I hablo mexicano

A change has come. Anglo-French Claire, the same Claire that arrived in Mexico with an unhealthy amount of trepidation and borderline fear of the Spanish language, has been replaced by a Claire who is confident with trills, subjunctive conjugations and, more importantly, Mexican vulgarities.

Having spent two months in France, I was rightly worried about being able to communicate once I got here, especially when I was thrust into the monolingual bosom of Cosoleacaque and the Zuñiga family. Although able to string together sentences, my neck and ears began to feel the strain of trying to follow rapid conversations, like a fast-forward, foreign tennis match, but now it’s roughly 30-love to me. I even find myself having quite dense discussions about life and love and philosophy. I dread to think about how many mistakes I make in every stuttery, Anglicism-speckled sentence, but I seem to be understood, and for basic conversation I’m rarely at a loss. I still have a long way to go: thinking about it now, I couldn’t give you the word for pavement, or flannel, but at least I know how to say ‘you’ve got big testicles’ (you’re a lazy bum). The most difficult arena for airing my Spanish seems to be in the classroom, when giving instructions to the kids, or chastising them. My stern warnings have slightly less gravity when I stumble over words, or have to ask the culprit how to go about telling them off in Spanish.

The one worry gnawing at me is that as a consequence my French is being pushed further back into my cerebral linguistic recesses ( ‘linguistic recesses’ rings slightly naughty...I’m sure I could make it into a euphemism for something). Skype and phone conversations to French friends and family go some way to helping alleviate the language loss, but I’m having to work to keep all three balls in the air: English, French and Spanish, so that by this time next year I can easily switch between all three and have almost equal mastery.

I’ll leave you with this thought: in Mexican Spanish, all of these words mean the same thing: la Tortuga, la cucaracha, la rana, la cuca, la conhca, and are used with unfathomable regularity; have a guess.