Mi Español es Muy Pequeño

Communicating in Panama has been the biggest challenge here, at least for me it is what I’ve struggled with more than anything else.

“Mi Español es Muy Pequeño” or “My Spanish is really small” may be the most helpful phrase I’ve learned to date.  It at least gets me a smile and a nod and some more sufferance for my sputtering as I gasp out wrongly conjugated verbs matched with improper gendered nouns while waving my hands and making charade like gestures.  “Yes our goes the boat ” hopefully conveys “Yes, we took our boat through the Canal”.

We have managed to over pay in restaurants, over pay in taxis, get lost, take the wrong bus, order the wrong food, order the wrong drinks, waste a day paying to do paperwork we didn’t need to do, not order enough/order too much food and drinks, get browbeat by a cashier at a grocery store, be left waiting for an hour at a dinghy dock, and in general avoid, miss or screw up quite a few things because my Spanish is so weak.  Fortunately I have not yet badly irritated any government officials or gotten slapped or arrested, but we will be in Central America for another couple of months so those are not ruled out.

Will has the best edge of any of us, having gotten through Spanish II in Ninth grade before we left.  Unfortunately additional Spanish was not practical with Keystone School’s curriculum, so he left off there.  Unlike me he can frequently understand the gist of what someone is saying.  He knows his numbers and he can usually articulate a basic thought even if he doesn’t know all the words.  I suppose having some verbs like “have”, “want”, “go” and “do” makes a big difference.  Action verbs = less pantomime.

The trouble of course is convincing Will that if he sees me sputtering, waving my arms and shaking my head at a confused Panamanian it is perfectly OK for him to just butt in and bail me out.  We’re working on that, I don’t think he realizes I won’t be the least bit offended by him stepping in as I am generally more hopelessly confused than the hapless local I am trying to communicate at with.

I took one day of Spanish in college.  I’ve listed to a “Learn Spanish” CD’s in the car and gave up shortly after it made it past the alphabet.  I’ve started Rosetta Stone but probably much too late.  Although it those efforts combined with being immersed in the language have actually made a difference.  The other day we negotiated our way in and out of town and actually conveyed a few ideas to the tax driver that he appeared to understand.  I even negotiated for a cheaper fare, something I am getting better at.  Of course shaking my head at the cabbie and saying “No, no” while walking away is pretty universally understood, but I am making progress even if I get confused between six (“seis”) and seven (“siete”).  Holding up your fingers works too, though it gets confusing with numbers over ten.

Hindsight of course tells me I should have started boning up on Spanish when we first moved on the boat.  Later I was much too excited resurrecting my French when we were in the French Caribbean islands; I justified putting off Spanish by telling myself I would only get confused trying to learn Spanish while speaking French every day.  Ha!  Instead now I find myself spitting our French words while I am groping for the Spanish words that are eluding me.

One technique that has helped has been a data plan for my phone so I can use Google Translate to deal with more complex language.  Although I’ve heard the translations can be a little wacky, in general at least it helps me get the basics across.

The technician, Juan, who has worked on our generator speaks less English than I do Spanish.  This has been interesting.  To remove the parts he brought an assistant.  To put them back in he did not and needed more of my help.  So we had to figure out things like “Start the engine now”,  “Your heat exchanger is ruined”, and “The generator isn’t putting out enough power” as we were testing the installation.  Several phone calls to his office where someone that could translate helped, the rest was Google Translate, finger pointing and out best guesses.  Though when the job was finally done and Juan was getting cleaned up there was no confusion when I asked ¿Cervesa?

Even more entertaining was contacting the French Embassy here in Panama City.  A French Embassy in a Spanish speaking country does not hire people for their English proficiency.  So I called the embassy looking to make an appointment.  I’ve been told on a good day that I “sound German” when I speak French (this was not a compliment I think), on a bad day I know I sound like I am speaking with a mouthful of marbles.  The lovely woman that I spoke to, well her English was not really any better than my French though I can assume her Spanish was first rate.  E-mailing each other worked really well, better than trying to talk.  Visiting the Embassy for our Visa interviews there was not a word of English anywhere but we did get by with our French.

Well, we’ve got Panama, Costa Rica and Ecuador (for the Galapagos) before we get to French (yay!) Polynesia.  Here’s hoping if I get arrested the judge speaks English.