If you’re going to make Costa Rica your home and you’re not a native Spanish speaker, I suggest that you put in the effort to try to learn your new country’s native tongue. That being said, it’s not going to be easy. I present to you the three stages of learning Spanish.
Dazed and Confused
This stage is a real bummer. The only thing that you’ve got going for you is your hope and enthusiasm. At the very beginning of this stage, people speaking Spanish to you might as well be making dolphin noises. Nothing is getting through. At first, you can’t even hear where one word stops and another starts.
The only thing that you can do is accept the embarrassment and choose the form in which you want to express to the person talking to you that you have no idea what’s going on. I personally chose a kind of stunned-faced smile combined with an upwards shoulder shrug. The person sees what you’re doing, and you can see the mental click of them thinking, ‘Ohhhh. This guy has no idea what’s going on.’
There’s a second, more hopeful part of this stage. You’ve been studying. You’re on the language apps. You have post-it notes all over your house. ‘Basurero’ is stuck to your trashcan, and ‘ventana’ is pasted to your window. There are even times when your Spanish teacher speaks to you in slow, perfectly pronounced Spanish and you understand every word of it.
Reality strikes when you leave the classroom and step out into the wild and try talking to real world Spanish-speaking people. You can hear the different words now and even understand a solid 50 – 70% of them, but then your brain can’t figure out how to glean all of the information that’s coming at you and form any kind of coherent response. All you can do is stick with it, continue to feel uncomfortable, and hope to eventually rise to the next stage.
Participating in the Spanish World
This stage is better. You’re like an adult walking around with a 2nd grader’s ability to speak. Your understanding of what people are saying to you is consistently at 75%. You can even have whole conversations where you understand every single word. You have enough words memorized that they’ll just pop out of your mouth when you think about them, and you can conjugate your most frequently used verbs easily (with some difficulty in future or past tenses at times).
This is a stage where you can live and interact in the Spanish world, but mistakes/misunderstandings will happen. I currently live in this stage, and I’ll give you a recent example of how I understand what’s happening for the most part but get hung up on things due to lack of fluency.
I had a camera trap project in the Osa Peninsula where I had to meet an old man on a dock on the bank of a river and the plan was to ride with him in his boat to his farm to install camera traps.
I successfully drove 8 hours to the correct point, navigated to the rural gas station and a restaurant, I even found the proper old man and conversed with him about the plan for the project. The trouble was when we both got in the boat and he stood at the back near the engine, looked at me, and said something with saltar in it and pointed at the boat directly next to us. He then repeated it and pointed at the other boat.
I thought to myself, ‘This can’t be right. The old man wants me to jump in that other boat?’ Just as I was moving to the front of our boat to no-reason jump into somebody else’s boat, he waved at me to sit down, pushed by me, and loosened the rope at the front of our boat. I then realized he had used the word suelta, not salta. He was pointing at the front of our boat, not the other boat, and he wanted me to untie our boat from the dock, not jump in a stranger’s boat (Which makes way more sense.).
I feel like that’s a good example of life at this stage. You can have conversations, you can navigate stores and the bank, you’re almost a normal Spanish-speaking person, but you also might randomly jump into some guy’s boat.
Dominating the Spanish World
For most of us, this stage is an aspiration. I’m not at this stage personally, so I don’t have any fun stories about it. I can only speak about viewing it from the outside because my wife resides at this stage of Spanish speaking. Her Spanish is so good at this point that people become immediately confused as to her nationality.
They can’t figure out why this blond-haired, blue-eyed lady is speaking to them in perfect Tico Spanish. I suspect reaching this level has some dependence upon personality type and/or intelligence levels, but a pure interest in learning another language is definitely a prerequisite. I encourage you to strive for this level of Spanish competency, but if you feel you’re unable to reach it just do what I did and trick a more talented Spanish speaker into spending their life with you.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica. Learn more about his projects on facebook or instagram. You can also email him at: vincent@guanacastewildlifemonitoring.com
