Submitted by Jessica Storm on the 2018 summer session program in Salamanca, Spain sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures…
Living with a host family is exciting and surprisingly difficult, especially when they don’t speak your first language very well and you have no choice, but to strengthen your language skills and find creative ways to express what you mean. I personally am a relatively quiet person so for the first few days of living with my host family, I didn’t say much. I didn’t really know what to say so I listened a lot. One day though, my host father sat down at the table while I was eating lunch and I thought of a few questions about Spanish culture I wanted to ask him so I started a conversation. He told me he was surprised I knew so much Spanish because I hadn’t spoken much before. I was a little nervous about speaking incorrectly and making mistakes in my grammar, but something my professor had said the day before stuck with me: while we’re learning a language, communicating imperfectly is OK. My host father and I had an extensive conversation about everything from climate change to party culture in the United States. It’s a rush to have a conversation with someone in a completely different language than the one you’ve known all your life. I realized then that everything I’d done to get to that point—years of Spanish classes, suffering through exams, essays and awkward class presentations—was paying off. It had been my dream since I graduated from middle school to become fluent in this beautiful Latin language and I am certainly getting there. It’s not perfect yet, though, as sometimes the library security guard speaks to me in rapid Spanish and I do not understand one word. Sometimes I ask for directions and misunderstand, ending up on the wrong end of a foreign city. I certainly don’t always conjugate my verbs correctly in speech, the words get jumbled in my head before they even leave my mouth, but I’m communicating imperfectly and I’m slowly letting go of needing to be perfect. As they say in Spain, no pasa nada, which means “whatever” or “it’s no big deal”. I love communicating imperfectly, I’m pretty good at it!