communication breakdown

Two years ago, before coming to Spain for round one, I wrote a letter to my then future Spanish family to tell them when I would be arriving, some tidbits about me… and that I was really excited to meet them. Of course, come to find out a few months later, instead of writing that I was emotionally excited in that ‘really looking forward to meeting you’ way, I had written something to the effect of “I’m so horny to meet you!” How’s that for a first impression. Not exactly what I had intended, to say the least. Looking back, I guess it’s a good thing they knew I wasn’t a native Spanish speaker because they probably would have locked the door to avoid living with a perv. Hopefully they just chuckled amongst themselves.

And that’s the beauty of (or problem with) living in a country in which you don’t know the language inside out. You don’t know all the little meanings that a single word can carry depending on the context. You say one thing while trying to say something completely different… sometimes creating an awkward situation or making yourself look like an uneducated ass. I’m good at that. Perhaps you try to say “your mother is so nice” but instead you say “your mother is a fat whore who eats children.” (Just to emphasize the point… not taken from real life example) And then there’s my sense of humor… which often times goes misunderstood. I try to be sarcastic, which is my way of life in English, but find that my idea of humor doesn’t always necessarily function in Spanish the way I’d like it to.

To avoid situations such as these, there is a remedy! Every Monday and Wednesday morning I start off my day with a swig of orange juice and a little thing I like to call Oral Communication class, where we learn to communicate better… orally. The structure of the class is more or less the following. First, the professor teaches us the material in a given section of the giant packet of material that we have. Then, we divide up into pairs and create a quick 20 second dialogue to practice whatever it is we just learned. Makes sense… and avoids the characteristic monotony of the rest of my classes.

So this past Wednesday, we were doing suffixes! Two girls were doing their little conversation in which they were talking about a dog... but the professor didn’t catch the part when they mentioned that it was a dog to which they were referring. So, they’re going back and forth using various suffixes to describe how handsome the dog is. How smart he is. Etc. So then one of them says, “Pero mira, tiene la cola ganchuda.” Which means “but look, he has a hooked tail.” The funny thing about the wold “cola (tail)” is that in another context, it can also mean penis. So the professor, thinking that they were talking about a man, hears “but look, he has a hooked penis.” Needless to say, there was some choking on her water involved, a few stuttered words, some eyebrows raised and a bottom jaw dropped… then finally a “cómo?? (What??)” before it got cleared up.

And we lauuuughed and lauuuughed…