El estudio en los tiempos del COVID-19

Harys Dalvi

May 2021

Lee en español

Considering the demographics alone, I was in an excellent position to fail the AP Spanish Language and Culture exam. When I decided to take the May 2021 exam, it was already March, so I had only two months to get in shape. I hadn't ever taken an AP Spanish class. I had minimal exposure to Spanish outside the classroom, and I hadn't been in the classroom in the two years since I took Spanish IV.

I also didn't have much external motivation to do well on the exam. I had already performed well enough on the SAT Spanish subject test two years earlier to waive my college foreign language requirement. All this leads to an obvious question.

Why did I study for AP Spanish?

It all started in a Mexican restaurant. My family's complexion made us look something like Hispanic mestizos; and considering the fact that we were in a Mexican restaurant, the server must have decided it was a safe bet to ask us "¿ya terminaron?" To my surprise, I understood this ("did you guys finish?") and responded "sí." I wanted to add "ya terminamos" ("we finished") but in the moment I couldn't remember the correct conjugation, terminamos.

This small experience showed me that despite the rust of two years, my Spanish hadn't disappeared entirely. In fact, I was close to being proficient if I could make the words and conjugations come more naturally and fluently. I decided to put in the effort to revise my Spanish and become proficient since I was close to that goal anyways. I saw the AP exam as a concrete deadline for me to structure my studying, as well as a personal goal for internal motivation. And so I started studying in the time of the coronavirus: el estudio en los tiempos del COVID-19.

How did I study for AP Spanish?

I knew that out of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, listening was my weakest skill. My vocabulary was sufficient to write what I needed to get out, I had practiced a fair amount of speaking with friends in the classroom, and I was able to understand most words I read. But when listening, the words went far too fast for me to keep up.

Therefore, my main study tool was Netflix. I watched TV and movies in Spanish without subtitles. By far, the content I spent the most time on was Lego Ninjago. I had seen the show in fifth grade, but at the time only two seasons existed. I had stopped since the second season was originally supposed to be the last. However, by the time I took my exam, I had seen ten seasons.

At first, I only did my best to listen and understand, while looking for words I didn't know. If I felt like I needed to know the meaning of a word, or if I had heard the same word many times, I paused to look up its meaning. However, after looking it up, I didn't make a note of the word anywhere. I just trusted that I would eventually learn the word through repeated exposure.

For vocabulary, this method worked, but it was slow. Being too lazy to make or study flashcards, I eventually settled on making a list of new Spanish words I encountered without including an English translation. Then I would review this list and look up any words I might have forgotten. This sped up my acquisition of vocabulary a little bit.

But even more important than the vocabulary, watching Ninjago allowed me to hear Spanish as words instead of just sounds. Because I was so unaccustomed to hearing Spanish, I would often hear a word I would know if I had read it, but I was unable to understand when listening. Ninjago reduced this greatly, so by the end I could understand most of the show.

Did my studying work?

One thing Ninjago didn't teach me was the culture aspect of the Spanish Language and Culture exam. The exam asks to compare a cultural characteristic of a Spanish-speaking community to that of another community, such as the United States. Ninjago takes place in a somewhat futuristic Asian-inspired land, not in a real-life Hispanic community, so I didn't learn about cultural differences between my own community and Spanish-speaking ones.

I also watched Pan's Labyrinth, which takes place in Spain, to become familiar with a different dialect of Spanish and to get a sense of cultural differences. Although I picked up on the quirks of Castilian Spanish, cultural differences remained unclear.

To be honest, I think some of this might be because unlike with AP Chinese for example, there don't seem to be as major cultural differences between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking communities (other than the difference in language, of course). Both are former European colonial powers that have since lost their empires (the UK and Spain), or else fully westernized colonies of those powers (everywhere else). An exception to this might be aspects of indigenous cultures that are still prevalent among Spanish-speaking communities, especially in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The Day of the Dead in Mexico is a good example of this. But I didn't get much exposure to indigenous cultures through Netflix, let alone through Ninjago, and so I was unequipped to talk about cultural differences.

On exam day, I felt overall well-prepared by Ninjago. Although I haven't received my score yet, I think I did well. (Update July 2021: I did indeed do well; I got a 5.) For the cultural comparison, I talked about the siesta that people take in Spain but not in the United States, as this was one of the few cultural differences I knew about. That section was probably my weakest on the exam. Otherwise I felt fairly confident, even though it wasn't perfect.

Reflection

I am still a little confused about the cultural differences between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking communities, but overall I learned a lot through self-studying this exam. I feel much more confident in my Spanish language abilities (if not my Spanish culture abilities) and my studies have inspired me to try and spend some time studying abroad in a Spanish-speaking country. Maybe there I'll find that I was shortsighted in my inability to see cultural differences.

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