LatinosUSA

“The prostitutes on the second deck were desperate, fixing their nails, combing their hair, lying in the sun like lizards. The students came down from first deck, hung around the women, and ended up chatting, fraternizing.” (p. 227, Jorge Amado, The Old Sailors)

To chat! This phrase is truly pre-technological. Men of old were told that we had to be smooth talkers, conversationalists, have a way of approaching women that would keep them interested. And when you were young, you were either born with smooth talk or you weren’t. If we take away the 10% of handsome men, we were left with that other 90% who tormented themselves over “being good at chatting.”

But it smells fishy if you don’t have it. Today I finished my Catalan course, about four hours a week.

What did it consist of? Once the grammar requirements were established, the teacher would have us stand up and randomly choose a classmate from the class, without repeating the selection: «to chat» (that is, to practice conversation). I spent three months chatting, apart from homework and the exam.

It was a fascinating experience! You end up getting to know all 15 of your classmates (from Brazil, Poland, Ukraine, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, and Russia), and you have a profile of someone around 30 years old, and you know them, almost, almost their entire life. Where you come from, why you’re here, who your family is, what the differences are compared to back home, whether you’ll return, what you cook, what songs you like, how they love there, how we love here, and a thousand other topics.

This civilization, which will soon abandon this way of learning languages ​​and in the future will be online, will lose this richness of nuances, of silences, of blends, of spiritual networks.

If someone asks me, «What’s the point of studying a language?»

I’ll say, to engage in conversation and observe the world of others.