Back through the Andes

Mentally refreshed and enthused by all the practical use I’d gotten out of my limited Spanish, I’ve reopened my high school Spanish notes and have been studying the grammar underlying the language on which I’ve been surviving for the past month and a half. Now the trick is just to refresh my Italian as I’m sure it is still there under a thin layer of dust. However, it was somewhat disconcerting earlier this week when I received a note from one of my Italian roommates from Pisa and realized that each time I began responding to her, only Spanish would come out. What a reversal from a couple of months ago!

Within two months I will be living in a dorm of the Cité Universitaire, a network of international student houses in Paris proper. If the French, Spanish, Italian, German, Austrian, (and English) friends I made and kept from my time abroad last year aren’t enough, I’m sure this arrangement will help me develop my languages. I just love speaking to people in different languages. There are so many different expressions and pretty idioms to pick up, not to mention different ways of organizing one’s thoughts.

One of my favorite cross-linguistic experiences is conversing with friends with whom you share a handful of languages but not a common native tongue. Take my friend Iván: last November we became friends thanks to a most fortuitous run-in with two Brits while in line at the cafeteria at my school in Pisa which led me into a group of Erasmus study-abroad students from across Europe. Iván is Spanish but, as his English had fallen to the wayside much as my Spanish had, our whole relationship developed in Italian. Two nights ago, Iván caught me online and we chatted for a bit. Whether similarly caught by the travel bug, struck by the fact that his years of English studies were begin put to waste, or for another motivation lost to me, Iván happens to be spending his summer in Toronto refreshing his English. (Don’t get me started on how frustrating it is that his flight leaves North America two days before mine heads back to it.) Nonetheless, quite uncoordinated, we’re both now immersed in each other’s native languages and share a common third through which we became friends. This made for a most linguistically appealing conversation, what I can only hope is a small sampling of what’s to come in the approaching school year.