Can I become fluent in Spanish in South America?

Six months ago I relocated to Ecuador, a Spanish speaking country, with little to no Spanish speaking skills of my own. I moved in with a host family, started volunteering as an English teacher at a local high school, and attempted the task of learning Spanish.

Half a year later and I’m sad to say I’m still nowhere near being fluent. Although I’m infinitely better than I was before I left London, I still have an extremely long way to go.

Why am I not fluent in Spanish yet?

As I always knew, my issue lies with laziness. From time to time I’ve been impressively proactive; scribbling notes, making conversation solely in Spanish, and even spending afternoons looking up wayward words and phrases I haven’t yet got to grips with.

But, for the most part, I’ve been hanging out with my fellow volunteers; English-speaking friends who I can’t help but speak our common native language with. So while I speak Spanish at work and with my host family, English still reigns supreme in my day-to-day life.

Things are changing, though. A few weeks ago, I left my home in Cuenca and began travelling in earnest; up through the Ecuadorian Oriente and across the border into Colombia. A direct shift from a teacher’s lifestyle and straight back into backpacking.

Luckily for me, my time in South America doesn’t end with a departure from Ecuador. While my friends head back to England for a new chapter, and the start of their university lives, I begin another chapter of my own; travelling, writing and volunteering my way around this huge continent.

But it’s not just the pursuit of those listed above that’s going to keep me going. For I have an ulterior motive – a challenge – and something that could end up being the making or breaking of me.

So here’s my Spanish challenge: I am not going to leave South America until I’m fluent in Spanish.

Of course, there’s plenty of debate over what ‘fluent’ means. Generally speaking, the better you are at a language the more you realise how much there’s still left to learn.

In a perfect world, I’d feel comfortable talking to anyone about any topic – be it history, culture, politics, or literature – but this is something that could easily take many more years to achieve. So I’d settle for the more varied, possibly less skilled but ultimately the most satisfying achievements with my language skills; things that, at present, I can see being a possibility but that still remain tantalisingly out of reach.

I want to be able to email my Ecuadorian host mum and brothers about my travels in flawless Spanish. I want to chat effortlessly to every taxi driver who picks me up. I want to expand my social circles in each city I move to, speaking only in their native language.

And don’t even get me started on how much safer I’d feel in a strange new place if I could ask anyone passing by for advice or help. Something your average gringo definitely can’t do.

But most of all? I want to not have to think when I speak Spanish. I want to feel like my mouth is doing the talking and my mind is making minimal effort. I want those verbs to conjugate automatically, those tenses to fall into place without effort, and that once-strange vocabulary to be more familiar and appropriate than English.

Slow and steady: my Spanish advances so far

There are some elements of this that are happening already, of course – which is also of great help to my eventual aim. One of the many benefits to living in a Spanish-speaking country for so long is the unconscious ability to start combining your first language with the one you’re trying to learn; so even though I predominantly speak English with my friends, we still throw in a hefty dollop of Spanish tambien.

A typical conversation amongst us could easily go as follows:

“Hola chica, como vas??”

“Bien gracias! Have you heard from that guy about getting wristbands for the club yet?”

“No, not yet… Creo que él está durmiendo. Or he’s just being lazy.”

“Ahh entiendo.. I hope he calls though! We need to sort our plans en la noche and we might not vamos en el club if he doesn’t habla para ti…”

Sometimes I even find myself idly translating the sentence I’ve just said out loud into Spanish in my head – like when my thought process does this for me:

Por ejemplo: cuando mis amigos y yo vamos a bailar en noche, hablamos mucho en espanol con mucha gente.

Simply put, we spend a lot of time dancing in clubs in amongst the Cuencan partygoers, and our Spanish increases tenfold when we’ve had a drink or two, or just so happen to be dancing with quite an attractive Ecuadorian.

What’s my motivation?

So why am I hell-bent on my self-imposed grounding on South American soil? Well, in case you didn’t already know, this place is pretty damn cool.