Vivi, my Spanish teacher, told me off yesterday. She’d been asking around in the office to see if I’ve been practicing my Spanish with people. And no, I have not. Everyone here is so friendly and can speak English so well, so there is no need for me to talk in Spanish! And I am shy. And scared. And don’t want to make a mistake. Well, Vivi says she is God and can hear everything and is now pushing me to speak Spanish, no matter how broken or incorrect. =)
I told her that G (the boy) makes fun of me when I make a mistake, which makes me insecure, which really is a big lie because he has been helpful and has been pushing me to practice and I just needed an excuse to not speak Spanish wrong. I don’t like being wrong. I like being right. And I don’t know enough Spanish yet to be right all of the time. =)
But then last night, I realized that my language-learning-speaking insecurity comes from somewhere deep in my childhood, from 1989 in cold, wintry, Toronto:
When I first came to Canada as a 5 year-old, I started attending a small Catholic elementary school in Mississauga. I was put into the first grade because I knew how to read. When we lived in the Philippines, I went to an all girl’s Montessori school where I was taught by nuns. Mean ones. The kind who would hit you if you didn’t pronounce your vowels properly. So I remember learning how to read by way of fear (a slap with a ruler, a pinch on the ear). This cruelty helped me a great deal when we moved to Canada because my reading comprehension was so great that I ended up skipping kindergarten. However, I wasn’t used to speaking English, so my grammar left much to be desired.
One day, a boy in my class started making fun of me for no reason at all. He was the bully, the guy who probably grew up to be some macho car enthusiast with big tattoos on his arm, getting drunk every single night at the corner pub. He was calling me names and making fun of my F.O.B. accent. So I, brave ol’ me, walked up to him and threatened: “I’m telling you!!”. There! Be scared! You’re going to get in trouble with the teacher. He looked at me for a second, and started laughing. ”You’re telling me what?”, he demanded. ”I’m telling you!”, I said. He stood there with a smug look on his face. I couldn’t figure it out. What the heck was so funny?! Why is he laughing at me? My friend Cristie walked up to him and threatened, “She’s telling on you!”. Cristie was born in Canada and wasn’t emitting the immigrant vibes that I was. That did it. Cristie’s perfect English came to my rescue and bully boy backed off. AHA! It’s “I’m telling ON you!”. Claro! Now I understood. What a difference an ON makes!
The boy got tired of making fun of me, Cristie and I went on about our playing, and I learned a very valuable lesson. To threaten a mean boy, do not forget the ON!
So now, maybe because I can’t differentiate between a subjunctive pronoun and a proposition and an infinitive whatever, I am a bit scared to accidentally tell someone hacemelo (to “make it to me”) as opposed to haceme (to “make me” something), which here (and probably everywhere else), mean two VERY different things! ;)
