Before I left, I had pictured myself chatting away in Spanish after two months. Now, a month and a half in, I order my coffee, and still sometimes nobody understands me.
Zero as a starting point
I had literally zero Spanish before this trip. No classes, no Spanish-speaking friends, no real contact with the language whatsoever. The plan was simple: start from scratch.
In the weeks before leaving, motivation was high. I listened to Spanish podcasts, worked through language courses, drilled vocabulary cards, and watched Spanish films with subtitles, just to get a feel for how the language sounds.
The coffee that eventually arrived
Then reality hit.
One of the most memorable experiences of this time was a simple coffee order. I had finally found a café that served filter coffee, the menu said café filtro. Pretty straightforward, really.
I ordered. Nobody understood me.
My phone was dead, so I couldn’t quickly look something up or show them what I meant. The staff member called over a colleague who spoke English. I told him what I wanted. He responded with neither a yes nor a no, I had no idea until the very end whether he’d understood me at all. After what felt like 30 minutes, I was ready to leave, mildly frustrated, unable to communicate or ask for clarification.
Then the coffee arrived.
What I took away from it: in Spanish, every stress, every sound matters. If you don’t hit it just right, people often won’t understand you, even if the word itself is technically correct. That’s not rudeness, it’s just habit. People here hear their language a certain way, and anything that deviates from that sounds foreign to them.
Motivation with an expiry date
At first, I kept at it actively: podcasts, vocabulary, everything I’d already been doing before I left. At some point, that faded.
The reason was less laziness than disillusionment. I realised I wasn’t going to be speaking fluent Spanish in two months, not because I wasn’t trying, but because languages take time. More time than this trip allows. And I simply had too little real contact with Spanish speakers. The handful of encounters I did have were valuable, but too rare to actually consolidate anything.
These days I only learn passively: while shopping, in brief exchanges, trying to make sense of what I hear.
What has changed
And yet, something has shifted.
When my new boss recently explained something in Spanish, all at once, no pauses, I could roughly follow where he was going. Not word for word, but in terms of meaning. That would have been unthinkable at the start.
Shopping has gotten easier too. I understand more quickly what people mean. The language has somehow settled in, not through active study, but just through being here.
What remains
I won’t be leaving here as a Spanish speaker. I won’t be forming fluent sentences or holding spontaneous conversations.
But I have gotten to know a language I had no connection to before. I’ve seen how language works when you actually need it, not in a classroom, but in a café, with a dead phone and real hunger.
That’s more than I expected. And somehow, it’s enough.