On Learning Spanish

“Wait.  I thought she was supposed to be learning French!”  Which is exactly why I’m writing about Spanish.

I took Spanish for I-lost-track-of-how-many-years, but it was a lot.

I listened to cassette tapes (yes, cassettes!) for hours upon hours.  I listened to songs in Spanish.  Eventually, I was reading the Bible and other books in Spanish.

And I absolutely loved it.

Well I would never claim mastery, I felt like I had a decently good grip on it.

With all that time spent learning Spanish, you’d have I thought I would have ended up in a Latin country.  When I handed my “résumé” to God, He didn’t look at it and say, “Oh, wow!  Look at how much time she’s spent on Spanish.  Let’s put her in…say, Mexico.  That’ll be a good fit.”

I mean, it would have made sense.  Right?  I could have bypassed two years of language learning and pretty much dived right into ministry.  I would have been close enough for family and friends from church to visit easily.  It wouldn’t have been entirely unfamiliar (I’ve been there twice, plus, think about where I grew up).

I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if God had directed me to Mexico.

But He didn’t.

He sent me across an ocean to…West Africa.  One of the least likely places I could have foreseen for myself.

So was all that time and effort wasted?

It’s helped me in some ways: knowing some things to avoid in language learning (no mental translation to English!), knowing what is effective (lots of listening to native speakers, with pictures to convey the meaning), knowing how the process flows naturally (hearing and understanding comes before reading and speaking), and so on.

Because Spanish and French are related, I can sometimes guess how a thought or sentence would be put together in French.  Some words are similar.  Grammatical structure is similar.

But…things that are different are not the same.  I find myself wanting to say también instead of aussi (also), y instead of et (and).  I say elle (she) when I mean il (he), because elle sounds like the Spanish word for he.  I pronounce de like the Spanish de rather than “du”, which is how it’s supposed to sound.  And I’m just waiting for the day when I’m accidentally going to call some random guy Seigneur (Lord) instead of monsieur, simply because señor is closer to the former than the latter.  I’ve already almost done it a couple of times…

Anyway, as French (and the consequent struggles) is a rather large part of my everyday life right now, I do often wonder why God couldn’t have just let me stick with Spanish.

It would have been so much easier that way.  So. much. easier, I tell myself.

But perhaps He did it this way so I’d find it harder to forget that I’m just a clay pot.

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7)