“Seriously?! There are four ways to say YOU in Spanish!
What’s wrong with just YOU?” Muttered Lori from Wales as she
shook her head.
“What do you mean, a table is a girl? It’s a thing, anyone can
see it’s an IT!” Exclaimed Mike from England.
“Good grief! I can never memorize all those verb endings,”
despaired another student from New Zealand.
I don’t respond immediately to these exasperated outbursts. I
let my students entertain these “unfathomable” concepts until their
defenses relax.
That was my morning Spanish Grammar class. In the evening, the
Spaniards come for their English class; and, I patiently listen to the
same comments… only different:
“Why is there a W in ANSWER if you don’t pronounce it?”
“Why is everything backwards in English?”
“If DO means HACER, why do you have the word MAKE ,
which also means HACER?” These questions don’t have proper
answers.
It’s become normal for my budding polyglots to compare and
defend their English language skills against Spanish, and vice
versa. It is pointless to justify the “correctness” of your native
language, since languages represent different thought systems,
different ways of organizing and communicating the world around
and within us.
Things really get fun when the Bilingual Adult Immersion class
meets on Fridays. This is where the big questions get discussed as
natives of the two languages meet head on head. Questions like: “If
Spanish is a phonetic language, why do you have an H and not
pronounce it?”
Last Friday, a couple from Ireland joined the group for the first
time. They were excited and had a list of questions for the native
Spanish speakers.
”Which YOU do I use to talk to all of you in Spanish?” Alice
smiled, waiting eagerly for a rational explanation.
María, in her Spanish accent (which us Americans think is
gorgeous, but don’t tell my students working on accent reduction!)
explained that “It depends on the person’s age in relation to yourage, the social context, your relationship with the person, if want to
compliment an older person you might want to use the TÚ form, if
you’re angry, you may use the USTED form. With friends always use
TÚ, except the older people always use USTED. With us, just use
VOSOTROS, we’re all friends here! Does that make sense?»
Concluded María with a smile.
Wide-eyed horror had replaced Alice’s faded smile. Before she could
compose herself, Sonia added her supportive two-sense:
In Argentina, we don’t use VOSOTROS, only VOS which is the
same as TÚ. For this group, you can use USTEDES!
Alice didn’t ask more questions from her list that evening.
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