The Language Barrier

It is impossible to describe the feeling of complete helplessness when you don’t understand a word and nobody understands you... it is something everyone has to experience for themselves. I will try, however, to give you an idea of how I felt during my first day in Spain.

I was very confident in my language abilities after college (I was able to communicate in 4 different languages), so I didn’t bother learning Spanish over the summer (clearly I had better things to do). The first doubts about possible communication problems occurred to me on my flight from Frankfurt to Madrid. All of the announcements were made in Spanish first (at least I thought it was Spanish; it could have been Italian or Greek and I wouldn’t have known the difference), followed by the German translation. At the time I thought it was pretty funny that I couldn’t understand a word, but soon I realized that the joke was on me.

A man waited for me at the airport (to this day I don’t know what his association to the team is/was). After greeting him in every possible language I could think of, he looked at me awkwardly and asked: Espanyol? I gave him the international sign of no (shaking my head horizontally) to which he responded with the international sign of yes/ok/this is going to be difficult (shaking his head vertically). He motioned with his hand to follow him; the next best option was to fly back home, so I gathered my courage and went with him to his car. After 20 minutes of silence this thought shot into my head: you are sitting in a stranger's car, you cannot communicate with him or anyone in this country, you don’t know where you are going... if he robes and leaves you in the middle of some field, you will never be able to navigate your way out of this!!! It sounds funny, but for the rest of the trip it shivered down my spine.

After two hours we made it to Alcazar and the man dropped me off at my hotel. The lady at the front desk spoke very good English; she showed me my room and told me that someone would pick me up for practice later on. It was so comforting to know that there was someone in the hotel that I could speak with (little did I know that the lady was going on vacation the following day and nobody else in the hotel spoke this language).

After a short nap I decided it was time to get lunch. I took a seat, opened the menu, closed the menu (I couldn’t read anything) and waited for the waiter. The waiter spoke at a rate of 10 words per second and was quiet intimidating. With my clueless expression I tried to communicate the following sentence: Good afternoon, sir, I don’t speak any Spanish but I would like to order something to eat, please. He didn’t get the message and stroke back with another series of quick words. This time I responded with: “no Espanyol, English”, which resulted in more confusion and another series of many foreign words. But I stuck to my story; the waiter quickly realized that shooting Spanish words at me won’t get us anywhere and left. After 5 minutes another waiter approached my table (this one was a lot friendlier – he smiled). He knew about 5 words of English, but it was enough for me to order lunch.

My struggle continued later that evening at practice. When I arrived at the gym, my head coach asked me in Spanish if I spoke Spanish. When I said no, he nodded and didn’t bother speaking to me for the next 3 months (no kidding). All of practice was conducted in Spanish; fortunately one of my teammates was fluent in English and translated everything for me. The off-court conversations and locker-room talks were all in Spanish, so the first couple of weeks I was completely excluded from the team.

By December I understood enough to be self-suficient and learned enough spanish words to carry on a 5 minute conversation. I will be taking an online spanish course this year so hopefully Ill be able to communicate fluently by the end of the season. As an end note, Spanish is a relatively easy and rich language spoken by a lot of people in the world; if anyone is interested in picking up a language, try Spanish.