Since I'm back with my parents we'll often have conversations about things like language learning. Everyone in my family speaks Spanish, which is pretty awesome, though we all learned at different times. My youngest two siblings learned in a couple months because they were put right into Spanish public schools at young ages (5 and 7). I learned in about 6-8 months, and it took my other brother only slightly longer. It took my parents about 3 years to be comfortable with the language, and they'll always have the American accent, something that all of us siblings eventually lost. For the most part.
So anyway, we have a pretty strong concept on what language learning is like. I may have gone over some of my memories in a previous entry. Today we went over some of our struggles, and the truth was it was pretty funny. My mom and I both mentioned our struggles with pronouns. She shared an anecdote about how she and my dad were headed to language classes in Bilbao and were behind a bakery truck, bearing the slogan "Lo bueno sale bien". In English, the best translation is "That which is good comes out well". My mom said she analyzed and mulled over the phrase the rest of the day.
What's funny about the phrase is that once the Spanish makes sense, it's an incredibly simple phrase. A pronoun, an adjective, a verb, an adverb. However, in English, well... in order to translate the phrase properly, in order for it to make any kind of sense, it has to become a rather cumbersome phrase that doesn't make for a good slogan. My amusement with this phrase comes in the complexity of the Spanish language. Spanish is easily the easiest language in the world for English speakers to learn. It's certainly the easiest of the Romance languages. But then you get the subjunctive tense, among others, and the pain-in-the-rear pronouns. I figured out the subjunctive easily enough (I just honestly don't remember struggling all that hard with it) but the pronouns... Oh, the pronouns. Pretty sure I had nightmares for 2 weeks about those buggers. And these are exactly what make the phrase fast less simple in English. And, I'll be honest, how I can tell when someone doesn't quite have a grasp on Spanish. Not to put myself on a pedestal, but trust me, I can tell. That and often the subjunctive is conjugated incorrectly or ends up sounding forced, like it doesn't belong in the sentence (it usually doesn't; not like that).
All this to say: I'm pretty sure every language learner has gone through something similar. A word or phrase gets stuck with them and they spend all day, or at least a few hours, analyzing it. And everything makes so much more sense after that.
