In Mexico Struggling With Learning Spanish? Try Being a Baby Sarah DeVries - Mexico News Daily
go to original September 25, 2022

Is it hard to live in Mexico without knowing Spanish? (Two Expats Mexico)

The first year I was in Mexico, I took Spanish classes at the School for Foreign Students at the Universidad Veracruzana. My classmates were mostly college students like me, and they came from all over the world.

The European students always made me feel a little bit jealous. As I struggled through verb conjugations and new vocabulary, they’d say things like, “Oh, I just keep getting Spanish confused with Italian!”

When it comes to those of us from (north-er) North America, we’ve really only got the one language, unless you happen to be French Canadian. And when your native language is the lingua franca of the day, it means that not much effort is made to take advantage of kids’ spongey brains language-wise. What for, we think? You already speak the language that everyone else in the world must adapt to.

This means, of course, that most of us learn second languages as adults, when it’s decidedly harder. Learning a language as a child happens naturally, and as long as we are around the language and are forced to use it, we’ll learn it.

So unlike, say, the Danish, who learn English and perhaps a few other languages as children, we English speakers are both privileged in that most people attempt to speak our language and at a disadvantage because for the most part, we get to adulthood not knowing how to learn another language; the experience simply hasn’t been necessary.

Even so, we all know the joke: “What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.”

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