How Game of Thrones Helped Me Learn Spanish

(Don’t worry Sean Bean fans, no spoilers here.)

It happened again. For a long time I’ve said that listening to a foreign language is a major factor in achieving fluency. I first learned that lesson when I was 19 and living in Costa Rica, but I’ve struggled to explain it ever since, until now.

It was January of 2004, and I had been living in Costa Rica for five months. My second semester of study abroad had just started. One day, I was sitting in my room with the radio on. Suddenly, as in, quite literally all in one moment, I realized I was catching all the individual words that the DJ was saying. Words that I didn’t normally listen to, even though I was always hearing them, if that makes sense.

It was as if all this time I had been hearing Spanish like an orchestra, and in that moment I could actually focus on all the individual instruments.

I actually stood up and went to my radio and stared at it, and I felt tingly all over as I listened to the words coming out of it. I had immersed myself enough to unlock a door to Spanish that I hadn’t been through before. I could almost see the light bulb turn on in my head, illuminating the contents beyond that door, and I was eager to explore.

That day was a turning point in my long journey of learning to speak fluent Spanish.

So often, when learning foreign languages, we try to pull as many words as we can from a sentence, attempting to understand whatever gist we can grasp. We can only work with what we have; learning takes time.

After that moment, though, I was grasping just about everything. I had become comfortable enough with the language to understand new words when I heard them, or at least identify that they were words I hadn’t heard before, which allowed me to break them down and even look them up if I needed to in order to understand.

That was twelve years ago (ouch). Since then, I have practiced Spanish as often as possible, I even taught Spanish classes, and I have continued to travel to places where I’ve used it, year after year. However, I have not returned to live in a place and be so immersed in Spanish like I was when I lived in Costa Rica.

Until now.

For the last two months, I have been living in Argentina. Here in Patagonia, there are locals who speak some English, but they don’t speak it unless they have to. This is brilliant for those of us who actually came to speak Spanish. I couldn’t tell you which of my friends here speak any English, because I’ve never even tried to speak it with them.

Since I came to Argentina alone, I’ve gone days without actually speaking English, and it’s been a beautiful challenge. Argentinian Spanish is a lesson in itself. Since they use “vos” for “you” instead of “Usted” (formal you) or “tú” (informal you), it’s very different from what I spoke in Costa Rica or learned in school.

I have had to learn to conjugate verbs in a completely new way to accommodate “vos,” and my friends still make fun of me when I accidentally refer to them as “Usted.” Some habits are hard to break. But, I digress.

Last week, something fascinating happened that is changing my fluency yet again. I got sick, and since I’ve been sick, I have hardly left my house (I work from home). About three days into being bedridden, I discovered something: a Game of Thrones channel on my DirecTV. Cue angel choir.

Season after season, hour after hour, day after day. All-you-can-watch Game of Thrones. I braced myself; indulgence was coming. But, here’s the kicker: it was ALL in Spanish, complete with Spanish subtitles.

The other interesting thing is that apparently several different people translated the script, because what was spoken varied a lot from what was written in the subtitles. It makes sense, there are many ways to say the same thing.

This fascinated the language nerd in me, because I was able to hear it one way and read it another, which basically meant learning twice as fast.

Today it was on TV in the background, as it has been every day this week (I can now hear it from the other room and tell you what scene it is, and probably even quote it, in Spanish.) #nerdalert

While I was listening to the words that I’d now heard over and over for a week, those words suddenly stood out to me. I stopped and paid attention and realized I was focusing on every single word. I walked to the TV just like I walked to the radio when I was 19. It was happening again.

Even with the solid understanding and fluency I have of the Spanish language after so many years, I still miss things here and there, and I don’t speak perfectly. On top of that, there are always accents and regional slang to deal with (and sometimes you have to learn to use “vos”). Yet, I feel like I’ve reopened that door I discovered in 2004, like I found the switch to that light bulb.

When you study abroad to learn a foreign language, go for a year; not one month, not even one semester. It took me five months to get to this point in Costa Rica. Today, after spending some quality time in Argentina, I’m at it again.

The interesting thing about this time, though, is that the light bulb came on after being inside my house for a week, not speaking to anyone, just immersing myself in Spanish television. That doesn’t have to happen in Argentina; that can be done anywhere.

My host cousin in Costa Rica speaks near-perfect American English, accent and all, yet he’d never been to the US, nor did his parents speak any English. I once asked him how he learned, and he said he had done it by watching movies and TV, essentially listening, with the intention to learn. It worked for him, and it has turned a corner for me twice now.

On top of all this, I’ve learned an entirely new set of vocabulary, thanks to the nature of Game of Thrones.

When I taught my Spanish classes, I always gave my students CDs of Latin music to listen to, and I assigned them homework to watch Finding Nemo in Spanish with subtitles. “Que lindo!” (You won’t understand that joke until you watch it). Whether they did it or not was up to them, but there was a purpose behind it: listening is a key to unlocking fluency.

Try this at home: watch your favorite show (I suggest Game of Thrones) in the language you want to learn, with subtitles on. Just turn it on and let it play, una y otra vez, I dare you to learn something.