Years ago, early on in learning Spanish, I was doing conversation exchanges with someone from Mexico.
I was trying to find and listen to as much music in Spanish as possible, so my conversation partner suggested some songs including this one:
In it there is a line that goes:
A ella no le gusta trabajar
Lo que le gusta es bailar
Moviendo las caderas siempre va
Con su caguama
I didn’t know what “caguama” meant, but after listening to the song a bunch of times, I could hear it. Instead of looking it up in a translator, I asked my conversation partner what it meant.
She explained to me that it was the word used in Mexico for a big bottle of beer. What you might hear someone in the states or Canada call a “40”.
At that moment, the word was stuck in my head. Now when I hear the song, or think about caguamas I often think of that conversation.
In learning Spanish, I’ve often looked up the translations of words when I hear them for the first time, and when I do that I almost always forget what it means.
The skill of being able to memorize translations can help you learn a language, but I think more valuable is the ability to sit with not fully knowing what a word means, hearing it a few times, trying to unravel the mystery of that word in your mind, and then having a real-life human tells you what it means – in their words and not the definition of it.
When you learn a word from a translation app it is completely disconnected from substance. It is 100% abstract. It is like hanging something heavy from a small piece of string.
If you let real life generate context for a word, and hear it in different ways, when you do find out what it means it is like putting something on a sturdy shelf. It is connected to your life and experience in a way that makes it concrete in your mind.
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