Wednesday, December 28, 2011

What I learned about Spanish in a year by following lucha

I've been interested in language for its own sake for some time, and like to consider myself at least decent at learning them. I studied Spanish for five years in junior high and high school, and never found the grammar too difficult. That was 10 years ago, though.

I started following lucha libre at the beginning of this year, and still had a working knowledge of Spanish at the time. What surprised me is that you don't really need all that big of a vocabulary—maybe a couple hundred words or so, along with relevant proper names—to follow the gist of play-by-play commentary. Most of this vocabulary will be basic Spanish words and wrestling jargon. This was the easy part to learn.

More difficult, I found, unless you've actually spent a substantial amount of time listening to native speakers, is actually picking out these words: Spanish pronunciation has far more nuances than many pronunciation guides will admit. Chances are that b, v, g, and d will differ substantially from what you expect, unless you've looked at Spanish phonology in considerable detail. y and ll vary among speakers (and sometimes from the same speaker). On top of this, native speakers will elide vowels at word boundaries. Se escapa is pronounced as three syllables, not four. ¿Qué va a hacer? has three, not five.

One aspect of Spanish that is probably de-emphasized while you're focused on learning all the verb tenses and such in school is that the word order is much more flexible than in English. Especially in running commentary, verbs will come first a lot more often than you might expect. Se preparan para volar los técnicos is a valid sentence.

I said earlier that you don't need a big vocabulary to get the gist of play-by-play. While that's true, to understand more than that, at some point you'll need to come to terms with Mexican colloquialisms. If you're lucky, your dictionary will define some of these accurately. The general Spanish dictionary that I use most often, spanishdict.com, is light on these, lacking definitions for vato, wey, and naco, among others. Not to mention the myriad expressions that end in -le: épale, órale, chale, etc. Americans will probably know ándale from its use by Speedy Gonzáles of Looney Tunes, but that doesn't help with the rest.

I still don't understand everything I hear, but I'm lot better than I was 11 months ago. Some of what I've written may be specific to my background, but I just thought that it was interesting, in retrospect, what I was unprepared for going into this.

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