At the Back of the Bus

“I was going to class when the bell rang?” said the boy, his prepubescent voice inching ever higher.
“Rung,” challenged a second boy.
“No, ‘rang,’ porque es la forma del ‘past participle,’” retorted a third.

With that, I swiveled around in my seat, exposing myself to a writhing mass of grade-schoolers. How the young Argentines, dressed in matching maroon skirts and blazers, got onto the topic of their most recent English-language lesson, I don’t know. After all, that would require me to understand their slang-ridden gibberish. All I know is that these tiny human beings, scabbed knees and all, were spending their after-school commute chatting about intricacies of the English language.

Meanwhile, I was gazing out the window at a billboard advertising some Cartoon Network show. The phrase “Me saco un moco” jumped out at me, under a drawing of a character, his finger plunged up his nostril. Even then, though the picture explicitly described the phrase at hand, my stubborn English brain lurched into place slowly and deliberately. There was nothing automatic, intuitive, or even slightly intelligent about it. As the triumphantly bilingual throng behind me moved onto a new topic, I moped, staring sulkily at the jumble of Spanish that warned me not to stick my head out the bus window.

"No voy a hablar español nunca. Voy a morir sin saber esta idioma estúpida. No hay ninguna esperanza para mí, y no hay punto en tratar de aprenderla."

And then, my forehead furrowed and my lips pursed in a snarl, I ceased my mental tirade. "Wait a second," I thought. "This stream of anger, this geyser of self-loathing, had just flooded forth in Spanish."

¡Spanish!

The thought eased the crease scarring my brow. Learning a language is one of the most impossible, virulent, terrible processes in the world. A process that catapults you into isolation and despair. So how does any stick with it? What makes them persevere? Undoubtedly, the answer lies in the tiny — and I mean tiny — moments of success. Like when I chose not to dangle my body out the bus window, not out of common sense, but because I could comprehend the warning sticker taped in front of my face. Or when I paused my spew of anger long enough to call attention to the fact that it had manifested itself in Spanish.

It didn’t get any easier after I stepped off the bus, immersed ever more in a world of unintelligible ñ’s and oddly placed accents. Improving my language skills is an achingly slow and endlessly demoralizing process. It’s an endless bus ride with confidently bilingual children; a ceaseless parade of laughingly simple cartoons I can’t understand. Yet with each ride, it gets easier.

Or, more accurately, a little less impossible.