Rob-Rivera.com

A Word on the Language Barrier

As an English teacher, I’ve been lucky enough to experience a first-hand insight on what it’s like for people to tackle a language other than their own from a teacher’s perspective; in my several attempts to try out other languages, the common denominator has been the lack of people to talk with, but when you’re dabbling into Japanese, Dutch or German in a Latin American country, you should count your lucky stars even if you do. English (and by correlation, Spanish) on the other hand, are languages required worldwide both for business and leisure. From an English speaker’s perspective, when you have an entire continent that shares the same tongue, you’d be a fool if you went in thinking you don’t need to know the basics. In that same regard, if I ever go to Germany I’d make an effort to at least learn the basics and soak up on the culture.

Once I received an email from someone who was pretty adamant about moving to Panama. He sounded like an American businessman, and it’s pretty common for me to receive mail from people wondering about certain, more-specific things about the country that you can’t generally get from the Tourism Board (I’m here to help!) but one thing that rubbed me the wrong way was his laudry list of preconditions to move to PTY. I don’t remember specifics, but it kind of went something like this: he wanted to find a place in Panama where he could buy a 3-story house and get a dog. He wanted to get it in an area where everything was in English, from the neighbors to the traffic signs to grocery stores and everything in between, so that he doesn’t have to deal with a single Spanish-speaker while he lives there. He wanted to live in a Latin American country and not have to speak a lick of Spanish. I, of course, politely told him to lay off the peyote, and gave him some options (Boquete and some areas out by the Panama Canal are bilingual in their traffic signs and all that jazz), but I sadly informed him that his God-fearing sentiment of the Spanish language will get a workout nonetheless. He also said something about how what I told him would determine whether he jumped into a plane the second he received my reply and start the paperwork.

I think he was being chased by the government, but I digress.

In the end, people can’t help but want to communicate. But like everything, there will always have to be a level of compromise. My advice is that, if you’re an English speaker and want to live in the tropical climates of Latin American climates, please give Spanish classes a shot. And if you’re a Spanish speaker with a passive knowledge of the English language (thanks for reading this if you are), you should try to polish your knowledge up. In the end, you guys will appreciate the other’s efforts just the same.

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