How To Learn a Foreign Language: Find A Native Speaker You Hate

It's often been said that the best way to learn a foreign language is to date a native speaker. I wholeheartedly agree, but I would take it one step further: the best way to learn a foreign language is to date a native speaker who you don't get along with.

While living in Bolivia for six months, I was not actively seeking a troubled relationship. But then I met Jorge, an outgoing, fun-loving, slightly obnoxious Chilean, who was studying to get his degree in engineering. His friends called him "El Chileno," Chileans being a rather rare commodity in this neck of the woods. Bolivians and Chileans have not always been the best of bedfellows: Chileans look down on their poorer, landlocked neighbors, while Bolivians are still furious with Chileans for taking their coastline.

Jorge was one of but a handful of Chileans in La Paz, and thus couldn't afford to be too smug. After all, he needed friends, so he slapped on his goofy smile and drank his vodka Koolaids and laughed along with everyone when they made fun of his accent. During our first encounter, I heard him tell one of his many jokes--something about two vaginas walking down El Prado (La Paz' main street)--but try as I might, I couldn't catch the punch line. I wasn't the only one. His joke was met with utter silence, until one of his Bolivian friends turned to me and asked, "Can you understand a single word this Chilean says?"

Bolivian Spanish is like spring water: clear and calm. Chilean Spanish, by contrast, is like a river rapid: fast, furious, tumbling. But some way or another, Jorge and I still managed to communicate on that first night, enough for me to understand that he was "in love with me" and thought I was "beautiful" and wanted to know when he'd see me again.

In Latin America, men don't waste time. They fall in love in minutes ("infatuation" is probably the more accurate term), pronounce it boldly and hope for the best. I gave Jorge my phone number, more because I viewed him as a potentially valuable language partner than mate. He couldn't speak a word of English, and hell, if I could understand him, I would be ready for anything.

And OK, he was kind of cute, too.


Jorge proceeded to call me every day, twice a day, for the next week. He called me his Keralita ("little Kerala"). I retorted that I wasn't his, and I wasn't all that little, either. (In fact, we were the same height, and as I later discovered, to my horror, I had bigger feet.) He loved it when I talked back to him like that, he said. He thought it was "cute." I spent much of our initial phone conversations saying, "Que" ("What?") but he continued to plow ahead with his rapid-fire Spanish and bold proclamations.

"When will I see you?" he kept wanting to know.

I finally succumbed and made arrangements to meet up at a bar with him the coming weekend. Based on our conversations throughout the previous week, I expected him to be there anxiously awaiting my arrival, a dozen roses, perhaps, in hand. But I was soon to learn my second lesson about dating in Latin America: Don't place too much faith in plans. It's not that the men are fickle, per se, it's just that small details like times and meeting places are generally not of as much concern to them as they are to our watch-obsessed American counterparts.

I may have been able to adapt to this lax attitude to some degree, but Jorge took it to the tenth degree. In my mind, on the night of our first date, we were going to meet up at the bar/club Ojo de Agua at 9 p.m. (I even took pains to demonstrate my attempts at cultural acclimation by showing up at 9:30.) In his mind, we were going to meet up somewhere at some point. Which is precisely what happened when he showed up at the club down the street, to which I had migrated with some sympathetic gringa friends, not at 9 p.m., or 10 p.m., or even 11 p.m., for that matter, but at 12:30 in the a.m.

He strode in like he owned the place and asked me to dance. He couldn't understand why I was angry. "Es detalle," he said, over and over. This, I was soon to learn, was his favorite expression, akin to, "It's no big deal." For El Chileno, as I would also soon discover, everything was detalle, from the weather to world war.

Perhaps that was an ominous way to start a relationship, but in retrospect, if you're looking to learn a foreign language, it's exactly the way you should start a relationship--because it only went downhill from there.


We disagreed on virtually everything. After I finally gave in to being his chica (girlfriend) Jorge called me only erratically and seemed to lose interest in going out much at all with me on the weekends. He often said he was going out with his friends, but was not at all pleased when I said that, fine, if that were the case, then I would go out with mine.

No, he said, it would be bad if I were seen out at night without him.

And why?

Well, naturally it would mean I was out prowling for another man.

Exasperated, I demanded to know why it was OK for him to go out without me, but not the other way around.

Because that's what men do, was his reply.

Though great strides have been made in the realm of Latin American female empowerment, machismo is still very much alive and well, especially from the perspective of a progressive, college-educated, ambitious young American woman who has been raised by hippies. After a while, El Chileno became fed up with my persistent objections to his excuses, always accompanied by mini-lectures on gender equality, so he started being sick a lot. During the brief few months we dated, he was on the verge of death three or four times. Of course, I knew better.


