Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 2)

Since I am still actively learning the Spanish language, there are a few different levels of proficiency with which I can communicate, completely depending on the context and the content of the conversation, that is, depending on the words and phrases I’m required to use in a given situation.

At a fundamental level, the most effective level of communication, the Spanish words materialize with more or less the same fecundity as they would in English. For example, I can greet someone, introduce myself, comment on the weather, say where I’m going, and say goodbye with a fairly high level of competency and with a fairly low level of thinking about translations. In fact, at this level, the Spanish words and my thoughts seem to fuse together like they do in English. Unfortunately, not all of my Spanish speaking experience can take place at this fundamental level.

The next level is a level of searching, that is, trying to think of words and expressions that I know in English and making guesses about how to phrase or pronounce them in Spanish. It’s about using a network of associations to communicate and really represents the essence of learning. I think of my English knowledge as a kind of springboard that I use to launch myself into the realm of Spanish. Maybe I pull off a perfect dive and maybe I belly flop painfully. Sometimes it feels kind of like grasping about in the dark for gems.

For this reason, the searching level can be both very satisfying and utterly disheartening. It just depends on the rate of success. For example, I was once trying to describe a fork in the road, so I chanced the phrase “un tenedor en el camino” and I got some very strange looks. But other times I’ll guess right and get super pumped. The expression “to kill two birds with one stone” seems to translate directly (matar dos pájaros con una sola piedra). Those are the times I love learning Spanish.

But it’s just as important to understand what others say as it is to be able to articulate your thoughts. The problem can be illustrated thusly: I’ll be chugging along happily thinking I’m the best Spanish speaker in the world, talking about things I’ve talked about before and therefore know how to talk about…and then the topic changes and someone throws in a string of brand new words. My dreams of linguistic prowess are crushed, suddenly and without mercy, and I have to bashfully explain that I have no idea what’s going on. Sometimes I’m saved by the fact that the person with whom I’m conversing can dumb down what they’re saying and rephrase it using words that I know, but that doesn’t always happen. It’s made very clear at this level of communication that when learning a language, listening and speaking are really two sides of the same coin.

And I suppose there is a third level of communication proficiency after the fundamental and the searching, which can be characterized by absolute incomprehension, and which I will (accordingly) call the level of incomprehensibility. I don’t often find myself operating at this level of (in)communication in Spanish, gracias a Dios, but every once in a while, if I stop paying attention to a conversation, I will become utterly lost, be unable to contribute anything, and start looking for a way to leave.

~

So I find myself describing a few separate things here. There is thinking and there is speaking and then there are words. Thinking seems to be made up of internal verbal strands and speaking seems to be made up of external verbal strands. The building blocks of both of these kinds of strands then, are words (hence verbal strands). I suppose it might make sense to talk about words specifically as those elements of oral communication—that is, the constituent parts of speaking—but I want to talk about thoughts, those unspoken but nonetheless articulated elements of language, as being made of words as well.

I will unpack then, exactly what I mean when talking about “words.”

I want to appropriate words as being vehicles for articulating meaning. That is they can articulate meaning taciturnly as with unspoken thought, and lingually, out loud as with speech, and of course written down as well, but this is not an important distinction for my purposes here. To put it bluntly, thoughts are unspoken words and speech is spoken words. But there is something I’m leaving out in this relation between words, thoughts, and speech, and that is unarticulated meaning. What I want to find is the source of thoughts and speech, and this means thoughts without words, preverbal thinking, pure unformulated meaning. And I want to call this source, this unarticulated meaning, a feeling. My intuition tells me that a feeling precedes a thought. (don't worry I'm not even going to try to adress how intuition fits into this.........)

Stay tuned for the next installment as I dive into the main metaphor of the argument!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2 ***
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement