i was fluent once

plus, my love/hate relationship to duolingo

Hola, me llamo Sarah. Impressed? Don’t be.

I started taking Spanish in the 4th grade, by which I mean a Spanish teacher would come to our classroom a few times a week and give us a brief Spanish lesson (Tengo hambre, tengo sed, blah blah blah).

I remember falling in love with the language when our teacher gave us “Spanish names”—a likely problematic but weirdly effective way to show little kids how a new language can grant you a new sense of identity. Even when I, anti-climatically, was dubbed “Sarita” (there were multiple Sarahs in the class, alas, having the most popular name of your birth year comes with these challenges).

I was nine, but a new language meant new access: to myself and to a huge part of the outside world.

I took Spanish courses continuously until my junior year of college (it was essentially an undeclared minor). I studied abroad in Sevilla, Spain during winter break my sophomore year of college. My host family’s sister (an adorable goth lesbian woman who was living at home after an epic break-up) introduced me to classic Spanish horror films, aiding me when I missed major plot points during movies like El Orfanato (turns out SIDA is not person’s name, but the Spanish equivalent of the acronym for HIV/AIDS, oops).

I was never perfectly fluent, but I reached a point where I could speak, write, and read in Spanish comfortably enough to get by without incident.

Image by Oana Unciuleanu

There are several times when knowing Spanish has come in handy—when explaining to a delivery person how to use our building elevator or explaining to our super how a hole had burst in my bedroom and water was now raining down on my bed (“El cielo roto!” I screamed in desperation because I forgot the word for ceiling. “The sky is broken!”). I’ve befriended shopkeepers and awkwardly communicated with bilingual students, who often gave me and my horrific accent a raised eyebrow.

But I don’t use Spanish all the time, and therefore my fluency has waned over the years. I can still understand most spoken Spanish, depending on the accent, and I can read it. When my husband and I recently rewatched Pan’s Labyrinth, an old favorite of ours, I could pick up on some funky and unwieldy subtitle translations. In other words: I still got it, but barely.

Fast forward to earlier this year, when a Pedro Pascal-fueled obsession with The Last of Us and a subsequent binge of Narcos (yes, I love Chilean-American international treasure Pedro Pascal, and no, I will not elaborate further!) inspired me to download Duolingo. Surely I could re-learn Spanish with ease! Surely I could brush up solely using an app! What could go wrong?!

you already know