The best times we had were the nights we spent together at his apartment, which became a point of contention between my host mother and me. Bolivia being a heavily Catholic country, like most of Latin America, it was unheard of for an unmarried barely-20 female to spend the night away from home. And in most cases, this was a moot point anyway, since young adults lived with their parents until marriage. (My gringa friend, who had also ventured into the Latin American dating world, was so fed up with the lack of privacy that she had resorted to accompanying her Bolivian boyfriend to pay-per-hour motels.)

But El Chileno had his own bachelor pad, and I intended to take advantage of this luxury. Though on the one hand, I felt bad for breaching my host mother's house rules, on the other hand, my 28-year-old host sister (who still wasn't allowed to spend the night away from home) pointed out that my host mother wasn't my mother, after all, and that I had been living away from my own parents since the tender age of 18, and that I should do as I pleased. So when Jorge wasn't out fulfilling his manly needs by rendezvousing with his male friends, or when he wasn't gasping on his deathbed with some horribly contagious disease, I snuck away a few times a month to spend the night with him.

We spent most of the night bickering about politics. El Chileno never had kind words for those "damn Indians," who were always "stirring up trouble" for the rest of the country. At the time, I was writing for a local newspaper, mostly about the indigenous struggle, and I tried to make him see a different point of view. Perhaps the indigenas, I said, pointedly using this word instead of the more derogatory indio, weren't really stirring up trouble--perhaps they were simply demanding rights that they had been denied for centuries.

It was right when I started to get really heated that Jorge would stop me. "You look so beautiful when you get mad," he would say. "And you speak Spanish so well." I succumbed to his kisses, but inside I was still stewing. I finally looked up the word for "patronize" in my well-worn Spanish-English dictionary so I that I would be prepared for his next interruption.


After a few months, the drop-off came. When we arranged to meet up, El Chileno stopped being late--he just stopped showing up at all. It's a funny thing, because I am generally a non-confrontational person, but when it came to arguing in Spanish, I said things the only way I knew how. Which was always the most direct way. Instead of calling him and saying, "I really don't appreciate the way the way you've been blowing me off lately," I would say, "You're a jerk, and I hate you." In fact, once I got going, it was a little addictive. Spanish had never rolled off my tongue with such grace and ease.

"Es detalle," Jorge would always try to say.

"Maybe to you it's detalle," I would say, "but this is my life and these are my feelings, and they are not detalles. You have no respect for me, and you have no respect for women. I'm fed up with your lies, I'm fed up with your stupid excuses, and I'm fed up with you."

"Mi Keralita," he would say.

Finally, I broke things off for good. "I am not yours," I said. "Because I hate you and you make me very angry all the time and I can find a better man who treats me the way I deserve to be treated. I never want to speak to you again."

When I hung up the phone, I was feeling so high off my near-fluent Spanish that it was only hours later that the sadness began to sink in. After all, breaking up with someone is never fun, even if he's a jerk.


It wasn't the last that I heard from Jorge, though. Months later, after I had returned to the States and had started dating someone else, I received an unexpected email, entitled: "Pienso en ti" ("I'm thinking of you.") It continued:

"hello Kerala the reason i am writing you is that i behaved very badly with you near the end and i wanted to ask your forgiveness and hope that we can continue writing each other a kiss and I hope you respond, el chileno."

So Jorge did have a conscience, after all--even if, true to his character, it came a little late. Of course, I couldn't resist one last lecture:

"Well, Jorge, you are right, you behaved very badly with me at the end. I got tired of your lies and everyone was telling me that I deserved a better man. I agreed. I will never put up with someone who doesn't treat me with respect. I hope you behave better with your next girlfriend."


When all is said and done, though Jorge does match some of the (in)famous macho Latin male stereotypes, he is more representative of the "male jerk" stereotype than anything else--a stereotype, I might add, that transcends ethnic boundaries. While in Bolivia, I also met many kind and caring men, including my host father.

These men, however, do not get the bulk of the credit for the progress I made in learning Spanish during my six months in South America. For that, I have El Chileno to thank. Which is good news, ladies, because whatever language you're trying to learn--whether it's Spanish, French or Mandarin Chinese--I'm sure there is a native-speaking jerk out there who will be willing to help you out.


Kerala Goodkin, Travel Correspondent:

Kerala's column, "On The Verge," published every other Monday to Gather Essentials: Travel, shares stories and reflections from the less-traveled corners of the world.

Kerala is co-founder and Editor in Chief of the Glimpse Foundation, a nonprofit that fosters cross-cultural understanding and exchange, particularly between the United States and the rest of the world, by providing forums for young adults to share their experiences living abroad. Read their stories at glimpseabroad.org. Kerala has also recently published her first novel, "How Things Break," which won the Elixir Press Inaugural Fiction Award and relates a year in the life of one young woman in small-town Michigan. It is available on Amazon.

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