Voices en Español

Today’s post is by guest blogger Graham Stephen. Graham is from Scotland but he lives in Wales and he is a fellow Spanish-language enthusiast like myself. We “met” each other in the Coffee Break Spanish’s online listeners’ forum. You can read more of Graham’s writings about the Spanish language on his co-authored blog, English-Spanish Exchange. Thanks, Graham!

Recently when I was looking for volunteers to provide voice recordings for a study of regional accents I received a few replies from people kindly declining and saying that they would not be suitable for the project as they ‘did not have an accent’ – funny how it is always other people from other places (and never ourselves) who do speak with an accent. Of course, everything is relative.

There are lots of different motivations for studying a new language: business, travel, vacations, relationships, fun, intellectual challenge, even health (recent Canadian research suggests that being bilingual can delay the onset of dementia by over four years), to name a few. But whatever your particular reason for learning Spanish happens to be, one thing that it will give you is an ideal opportunity to challenge your assumptions, to view things from a different perspective.

There are certainly a few traps for the unwary first-time leaner of a new language. One of the most fundamental of these is, I think, assuming that the structures of English form the natural way of using language. There is of course no reason for this to be case. English is but one of the world’s thousands of natural languages, each with its own characteristics and peculiarities.

An important early lesson is that we should try not to just reproduce English language using Spanish words. The ultimate goal is to be able to simply think in Spanish. But before we get to that stage, we tend to continually translate from English to Spanish and vice versa. We should therefore be careful to try to abstract and re-express the essential meaning rather than focus on the individual words.

But in order to be able to build up more and more complex pieces of language you need first to break the language down into its nuts and bolts by way of its rules of grammar. When you study another language, such an analysis of how it works will in turn teach you more about your own language. Just because we are fluent native speakers does not mean that there is nothing more we have to learn about our first language. In fact as it is such an intrinsic part of our everyday life we are all the more likely to take it totally for granted and pay little or no attention at all to its linguistic features.

As well as becoming more aware of your own language by studying another one, you can also take advantage of the opportunity it grants you to gain a fresh outlook on things, to appreciate the differences, to accept diversity.

When you compare English and Spanish, on the surface the most obvious difference is vocabulary. Syntactical differences, such as the relative placement of nouns and adjectives for instance, are also fairly evident. As we descend to deeper levels, though, we encounter more subtle semantic differences, such as: who is the agent of certain actions (e.g. I like v me gusta); questions of existence, identity, essence and state (e.g. the ser/estar dichotomy, I am hungry v tengo hambre, and so on) – no doubt all areas with ample scope for more profound philosophical inquiry.

And at a different level there exists an inextricable relation between language and culture – study one and you will gain insights into the other. Paying attention to the cultural references inherent within a language, nestling for example in its metaphors, can only enrich the overall learning experience.

In summary, then, my final words are: learn some more Spanish today and let the experience broaden your horizons.