For those of you who have ever thought about traveling abroad and using a foreign language you have been studying, I have written this - after 50 days of research - to help prepare you for the phases of foreign language acquisition of auditory comprehension. You are most welcome.
Step 1: Arrival
Upon arriving in the country of your foreign language, you will feel very over-confident. You will hear things in the FoLa everywhere all of a sudden and you will find this extremely enchanting. You are not understanding every word by any means, but you are just so taken by the novelty of it all that you feel like you can take on the world, one verb conjugation (and a good, pocket-sized dictionary) at a time!
Step 2: All Aboard the Struggle Bus!
A few days into your journey, you will start to have the horrible and terrifying realization that you are nowhere near as linguistically prepared for this journey than you previously thought you were. You wonder where all of the information from all of those many years, workbook excersizes, cheesy diologues, half-done homework, etc. has gone and why things are so difficult. Your brain (and pride) refuse to accept the fact that you are incapable of understanding a basic exchange between two people sitting next to you on the bus, and so your brain strains to understand. You will LITERALLY get a headache from your poor little noggin trying so desperately hard to understand even the most basic of exchanges between natives. And the worst part is, the language is EVERYWHERE, so your brain never has a moment to regroup - thus the headache becomes a perpectual pain in your head for many days.
Step 3: Struggle Bus'n
This is the stage where your headaches have finally subsided, but your ego is severely bruised. By now you have accepted that you are most likely going to be understanding a word or two per sentence, but will be utterly unable to string them together to form any coherent meanings. There is no other choice than to accept that you cannot understand and move forward. It's the great moment where you realize just how much you still don't know about something you may have been studying for over a decade and have received your B.A. in from a good university. You may begin to question why you have so many student loans if you can't even understand near enough to be able to evesdrop on the couple behind you in the grocery store line. Defeat, embarrassment, anger and hopelessness are prevalent feelings during this stage.
Step 4: Ignorance is Bliss
At this point in the process, you have learned to completely tune out any verbal utterances that aren't in your native language. This is actually quite an impressive feat and takes awhile to master. Suddenly you can travel on the metro without having your ears bombarded with harsh and foreign sounds they can't find any meaning in. The fun part of this stage is when you hear somebody speaking your native language while in a crowd of FoLa speakers. Without even knowing what you're doing, you will instantly be able to hear and comprehend the most random of statements from far distances away (and even despite any foreign accent) when uttered in your native language. It's like super sonic hearing. It can get pretty fun if you are around random enough conversations!
Step 5: Pulling the Chord on the Struggle Bus
One day you'll be minding your own business when you begin to think about something from the last conversation you had with a native and it hits you: You can't remember if that conversation was in your native language or your FoLa! You think and think and think, but no matter how much you try to think back to it, you can't make out any words; you can only remember the overall meaning and outcome. This will start to happen with conversations you had hours ago or even minutes ago. At first this feels almost a little concerning, but as it happens more and more, you start to feel like a pretty serious BAMF and begin automatically code-switching (when you respond in the language that is being spoken to you without realizing it) and occasionally (and increasingly) messing up your native language and inserting grammar from the FoLa into your own language and you even begin forgetting common words in your native tongue.
Step 6: Exiting the Struggle Bus
And then, out of the blue, it'll happen. You'll be minding your own business - playing on your phone, reading a book or a map, day dreaming, focused on WHATEVER - and you'll start to evesdrop on a conversation in your FoLa without even meaning to. And you'll only begin to realize you're evesdropping when you start to giggle at something funny that's being talked about by natives in that FoLa. You'll start giggling or thinking about the conversation or listening for more details BEFORE you ever realize that suddenly... out of NOWHERE... without even TRYING (or paying attention!)... You. Just. Understood. Natives. Conversing. In. Your. Foreign. Language. The first time this epiphany hits you, it's going to be a big deal. You're going to take a bus into Madrid and buy yourself cupcakes to celebrate. You're going to do a little jig on the street when you think nobody is looking. You're going to smile real big and tell yourself how wonderful you are. It will be glorious.
Step 7: Waving 'Bye bye' to the Struggle Bus
Of course, it'll still be a gradual process towards the perfecting of your Auditory Comprehension in your FoLa. You won't wake up one day and understand every single word and phrase. But you will notice yourself hearing certain words and phrases being repeated often and you'll either look them up or begin to understand their meaning in context. There will still be conversations where you have little idea what's going on, but these moments will not bother you as much, because you will have more and more moments where you're understanding things perfectly without even focusing your attention on the FoLa at all. Heck, the other day I was playing Angry Birds on my Smartphone, day dreaming about Christmas Break and singing a song in my head and I still was able to understand 75% of the gossip going on around me without even trying. This step is the ultimate moment of happiness in your Auditory Comprehension part of your experience abroad. Of course, the epiphany that you're suddenly understanding meaningless conversations going on around you does not last too long, and eventually you'll become so accustomed to just understanding everything that you won't be able to remember those headache days of feeling lost and dumb, but the glory will always be there when you stop and think how far you've come since the day your plane landed in that new country you're beginning to call home. :)
XOXO**
** This blog has been brought to you by my newest Spanish word friend: "Prender"
--> Prender: v. To light on fire. <--
So. Totally. Awesome.
Not to be confused with "Aprender," which means "To learn." Haha!
I also recently learned that "to inhabit" is "habitar" in Spanish, and "to not inhabit" is "inhabitar" in Spanish. Whoa. o_O
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