of "authentic" Spanish video content -- all native speakers, wide variety of topics/genres, made accessible/comprehensible in a variety of user-controlled ways - that hopefully our viewers.find (at least some of it) so interesting that they forget about "learning" and actively start "acquiring."
Macfadden, I can only recommend you to join us in the Saturday voice chat, we have all levels there
Have a look at the thread, click on newest for info on our last chat last Saturday
