Watching Money Heist is lowkey fucking me up. I can’t half watch it like I do with other shows in Spanish I watch. I couldn’t figure out why at first...
I did awful in Spanish and could never fucking figure out why. I could mostly understand what people were saying to me outside or school but then would absolutely get fucked over in class.
Why? cause in high school, for some ungodly reason, they chose to teach us Spanish that was pronounced how it is in most Latin American countries but used verb conjugations, vocab, etc. of European Spanish.
Different accents (already knew that). But also just different words, some different ways of using verbs (like which countries prefer which type past tenses even if one is actually the ‘correct one’). Cause living in the US and growing up with several of my dad’s colleagues being first gen Americans with family from Mexico, I just never figured out why I only did okay or awful in high school Spanish even though I understood it fine outside of it.
It was the ‘wrong’ Spanish. And since I didn’t know it well enough, my brain just couldn’t easily work between the dialects. Like when people who are learning English only really watch/listen to things with American accents then watch something with a British accent and suddenly words don’t exist anymore. But they figure it out!!!
Learning a second language is hard. Being taught some awful combination of different dialects when it is unlikely you will ever use one type (like will I ever go to Spain? Yeah. Could I figure out how to adjust once I get there? Yeah. Do people in the US often speak Castilian Spanish? No.)
Like Puerto Rican Spanish is different than Mexican but I actually don’t have a hard time with those dialects and vocab changes because I’ve heard both all my life. But that monster they gave us in high school screwed me over.
Tl;dr: schools in the US should be teaching Spanish that more closely follows rules and vocab of the dialects spoken in Latin American instead or giving us the rules and vocab of Castilian Spanish and making us pronounce it the way it is typically pronounced in Latin American. We literally live right next to Mexico and 20% of our population is Hispanic.
