The Car of Blue
By Jamie Venezia
Spanish is so much fun to learn. Honestly, the time I spent learning Spanish was one of the most fun times in the world. It is very different, and somehow, the same. I remember walking into the classroom. It looked like kindergarten. Every letter corresponded with colors and pictures. No one knew what anything meant, but we were all excited to try. We sat down at desks with our names printed clearly on the front (Mine did not say Jaime, thank goodness!) and we waited for someone to explain what everything meant. We just waited.
Learning the alphabet was fun; we learned to sing the alphabet song in Spanish, which while it was not difficult, was still a blast. When we got to sentence structure, however, everyone was puzzled. The adjective example threw everyone off. El Carro de Azul. The Blue Car. Literally, in English this says The Car of Blue, which just sounds magical. It sounds like Lord of the Rings and I have to travel from Mordor with The Car of Blue. Since I am a romantic type, I instantly fell in love with this new way of saying things. I always felt so magical and majestic; always trying to hit that perfect Spanish accent when I pronounced words. It was harder for some kids to learn this new way of talking, however. It did not sound ‘right to them’. My friend, bless her heart, struggled with Spanish syntax and always wrote down el azul carro. Of course, in the English language, we write our adjectives in front of the word they are describing, so it always sounds right to us.
Let me explain why English is the worst.
Why would we put the adjective in front of the word it is describing? It seems like messed up priorities. When you walk down the street, and your sister runs into the road to get a ball rolling astray, do you ever go “Look out for that blue thing! And also it is a car!” No! Of course not! The more important thing is the car. The noun is the subject of the sentence, and yet we put the word describing the word we are truly talking about, first. Why? In Spanish it is very direct. I feel like it would be easier -albeit mildly- to call my sister in from the road. El carro de azul. It sounds so pretty. The car of blue. English has us say things backwards and put less emphasis on things we really care about or mean. It is backwards and upside down.
I thought of it like that for the longest time. I am a writer at heart, and I always will be. Learning Spanish impacted my style of writing. When we had to translate things, they stopped being the blue car and forever became the car of blue. Then, I noticed some other aspects of my writing changed. The tall girl now became the girl that is tall; the loud music became the music that is loud. I even started writing my dates as “the fourth of October of 2016”. Everything started sounding really romantic and magical. I tried to figure out what was going on.
The nouns started coming first for me. It seemed very important. All the ducks in a row. It was not loud music, it was music that happened to be loud. The most important part is the music, and we cannot lose that part of ourselves.
My dates started to appear from least to greatest measurement of time; days, months, years. In a way, it helped me keep organized. Do the specific things first, then get general. This was also a concept that eluded most of my classmates. I just thought of them like fractions; the first number on top went into the number on the bottom, not vice versa. Therefore the days that make the months that make the year goes first. It was all a matter of priorities and what was important. If someone asked for the date, you would not just say 2016. That is very vague and gives no real sense of when it is. First you give the day, and if specifics are needed, the month then the year. Spanish made sense. Everything just came in the order of importance.
In a pretty symbolistic way, Spanish helped me get through my freshman year of high school. It helped me prioritize what is important first, and then it helped me with the general romance of everyday life. Spanish was one of the most fun things that I have ever done, because it just made sense where English made up arbitrary rules to follow. Spanish is much more than a language, it is a whole different way of looking at the world.