Spanish class

First Spanish class last night. Completely entry-level, for people with no previous experience with the language. It went well, and I must admit that while no foreign language is easy in objective terms, Spanish does seem to live up to its reputation of being relatively easily grasped by a beginner. To compare with French, the only other language I've studied in a classroom setting, Spanish is far easier not only actually to pronounce, but to understand and remember how letters are pronounced. Silent letters are always silent. Non-silent letters are pronounced the same exact way every time, or, at most, two different ways based on the letter that follows. Certain sounds that we have in English do not exist. The instructor claimed that there are only twelve basic sounds in Spanish – six vowels and six consonants. While that is a bit of an oversimplification, it is not that far from the truth. And before I am accused of overstating the case because of my knowledge of French which, like Spanish, is a romance language, I should point out that I am not talking about myself – I am talking about a class of about 25 people ranging in age from college student to retirement.

Sure, people did have the kinds of trouble that you might expect native speakers of American English to have. The rolling “r,” especially the double-”r”, which is actually a separate letter in the Spanish alphabet, gave people grief. Even those few who could roll their “r”s could not hear the different between the two. The distinctly emphasized “d” was a challenge – people tended to deemphasize it the way we do in English, which made it sound like the Spanish “r,” and claimed not to be able to hear the difference. There was one woman who, while she was catching onto the concepts relatively quickly, spoke with such a pronounced San Fernando Valley accent and inflection that it was difficult not to laugh. She looked the part, too – bleached blond hair, tanning-booth tan and a pink sweatshirt. To think that in most Spanish-speaking countries, she would be the archetypal American...

By and large, however, people were getting it. After about two hours of class, everyone was able to read simple prose from the first few pages of the textbook with minimal stumbling, and make themselves comprehensible. Try that with French or German! I attribute the success rate to the ubiquity of Spanish in our daily life. In any urban area in the US these days, there is simply no way to avoid hearing it – you hear it in stores, you hear it on the radio, you hear it blaring from low-riders on a Saturday night. And our brains absorb it, whether we realize or not, and become comfortable with its sound. It may be a foreign language, but it is a lot less foreign than just about any other.

From the “Only in Washington, DC” Department:
Only in Washington, DC, do you learn how to say “Environmental Protection Agency” in the first few minutes of an introductory foreign language class. For the record, it is Agencia de Protección Ambiental.