Since I am preparing to head to South America, I have come to realize that my Spanish has gotten very rusty. Once upon a time, I could speak and understand Spanish fairly well, even if I was never really fluent. Of course, before that I really hated the Spanish language.

For starters, my mom was a high school Spanish teacher. She even went and did an exchange program while she was teaching. She went and spent a month (I think) living with a family in Saltillo, Mexico to improve her Spanish. My dad knew a little Spanish, but really not very much. My mom always wanted my brother and I to learn Spanish, and I can remember her giving us impromptu lessons while she cooked dinner, or at other times during everyday life. At that point, neither my brother nor I were particularly interested in learning a language that we didn’t see much need for.

In high school, my brother got interested. He took three years of Spanish, and became quite good at the language. He also became friends with a student named Mercedes who was a native Spanish speaker. As a result, he got quite good at it.

I guess that this is the best time to point out that there are certain people who just seem to be built to learn other languages. I think my mom and brother both fit into this category. My mom has since gone on to study French extensively. My brother became fluent in Spanish, learned multiple computer programming languages, and then decided to learn Chinese. He is still working on the last one; he frequently carries around a stack of flash cards so that he can study the pictographs for vocabulary review.

The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I had taken one year of Spanish, and learned very little of the language. My parents took my brother and I to Mexico on vacation. We had a good time, but my brother became very obnoxious - insisting on speaking only Spanish to me, with the primary intent (I am convinced) being to irritate me. It worked. It also made me less interested in learning the language.

I did continue studying it — mostly because Florida had the requirement that every student had to have two years of language. I had already started Spanish, so it was easier to finish with that than to start over. I actually liked my Spanish teacher for Spanish 2 and became friends with a Puerto Rican student. All that combined to make me take Spanish 3, and actually begin to learn the language.

When I went to college, I missed (my own mistake) the placement test for Spanish. I thought about taking Portuguese instead, just to be different and contrary. Instead, I wound up starting over with Spanish. I did two semesters of basic Spanish and then stopped. Along the way, I think i caught the language bug, because I also studied Ancient Greek. In my one year of seminary, I studied Biblical Hebrew. I also took a class in French for grad students when I was considering grad school.

I took a mission trip to Honduras during college, but my brother and I spent most of our time on the island of Roatan. Here, more people spoke English or Pidgin, rather than Spanish. We did visit the mainland for a couple of weeks and did use some Spanish, which helped my fluency.

Later in college, I did a shorter trip to Haiti. (Yes, I studied some Creole to prepare.) While there, my Creole didn’t do me any good, other than a couple of survival phrases. However, I did meet the Spanish teacher from the local school, and he and I managed to communicate in a mix of Spanish, Creole, and English, but mostly Spanish.

After college, I moved to Denver for a year of seminary. While there, I quickly became friends with Joaquin, who was a pastor from the Dominican Republic. Joaquin and I grew close quickly. We worked out an arrangement where he would help me with my Spanish, and I helped him with his English. This is when I finally got very good with Spanish. I am told that the sign that you have begun to master a language is when you begin to dream in that language. While I was in Denver I had bilingual and Spanish dreams on several occasions.

After we left Denver, I had very few chances to use my Spanish. My travels have taken me to other parts of the world, and my friendships with native speakers have been fewer and farther between. My friends Sam and Claudia have helped me practice recently, but there have not been as many opportunities for this as I would like. It think that the lack of practice will show up on this trip, but I am hoping that immersion will help the language begin to come back. Then the challenge will be to find opportunities to practice, so that I can continue to learn.