Speak A Little, Give A Lot

I’m a communications major. No, correction, I’m a strategic communications major. For the last four years, I have studied the ways in which people exchange messages. However, when it comes to thinking about everything communication actually entails, nothing in my studies has been as revealing as my time here in Mexico. It takes me about three times longer to think about how to express a sentence in Spanish. Then, once I decide how I’m going to say it, I still have the challenge of being humble enough to sound like a five-year-old and self affirmed enough to surpass the developing smile that forms across a native speaker’s face (this smile could be due to me not conjugating a verb or simple a response to my Minnesotan accent…I’m not sure).

Basically, this is just to say that I have never focused so hard on speaking. I scrutinize every word to check my tenses and meanings. Then, I think about if my words are even expressing what I mean. It seems my vocabulary bank is also suffering from the economy.

However, just when I want to fall into the defense of, “Is it really that important for me to learn Spanish, I can always find people who speak English anyways,” I hear an American having a fluent conversation with a Mexican in Spanish and my heart flutters. It flutters because I think, ‘My God, that person can communicate with millions more people simply because he/she stayed focused and worked on conjugating their gosh darn verbs.’

So, my point is, Spanish is still a huge challenge for me. Yet, I have a lot of wonderful, supportive people in my life who tell me, “Yes, but think of the job opportunities.” or “Think of the personal things you can accomplish with a second language.” But to be quite honest, my motivation does not come from future prospects.

I have made a friends here in Mexico who kindly oblige me by speaking English every time we meet and my motivation comes from the ideal day in which I can honor their language and their efforts to communicate (at least for more than two hours) .