Hello party people and welcome to another blog post!!!

As you can tell by the title, this post is going to go into depth about my attempts at becoming a linguist aka a polyglot aka multilingual.

I think I’ve briefly mentioned this in another post, but I’m currently struggling with learning 3 languages simultaneously (highly don’t recommend, slows down progress especially if the languages are close to each other).

• Spanish
• Japanese
• Korean

Of course, there are other languages I want to learn like Mandarin and Arabic but as you can see, I already have my plate full (as hell).

Now that I’ve reminded everyone on what languages I’m studying, let’s go into each language in a little more detail, starting with Spanish.

Spanish or Español

¡¡¡Hola!!! El primer idioma del que quiero hablar es el español o Spanish en inglés.

That translates to, “Hi!!! The first language I want to talk about is español or Spanish in English”.

I’ve been learning Spanish off and on since I was a child (I’m talking elementary/primary school age), but didn’t get serious about learning until around the end of high school/the start of college/university. And even then, it was an off and on process because my life is quite chaotic and I’m terrible at hyping myself up to learn these languages.

Anyway, when I was a child, it was mandatory for schools to teach Spanish (or at least it was for my school/school district) and I didn’t mind it. Even as a youngster (I’m still young, lmao. I’m in my very early 20s), I loved the idea of learning another language besides English and understanding a whole other part of the world.

Unfortunately, for some reason or other, they took the Spanish curriculum out of schools by the time I was in either 3rd or 4th grade. Add in the fact that something extremely traumatic happened to me around that time and you’ve got a recipe for forgetting everything that was taught to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I retained a lot of Spanish information. But there were a lot of grammatical structures and words I found myself having to re-learn once I got to middle school and Spanish became part of the curriculum again.

Since Spanish is one of the closest languages to English, it relatively takes a shorter amount of time to reach a basic level of understanding for Spanish. In fact, depending on how much you study on a daily basis, you can reach fluency within a year to 3 years. Now, this varies upon person, but it typically doesn’t take long to learn Spanish (at least I don’t consider this a long time compared to the other languages I’m learning/want to learn).

It also helps that a lot of the words and grammatical principles in Spanish are similar if not the same to English so if you really put in the effort or surround yourself with the language, it really won’t take you that long to learn.

I just play too much, can’t concentrate, and suck at prioritizing my interests and hobbies, so I’m somewhere around a beginner-intermediate level when it comes to Spanish. What I mean by this is, I can read Spanish perfectly fine and can comprehend what I read…buuuuuut don’t ask me to speak the language to you or translate based on what someone is saying.

Listening comprehension and speaking are my weak areas when it comes to language learning, but I’m not going to let that stop me. I just have to find a method that works for me and adjust my learning style to fit the way my brain works.

Let’s go over some common Spanish phrases, words and sentences.

• Hola = Hello
• ¿Qué pasa? = What’s happening?/what’s up?
• ¿Qué onda? = What’s up? (Mexican dialect)
• ¿Cómo te llamas? = What is your name?
• Me llamo… = My name is…
• ¿Podría repetir? = Could you repeat that?
• un poco = a little [bit]
• Te amo/te quiero = I love you/I want you
• ¿Cómo se dice … en español? = How do you say … in Spanish?
• Hablo = I talk/speak
• pero = but
• aprender = to learn
• encantado/encantada = Delighted/please to meet you
• solo = only

Let’s break down what these phrases mean in Spanish since there are grammatical structures within the phrases themselves.

¿Cómo te llamas?

Cómo typically means how in Spanish but can sometimes mean what in certain situations. Te is the direct object pronoun for you or in this case, your. Llamas means to name but the typical word for name in Spanish is nombre. Llamas is also conjugated to the present tense you form which is essentially attaching -es to verb stems ending in -ir, -er or -as to the end of a verb stem ending in -ar.

Put it all together and you have “What is your name?” in Spanish. Another way to ask this question is ¿Cual es tu nombre?

¿Podría repetir?

Podría is the conditional formal you tense of the verb poder which means can or to be able to. Spanish is a conjugation language so depending on the tense and situation for the verb, the verb ending changes into something different. For the conditional formal you tense, you drop the -e from poder to make it podr- then add the correct ending according to who you’re talking to. Since we’re speaking formally, the correct ending is -ia.

So podría means can you.

Repetir means to repeat and if you know a little bit about Spanish, you’ll notice this verb isn’t conjugated like the first one is. Why is that? In Spanish, sometimes the second verb remains in its infinitive form either for the sake of maintaining the correct message or some other reason I have yet to figure out.

So, put these words together and the translation is, “Could you repeat that?” If you specifically want to say, “Could you repeat it?”, you can say, “¿Podría repetirlo?“

Solo hablo un poco de español, pero aprendiendo

Some of you may be thinking, “Wait, this isn’t one of the phrases listed” and you’re correct. I did, however, separately post the words for this phrase in the list so I could go over this phrase with you guys.

This means, “I only speak a bit of Spanish, but I’m learning [the language]”.

Let’s break this down.

Solo typically means only and hablo is the present I, me tense for hablar which means to speak, to talk. In the present tense form, it means I speak, I talk. Un is an article word that means a, an and poco means little bit or small amount. De has two meanings: from or of. In this sentence, it means of. Español is Spanish (please tell me this was obvious) and pero means but, not to be confused with perro which means dog. Pero has a softer roll of the tongue on the r than perro.

Now, aprendiendo deserves its own paragraph(s) because it’s a slightly complicated verb conjugation. As previously stated, Spanish is a language of multiple verb conjugations (which beat my ass but I digress) based on the infinitive form of the verb (i.e. they end with -er, -ir, -ar instead of their conjugated ending [hablar, poder, repetir]). For aprendiendo, this verb is conjugated to a different kind of present tense form (I believe it’s called progressive present tense but don’t hold me to that).

Aprender is the infinitive form of this verb and it means to learn. To change a verb into something you are currently doing in the moment, for -ir, -er verbs, you drop that and add -iendo to the verb. For -ar verbs, you drop that and add -ando to the verb.

Put all these words together in the order I explained them in and you get, “Solo hablo un poco de español, pero aprendiendo“. You can use this phrase anytime you want to explain to someone that you only speak a bit of Spanish and that you are working on learning the language so they can give you a bit of grace when speaking to you.

I hope my explanations make sense as I’m not good at explaining things to others. There are plenty of free Spanish resources you can use online or in the app store to become fluent in Spanish and there are some paid resources as well that are totally worth it.

One thing to note about learning another language is that there are different dialects for each language. So just because you learn how to say something in that language doesn’t mean there isn’t another way to say it or that everyone speaks that way.

It’s just like English. In the US, we say afternoon but in Australia, they say arvo. It means the same thing, but we have different slang and ways of saying things. So even though you are only learning one language, it can often feel like you’re learning more than one language and that can get overwhelming sometimes.

I’m not gonna lie to you and say that learning a language is easy because it’s not. Some things aren’t going to make sense to you and you’re quite literally retraining your brain to recognize something unfamiliar to it. I can tell you that it becomes easier once you know what methods of learning work for you and you take the time to truly understand the language for what it is.

There’s so much to Spanish that I have yet to learn and it brings me excitement every time I learn something new or can feel my skills developing more. I also love a good challenge and learning another language was right up my alley.

In the next post, we’ll be exploring my Japanese language journey and how that language and culture had me in a chokehold for the longest (they still have me there).

That’s it for this post. Thank you so much for taking the time to read my post and I’ll see you in the next one!!!