How working locally helped me learn portuguese
Since working at a local, small-scale media company in Buenos Aires, I’ve learned a lot about communication, or maybe more specifically, a lack thereof.
To say my Spanish skills are rocky at best would be an understatement, however my bosses Dani and Paula were in the same boat with their English capabilities. For the most part we spoke in hand gestures, broken Spanish and high fives (a habit Dani developed after my arrival). However, our limited ability to talk to one another taught me a lot of things, very few of which had to do with language.
Primarily, I learned to be more vocal. I share a habit with many young people, in the fact the I don’t like admitting that I don’t understand something. I feel guilty about constantly bothering people and/or editors with questions, and I tend to implement the “figure it out as you go” strategy.
However, with Dani and Paula, I had to get used to asking a million questions or asking them to repeat themselves when I didn’t understand what they just told me. It’s a reality not only in Buenos Aires, but everywhere, that I, shockingly, do not know everything, and coming to terms with this has been a professional godsend.
Secondly, I learned not to over-complicate matters. When trying to find the right thing to say in Spanish, I often found myself flustered with my inability to find the words that would translate properly. Then I realized I’m working with the vocabulary of an eight-year-old and I might need to dumb it down a bit.
Dani spent a good majority of my first few days saying “Tranquilo! Tranquilo!” (a nice way of saying please calm down) when I would look completely lost and overwhelmed. When I found myself struggling in the workplace I learned to remind myself to take a deep breath, take my time and keep it simple. Whether at work or on the road, there is no need to make life more difficult than it needs to be.
Which leads me to my final lesson: patience. Although Dani and Paula did everything in their power to make me feel comfortable and not like a complete nincompoop (they even bought me a case of Coca-Cola to have at the office “because all Americans love Coke”) there are still times when I had no idea what was going on around me.
In the end, it allowed me to develop patience within myself. In a world where we have access to information and goods and people within a matter of minutes, if not seconds, it can be frustrating to allow things to develop slowly.
With each passing day I felt myself gaining more knowledge of the language and customs of Argentina, I knew that I was becoming more self-sufficient in a monster of a city and I took pride in what I accomplished. Would I have prefered that I could have woken up and been fluent in Spanish and known everything about Buenos Aires, of course, but then that wouldn’t be much fun.
The second best thing is having the patience and the fortitude to let it happen gradually and then looking back and seeing how far I came.
Writer: Torie Ross (Jetsetter Jobs Outreach Intern)
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