“It makes me think of all the people in New York who can't speak English and who must be terrified of the guy who comes to read their gas meter or desperately hope the clerk will show them how much they owe instead of just telling them. I've never thought about those people and now I'm one of those people.”
-David Sedaris
Jose Alberto guarded the condominium where I stayed in San Jose, Costa Rica. He is an efficient, stately little man with smiling eyes and a debonair graciousness he displayed when he unlocked the gate for me each morning. Every morning for three weeks, I got up around 6:30 am, ate a lovely breakfast of pineapple, mango, papaya or watermelon, buttered toast, and drank the most amazing coffee I’ve ever tasted, and then walked out the door towards my Spanish immersion program at Intensa, a language school located in Barrio Escalante, a quiet little suburb near downtown San Jose.
After breakfast, I would always say good morning and goodbye to Jose Alberto, who patiently, sweetly listened to my mangled Spanish.
While I love learning Spanish, I am an almost hopeless case, and this was especially frustrating in Costa Rica since language had been something I had excelled in as long as I was speaking my mother tongue (English). Like many of our students, I have a lot to learn for someone who has returned to the classroom 15 years after my first high school Spanish class.
During my time in Costa Rica, I routinely messed up verb conjugations and told my host family that I planned to bake them spinach-ricotta calzones without realizing my Italian recipe would be translated as preparing the family “spinach-ricotta underwear.” As Lera Boroditsky, assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, says about learning language, “You're inheriting much more than just how to speak. You're learning a whole cultural system.” My cultural and linguistic finesse in Costa Rica was roughly akin to Tarzan: “Me Kella; You Jane!”
But I was not insecure or shy when I spoke with Jose Alberto, the condo’s guard. I was eager to show off what I had learned in school, to show this 50-something Tico that I would learn his language, poco a poco, little by little.
Finally, at the end of my three-week immersion program, I couldn’t wait to express my gratitude to Jose Alberto. I wanted him to understand just how excited I was to return home to the United States with improved, albeit emerging, Spanish skills thanks to easy-going listeners who didn’t correct me every time I used the wrong article or verb. In preparation for our last exchange, I consulted my Webster’s Spanish-English Dictionary and found the perfect word to describe my state of bliss: excitada.
“Yo estoy muy excitada,” I said proudly to Jose Alberto. His eyes widened and he stared at me for a moment before he spoke. He began to laugh. Finally he said, “Tu estas feliz o contenta, pero no excitada.” I was puzzled but unfazed. I waved one last time to Jose Alberto, and then turned the corner, past birds of paradise and the wrought iron gate.
When I arrived at school, I told Grace, my teacher, what I had said to Jose Alberto. She too began to giggle. “He was right,” she finally managed to say. “You are happy (feliz) or content (contenta), but not excitada.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Because you told the guard you were horny.”
McKenna, B. (1998, November 2). An interview with the ‘wickedly
funny’ David Sedaris.” Retrieved September 22, 2009, from the
University of California, Santa Cruz’s Currents Web site:
Krulwich, R. (2009, April 6). Shakespeare had roses all wrong.
Retrieved September 22, 2009, from the NPR Web site:
Did you know…
Kella Hammond was a member of the NFL? The National Forensics League that is. She qualified for nationals in a cross-examination debate when she was a junior in high school. Thankfully, she didn’t become the attorney everyone said she should become. Kella is a Resource Specialist at the Kaplan University Writing Center.
[This article was originally published in our September, 2009 issue.]
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