Week Three: Classroom Application in El Mundo Real

How I actually learned vocabulary words and grammar (hint: I didn’t get a grade for it)

A lot of the study abroad experience is, of course, the real-life application that happens outside of the classroom. For me, this happened mostly with my host family who was luckily very attentive and present for me to practice (as well as extremely patient). Dinner conversations, as I have touched on before, were my time to shine to practice because it was expected to talk and not eat quietly. I learned this the mildly-embarrassing way during dinner after my first day of classes. We had just gotten our first vocabulary which had a lot of review-words of how to describe people physically (rubio, alto, barba) and emotionally (simpático, cariñoso, hablador). Although I knew most of the words, there were some that I didn’t know and had to take extra time to commit to memory. One was “callado”, which means “quiet” in terms of describing a person. Later that night at dinner, as my roommate talked animatedly and I struggled to keep up with what was being said, my host dad remarked, “Tú eres callada hoy, Ashley.” As slightly-taken aback I was at being called out for being quiet (I am an extremely extroverted person and never in my life have been called quiet), I also had a moment of “oh my god I’m studying abroad and already understanding words that I learned in the classroom.” After that moment, I always put in effort to talk during dinner and will never forget the meaning of the word “callada.”

Another example of using Spanish outside of the classroom was actually in a way where I learned the grammar and appropriate context in my outside life before formally learning it in the classroom. One day while we were ordering bocadillos to go for dinner with a group of friends that included students who were in higher-level Spanish classes, I noticed that while I said, “Quiero un bocadillo” (“I want a bocadillo”) one of those girls said, “Me gustaría un bocadillo” (“I would like a bocadillo”). When I researched later what it actually meant and realized that it was the more polite way of asking for things, I used “Me gustaría” from then on when ordering. During one of the last weeks of school, we learned the conditional tense which was used, among other contexts, for courtesy. It was a pretty cool moment for me knowing that I had learned something from observing Spanish in daily-practice before being taught it by the professors. 

A final way of applying Spanish in my life in Valencia was through the way that it will most likely continue in my life back at home, which is my attempt at using Spanish while texting my friends and using social media. While writing an Instagram post, I realized that what I wanted to say in English would need to use the present perfect tense which we had learned in Spanish class. Fast forward a few weeks later while I was working on my final exam for the class, there were so many different tenses that I was becoming panicky and forgot when to use a couple of the tenses. As I kept staring at the sheet, I suddenly remembered the sentence that I had come up with while writing that Instagram post which used the tense that I had forgotten in the appropriate context. My use of Spanish outside of the classroom, albeit for something as unimportant as an Instagram post, ended up saving me on my final exam. 

Cultural TL;DR: A lot of what you can learn about language and culture not only can be learned in the classroom, but often goes beyond what is taught.