Just another of life’s little ironies

My first and last Spanish lesson took place in the second week of school. Injected with renewed intellectual fervour (haha) to pick up Spanish independently after rearranging last April’s Barcelona photos, I marched confidently into Initiation à l’espagnol ready to razzle-dazzle the teacher with my flawlessly rolled rrrrrrr. You know how the Spanish r is vibrated with the tongue to produce that sound akin to drilling? Typically, the Frenchies can’t do it properly since their r is sort of gargled or kah-pui’ed majestically at the back of the throat (like the Scottish ch in loch ness). So that’s what they do to their r’s in Spanish too. I can roll it brrrrrilliantly though, and I bet you can too.

Initiation, right? Complete beginners all, right? So. Wrong. After asking everybody, in French, to register themselves if they weren’t already (I put my name down as auditrice or observer), the young, stylishly coiffed and Zara-clad Prof said something that I thought I hadn’t caught because I was at the back of the room. So I sat up straighter, pricked up my ears and waited eagerly, the picture of a model student, or begging dog – while, acting on his instructions in Spanish, every other student in class took out the previous week’s homework and handed it in.

A page-long self-introduction in Spanish.

I would’ve bolted from class as inconspicuously as I could’ve then, but alas and alack, the Prof had just closed the door. The next ten minutes were a tense blur as he continued nattering on elegantly in Spanish, soliciting responses from time to time, all charmingly mellifluous and absolutely meaningless to me. I realised, too late, that even though I’m a second-year, first-year Spanish initiation is what I should be observing. How embarrassing! I cowered in my seat and painstakingly, blindly, transcribed everything he put down on the board, hoping that with my (relatively) unpronounceable name, he’d never call on me.

Again, not to be. Señor next distributed a Spanish magazine article and delegated reading out loud. As Marie, Florent, Fanny and Alex were called, I followed their progress anxiously, quickly learning more or less how to pronounce Spanish the French way. After Alex finished, Señor said something and there was a silence. I hazarded a look up. Not good; he was staring expectantly at me. A nudge from Alex.

“C’est à toi,” Alex hissed. “He’s calling the person next to me, that’s you.” Merde alors !

Quickly, I explained to the Prof in French that I was a complete beginner in the wrong class by accident. Irritated, he retorted that reading out loud didn’t require prior knowledge and that the most important thing was the effort put in. Theoretically true, Señor, but in front of a large class of non-beginners?? Besides the rrrrrrr, I didn’t even know any other pronunciation rule! Defenceless to argue further though, I began tremulously to read. My hands were clammy; my throat, bone dry.

So I stumbled hoarsely through that horrendously long paragraph, helpless at the numbers and acronyms, inventing accents on syllables that appeared more important. Those five-and-above-syllable words were killers I tell you, and there were a very many of them in that possessed paragraph. Finally, I sputtered out the last word (six syllables), hopelessly and utterly beaten.

“Muy bien!” Señor beamed sunnily. “Vous voyez, c’est l’effort qui compte.”

Even if you do say so yourself, sir. Sigh. I think I rolled my eyes back at him in defeat. He asked me a comprehension question later on in class too, ever intent on persecuting the weak. I pretended to understand, since it was the effort to pretend that obviously counted, and compelled Alex to point out the answer in the text for me. Again, I read it aloud and nodded sagely in faux enlightenment when Señor added on to it, none the wiser. Sigh.

I meandered sadly up to him to apologise for my obliviousness when class had finally ended and asked that he take my name off the register.

“Actually,” he returned jauntily, “I think you can stay here. This class is really lousy!”

Haha!! Just a moment before, he had told the class that their level of Spanish was “not profound, but not bad”. Grinning, I emphasised that I was a complete beginner – they, at least, could write.

“You’re really a complete beginner?”

Sí, Señor.

“But your pronunciation’s very good. Why? Have you lived in a Spanish-speaking country before? Don’t worry; I’m sure you can catch up! The level in this class is really zero.”

Grinning even more maniacally, I explained that I just knew a couple of Spanish songs, grabbed a pen and hurriedly struck my name off the register myself before he convinced me that I really belonged in that really zero-level class. He seems like a great guy, that Prof – if ruthlessly honest only selectively – but he’s got to learn to separate “imitating noises” from “understanding”. For a teacher, he also doesn’t understand the concept of “complete beginner” very well.

Back home that day on the phone with my sister in the after-glow of this mega ego-boost, I triumphantly revealed the source of what I thought was my flawless Spanish pronunciation: Il Divo’s Regresa a mi, which I was crazy about enough to memorise the lyrics to in late 2004. (It’s a glorious pop-operatic translation of Toni Braxton’s Unbreak My Heart. Ask me for it! It’s still great.) Jie let rip one of her guffaws that I really miss.

“At least that CD came in useful for something,” she hooted, without skipping a beat.

Huh. I guess I shouldn’t have howled the song around her so often back then. It appears to have created a mental block – she still maintains that the lyrics are in Italian, not Spanish. Well. You may think Il Divo are drippy, Jie, but they’re ALL MAN ok! Haha.

Listening to the song later on in iTunes though, I tumbled back down to earth with a hugely disagreeable jolt of hubris when I realised that my pronunciation in class had been anything but perfect. In my influenced state of bug-eyed panic, I had gargled instead of rolled every single one of my rrrrrrr’s.

~ by grossomodo on October 3, 2006.