Mi Espanol

It has come to my attention that I may need to brush up on my Spanish if I plan on continuing to live in the city much longer. Yesterday I was pretty embarrassed that I couldn't ask a simple question to a landlady about her apartment we were looking at.

I wanted to ask if we could move in on May 1st. So I tried something like, "Pueden se mueveren primero del Mayo?" Which is terrible, and even worse with my accent. Later I tried to think of how I should've said it, something like "Quieren movarse a este apartimiento en el primero del Mayo, okay?" (Because OK is universal). Trying to conjugate verbs on the spot like that was way too stressful. And she only sort of understood... she kept saying, before May is ok, so we were like, does that mean the lease starts April 15th? And all to no avail because we wanted to shop around some more.

I seem to recall another time when knowing Spanish better would have been helpful. And according to our Big Onion tour guide, the greatest number of immigrants to the city right now is Dominican people. It's pretty sad that four years of high school Spanish gets me no where in the real world. Although part of the reason it's so hard is because my brain keeps interjecting Chinese words, since that's the other language I'm used to thinking in. Like, Women yao... movarse... zhege fangjian... And so on until I pretty much resort to English. Failure!

How people can speak more than one language fluently is a great mystery to me, especially if they learned the second language as an adult. But I know it's possible (for instance, our broker speaks English, Japanese, Arabic, and Hebrew) so I'm trying not to give up hope. My brain just needs to compartmentalize things better, or something.