Grammar escapism

I love grammar. It is the logistics of language. The process of delivering meaning. You can have words in storage, but you need a system to deliver ideas, and an orderly system is best. The more I understand Spanish grammar, the more comfortable I feel pulling words out and trying them on the street. Even in grade school, I loved diagramming sentences. Analyzing a process is much more comfortable to me than trying to speak to strangers. I was beginning to think that my obsession with direct and indirect object pronouns was simply displacement behavior. Perhaps I was just distracting myself from really trying to communicate, a guise for my shyness. Maybe my insistence on knowing exactly which past tense verb form to use was really an excuse for not actually speaking. Understanding the system is very comforting to me. But now the hours of hand copying my giant spreadsheet of verb conjugations is paying off. I am starting to understand how Spanish grammar works, and I am elated.

I find the sound of language difficult to grasp. In my learning process, the sounds often don’t make sense to me. They confuse me. Other people love the sound of language – its rhythms, melodies, syncopation. Anna must be one of these people. I can see that Anna hears the music. She learns the language by hearing it as song. When she corrects my Spanish she corrects the sound of it, both the pronunciation and the rhythm. She tells me, “I think it would sound better if you said it this way….” Then she offers me a more graceful way to express the idea. Often her construction shocks me. It does sound much better her way. It delights me that her Spanish sounds beautiful, beautiful in her accent and her phraseology.

Alex focuses on efficiency. From the very beginning he has been able to sort through a very limited vocabulary and use the fewest words possible to transmit a message. With a small vocabulary you often have to talk around your subject. Alex is a master of this. While I am still wondering how to simplify an idea down to its core, he has already shuffled through his deck, pulled out a few effective cards, and placed them on the table. He has no difficulty getting words out of his mouth. Even a few months ago when I had a much larger vocabulary than he did, he always outmaneuvered me. He arranges the words masterfully to get to the point. Perhaps it is like playing chess or solving a puzzle for him. He listens to me struggling until he simply can’t stand it for one more second. Then he swoops in and completes the language transaction for me so that we can move on to more important matters.

Sigh. I love my verb lists. Probably because they provide a place for me to hide inside my head. But, happily, they are paying off. Me gustan mucho mis listas.