I signed up for an A1 Spanish class, which means absolute rank beginner. This makes me feel like a bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, because I already know a fair bit of Spanish. First and foremost, I grew up in the United States, where you have to be really willfully ignorant not to pick up at least a little Spanish. (Of course, many Americans are, but I’m certainly not one of them.)
This video from Babbel very nicely sums up the plethora of Spanish encountered by the average American.
Secondly, this isn’t my first rodeo with Romance languages. Once upon a time, long long ago, I was actually fluent-ish in French. Although it’s certainly the strange child of the group, especially with regards to the tenuous relationship between pronunciation and spelling that makes even English go “now hold on a minute!”, it’s still a descendent of Latin. My online friend Josh over at NativLang made a fantastic video about how French got to be pronounced so strangely, and it’s great fun to watch, especially since he constructed it as a baking analogy.
Speaking of Latin, I actually learned it for a year during my sophomore year of high school – and this should tell you something about how old I am – by correspondence course. Like literally in the actual postal MAIL.
Furthermore, I actually took Spanish for a semester in high school! However, by that point I’d already had two and a half years of French and a year of Latin, so my undiagnosed ADHD brain was SO BORED because the class was SO SLOW. I also really didn’t like the teacher, a white non-native speaker who ran down “kitchen Spanish”, so I bailed mid-year. Still, this was over thirty years ago! How much Spanish can I actually know these days?
For the sake of my own curiosity, I dug up a Spanish word list, the top 1000 most frequent words with their English equivalents. Now, if you know anything about corpus construction or translation dictionaries, you’re going to be sputtering about the limitations and flaws inherent in lists of that nature. (Me, it’s me, I’m the one spluttering.) If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just google the phrase “problems with word frequency lists”, and you’ll see what I mean.
However, this is not rigorous academic research, just a first pass at getting a back-of-the-envelope feel for how much Spanish I know. Now, if you know anything about language learning, you’ll immediately ask “active or passive vocabulary?”. (Again, it’s me, I’m the one asking.) So I had my husband quiz me with the English equivalents of the top 100 to see how many of the Spanish words I could come up with. I managed about half, so just for a lark, I had him quiz me on the next 100, and I got about a quarter. Now, two points barely make a line, let alone a curve, but I figured it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that my knowledge of the next 100 would fall off accordingly, so I stopped there.
I then asked him to print out single-sided pages of the remaining word list, and fold them in half so I could only see the Spanish words. The toner cartridge crapped out a bit before 500, so I decided only to test myself on roughly words 200 to 500 to check my passive understanding. I guessed correctly on about 40% of the words, guessed incorrectly on about 10%, and didn’t have a guess for about half.
So, certainly not a rank beginner, but as I don’t remember what little grammar I ever knew, I think it’s fair to put myself in A1 to solidify my understanding. My class starts tomorrow, and I’m pretty excited! (As much as I can be while deeply dysthymic, anyway.) I even heard from my teacher today, and warned him about the whole non-binary issue. He replied with a cheery “no problem”, so I imagine it won’t be a big deal. Hasta mañana!
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