When we went on our recent one-week trip to Mexico I was excited for the opportunity to practice the Spanish skills, that I have acquired over the last six month or so. Leading up to the trip I increased the number of sessions I signed up for, and I also made sure to go through a full round of conversation in the “talk-abroad” offering of my language school, which meant that I had four 15 min conversations with people from Central and South America – here Mexico, Panama, Venezuela and Paraguay. There are always new and interesting facts that one can learn there for example I learned that Paraguay has a significant German population of immigrants that is still growing. Equipped with all these preparations we headed for Mexico, and I was determined to try my Spanish from the moment we landed. The first attempt yielded mixed results right away. The driver of our shuttle acknowledged my attempt but switched quickly back to English. It felt almost like that he was proud of his very fluent English and he wanted to showcase it in the conversations surrounding getting his guests together and chauffeuring us to the hotel. This became the pattern in many encounters. In particular at the hotel and the restaurant located in the hotel. It is to be acknowledged with a compliment that pretty much all of the people staffing the front desk and serving in the restaurant had very good English proficiency. Of course, I needed to recognize that in a situation when it was very busy, they sure did not have the time to iterate through a not so fluent conversation from my side. A further complication was that our group of 6-8 people only had me with the desire to learn through practice while everyone else was anchored on English and on the opposite side my skills were not yet solid enough to make myself the hotshot translator for the whole group. It became clear that I needed somewhat focused 1:1 conversations so I could manage and get my point across. Eventually I had good success in other unexpected places. Here with the Uber drivers. They seem to be more willing to engage in a conversation and I made some good progress on numerous rides. In some cases, the drivers were also not as fluent in English so more opportunity to seek an exchange in Spanish. I one case we discussed the difficulties with the accuracy of the Uber-App GPS and hence related trouble to connect with the driver. Up to that point I had tried to send messages to the driver about our exact location and that usually worked but I got additional recommendations on how to get the system to accept our location. Probably the longest successful conversation occurred when we rented Mountain bikes to go riding in a nearby area. A man in his thirties was behind the counter and as I tried to explain what we wanted to do he stayed with Spanish the entire time and only elaborated in English when we got stuck. He also expressed his appreciation for me trying and explained that most of the other tourists enter and start talking English, expecting that he understands (which he does) and not even confirming that or trying to scope the situation. He facilitated the rental agreement, recommended the right trails (which was important after we saw the terrain and the features) and also gave us directions on how to get to the park and how to navigate some construction nearby. I will not claim that I understood every word, but it felt good to have conducted the entire process in Spanish.
Thinking back, I should have remembered the boundary conditions encountered in Mexico from prior experiences. Many years back my wife and I took French lessons in preparation for a journey through France. And similarly in touristic centers we did not really succeed with our efforts to practice the language, not in hotels nor in the restaurants. I do remember though one evening with the owners of our vacation rental in the Bretagne – a young couple – where we managed with our limited French and their limited English (ours too!) and a lot of handwaving to bring information across and to have a good time together.
Perhaps the practical conclusion is that in situation where one is in locations off the beaten path or encounters people that are not associated with the mainstream tourist industry the level of local language skill does count and perhaps these are the situations were it actually really matters.