USA! USA!

People are often surprised to learn that I am a pretty fluent Spanish speaker.

4 thoughts on “The Lazy American

  1. Is it really being lazy, or just not having a lot of opportunities to use it? The funny thing I’ve realized about foreign languages is that for the most part, unless you’re using them to survive in the country that than language is spoken, once you’re done studying them in school they kind of get reduced to little more than a parlor trick you pull out from time to time. People aren’t going to come up to you and start speaking in Spanish if you don’t LOOK “Latino,” as arbitrary as it is, for much the same reason people come up to my girlfriend if they want to ask a question in Chinese, even though I’m really the more fluent speaker.

    Since college, all I use my Chinese for now is just to make the cashiers in the oriental mart smile. They don’t even know my name but now they know me as that Chinese-speaking white boy.

    I guess having a language in your intellectual arsenal is like having a smoke detector in your house, in that you really should have it, but you’re not lazy if it doesn’t get a lot of use.

  2. Que lastima! Tengo las problemas mismas cuando “hablando” espanol. Y, cuando escribiendo en los “Comments” de las paginas del Internet.

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