Learn Spanish on the Next Level (part II)

1. A complete sentence. They say that you learn languages better when you are under pressure and thrown in at the deep end. I would have to agree with this, as my first complete Spanish sentence was spoken at the exact moment when I most needed it. As I travelled around Peru and Bolivia I was aware that time was running out to make my onward flight connection from Santiago in Chile. I think I was kind of hoping that the problem would sort itself out if I ignored it long enough, but it turned out that it didn’t and I found myself in La Paz, Bolivia the day before my flight was due to leave from Chile and with no way of getting there in time. I had realised that speaking English in Bolivia wasn’t usually a great option so I sat down with my dictionary, a cup of coffee and a heavy heart and tried to translate the phrase, “I am flying tomorrow and need to change my flight or I will be stranded here shining shoes for the rest of my life”. I think it took me about an hour, a further cup of coffee, a couple of boosts of chocolate and a lot of head scratching but I just about got there in the end. I may actually have said something like, “I fly tomorrow and need fly other day not tomorrow other”, but I got my point across and my flight was, rather miraculously, changed to a more suitable date.
2. Future tense. Anyone who is trying to learn Spanish will tell you that the conjugation of the verbs is the most difficult part. I hadn’t even attempted to learn the future tense yet but for some reason I needed to use it. I can’t remember why I needed it but I can clearly remember sitting in the fine plaza in Tucuman in Argentina – where I coincidentally met a former work colleague from Edinburgh, how bizarre is that – and indulging in my by then favourite hobby of trying to dig myself out of a hole. At this point the clouds didn’t part and shine a celestial ray on me but something just as remarkable happened; I came up with the answer which I didn’t even know I had in me. From some dark, secret well of unspeakable knowledge a song came unbidden to my mind. “Que será, será. Whatever will be will be.” That was it, you just added an accented “a” onto the end of the base verb. I had learned how to conjugate future Spanish verbs thanks to an old song which I had always thought was in Italian.