Don't Mess with Mexican Women Part II

In my story, "Don't Mess With Mexican Women", I mentioned,

" I had no clue what this Mexican Donnybrook was about."

One of my "critics," though professing to hate everything I write (and professing to hate me), took that opportunity, because I said what I did, to postulate that my not understanding the conversation contradicts everything I've been writing about learning Spanish. "If I had any degree of spoken fluency (and I do) then I should have been able to divine what was being said by the warring couple, the subjects of my previous story." So goes this critic's logic.

Let me say this: We Americans, with a less than 9% bilingual rate in our country, linguistically inept, are hardly in a position to judge what is or is not linguistic fluency.

The point is simple. If how you judge fluency in a second language is having the ability to speak with 100% proficiency, like a native, then you do err.

The Spanish you learn in a classroom will not be the Spanish you hear spoken on the street. It most certainly will not be the Spanish you hear when a Spanish speaker, especially a Mexican, is mad and talking at the speed of light. This is what this woman was doing in the incident I reported, "Reading her man the riot act."

Mexican youth, much in the likeness of the Pochos and Pochismos in La Frontera, right here on the streets of Guanajuato, make up their own dialects. Tell me how anyone would learn what "No manches" or "¿Quién va a hacerlo, Buey?" means in a classroom where you are learning how to conjugate estar and ser?

You can't. You've got to live in the culture, not in Gringolandia isolated bubbles, and you've got to have relationships in the community so you can have your acquaintances teach you the street slang.

Imagine trying to figure out the slang at speeds that make you wonder how any human could possibly understand what was said, and you have the reason why "I had no clue what this Mexican Donnybrook was about."