The Accent

I’m getting better at this big city stuff; I’m on a winning streak of four days without having been ripped off. I was supposed to start classes on Monday but got miserably lost (essentially ended up in Newark instead of Manhattan) on the way to the school, and spent the day getting unlost. Tuesday I actually made it to the school after a pre-dawn walk through town, evading the night’s remaining optimistic prostitutes as the sun began to show, and I got there for 8am classes, as instructed, and was informed my class would not begin until 1:30pm. Bienvenidos a Latin America. Florida street, the street on which the school is located, is the heart of Buenos Aires, is closed to cars, and packed with things to spend one’s pesos on. In pursuit of fiscal austerity, I chose not to remain on Florida St. because the walk home is physically impossible to repeat in one day and 5 ½ hours on the street would deplete my week’s supply of food money. Today, though, I actually got to the school, at approximately the correct time, and went to class, which led to the next problem.

I'd heard that people speak quickly down here. Although this is true to some degree, the real problem for an American Spanish speaker is the accent. I'm learning that Argentina considers there to be three main Spanish speaking countries: Spain, Mexico, and Argentina. As most people know, the Spanish pronounce "c" and "z" with a "th" creating the infamous lisp. What is less infamous is the dreadfully difficult-to-understand absence of "sssss" in Argentina, and the dramatic contortion of the letter "ll" from a consonant "y" sound into a sentence-dominating JUHH. It took me this entire week to sort this out and up until yesterday I have been able to understand about one out of every five words that happen to not contain an "ll" or an "s." The whole issue could have been cleared up on Wednesday but my teacher might be the least helpful instructor I've ever met. She insists that a verb tense, vosotros, is unique to Argentina, and that Mexico and Spain are both wrong to not use it. This is wrong a) because Mexico seems to be just fine without it, and b) vosotros is widely used in Spain. I want to slap this lady. Classes this week have been more of a education in anger management than Spanish, but I've found humor in it by comparing situations to David Sedaris's  Me Talk Pretty One Day. My advice to anybody wishing to continue their Spanish education is to do it in Guatemala. Learning Spanish here is comparable to sending someone trying to learn English to Alabama.

On a more cultural note, its interesting that nobody here will get into a political or religious discussions. Even soccer teams they won't talk about. I'd love to find somebody willing to talk about the government here. I think the chances are pretty good that I'll find somebody though.