Losing My Fear Of Speaking Spanish

Returning to a destination you loved after many years away is always a delicate tug of war between the place you remember so fondly and the place it has become. Part of you wants everything to be exactly as you left it, preserved in amber along with your memories, and another part is eager to discover what has changed, because that is what places inevitably do. Cities change. Neighbourhoods evolve. Favourite bars close, new ones open and the places that once felt completely familiar become almost unrecognisable, the old blending with the new.

Seville was no exception. On a recent trip back I found the lovely guesthouse I had stayed in had closed, Plaza Nueva was far more polished and gentrified than I remember it, and there are streets where new hotels, restaurants and fashionable cafés have changed the character of entire corners. There are places I remember that have disappeared completely and others that are still there but somehow don’t feel quite the same. Every now and then I found myself trying to reconcile the Seville in front of me with the one that has lived in my head for years.

That familiar sense of belonging soon came back as I started to explore again: the smell of the orange trees that are everywhere, the slow, languid evenings and the wonderfully unhurried sobremesa; the tapas crawls that stretched from one bar to the next, and lingering around Plaza del Salvador with a drink as evening slipped into a warm night.

Before long I wasn’t thinking quite so much about everything that had changed. I was remembering why I’d loved being here in the first place, and how much I had changed myself since I was last here.

Back To Where It All Went Wrong

The last time I was in Seville, many years ago, my Spanish was terrible. I had learned a handful of useful words and phrases before arriving and, like every overconfident beginner armed with a phrasebook and absolutely no idea what they were doing, assumed that would be enough. I still remember carefully rehearsing what I wanted to say to a waitress, finally getting the words out and watching her face settle into an expression of almost maternal pity before she answered me in flawless English. Whatever I had just said, apparently it wasn’t Spanish.

It was funny, even at the time, but it also left its mark. There is something uniquely uncomfortable about trying to express yourself in another language and knowing that you sound nothing like the person you are when you speak English. After a few more equally clumsy attempts I became increasingly reluctant to try, retreating instead to the safety of a few memorised phrases and the lazy, shameful knowledge that, in most places, I could probably get away with English.

That had started to change long before I returned to Seville. Learning Spanish one-to-one with a tutor had forced me beyond those rehearsed exchanges because there was nowhere to hide once an actual conversation started. I had to listen to questions I wasn’t expecting, respond without having a sentence prepared, stumble over words, explain my way around the ones I didn’t know and simply keep going. Slowly, those conversations stopped feeling like something to be nervous about and started becoming something I genuinely enjoyed.

Taking My Spanish Out Into The Wild

There is, of course, a big difference between talking to a tutor and talking to someone who has no idea that you are still learning. A tutor knows when to slow down, when to rephrase something and when the slightly panicked look on your face means you haven’t understood a word they’ve just said. More importantly, they know roughly what you are capable of and can keep pushing the conversation without leaving you completely behind.

No one in Seville knew any of that. At first I stuck largely to the familiar interactions I knew I could handle. Ordering food, asking for things in shops, buying tickets and all the other small exchanges that come naturally when travelling. But I found myself using Spanish without the same hesitation I had felt before, and when someone replied I wasn’t immediately searching for an escape route back into English.

It was in a crowded little tapas bar, Las Teresas, that I got my first real sense of how much had changed. I squeezed into a space at the bar, transfixed by the huge Iberian hams hanging behind it and surrounded by the clatter of plates and overlapping conversations, with the sweet, spiced smell of vermut casero drifting across the counter. I caught the waiter’s attention and simply ordered a drink and some tapas in Spanish. Nothing flashy, just basic Spanish, but the waiter instantly threw me a curveball by asking a question in return. This was where I had frozen a thousand times before with my tutor, but this time I didn’t.

I answered back. In Spanish.

The waiter nodded and wandered off, and within a few moments my order was on its way. Nobody had switched to English, nobody had looked at me with pity and, perhaps best of all, I hadn’t really thought about any of it until it was over.

Standing there afterwards, drink in hand, I felt a ridiculously out-of-proportion sense of achievement for something as simple as ordering a few tapas. And I know it is slightly ridiculous to feel so proud over such a small thing. I know people who are perfectly fluent in two or three languages who wouldn’t think twice about doing that, but to me it felt like a genuine milestone. Such a small thing on the surface, but after all the frustration and false starts it felt enormous. All those years later, in the same city where I’d been too embarrassed to keep trying, I’d finally ordered in Spanish and been understood.

And those little slices of ham and cheese were some of the best things I had ever tasted!

That tiny victory gave me a little more confidence to keep trying. I wasn’t suddenly wandering around Seville striking up lengthy conversations with everyone I met, but I was becoming less worried about what might happen if I did say something and more willing to see where my Spanish could take me. Ordering something was one thing. Actually having a conversation with someone was another.

By that Sunday morning I had settled comfortably back into Seville’s slower rhythm, and the little art market outside the Museo de Bellas Artes was the perfect place to enjoy an easy, unhurried morning. Beneath the trees of Plaza del Museo, local artists had taken over the square, their paintings balanced on easels, propped against railings and arranged in colourful rows wherever there was room. People drifted slowly between them, stopping to talk to the artists or leaning in for a closer look, while a group of old men sat nearby on plastic chairs, deep in animated conversation and seemingly determined to put the world to rights before lunchtime.

There was a wonderfully creative feel to the square, less like browsing stalls at a market and more like wandering through an open-air gallery where the artists happened to be standing beside their work. Seville appeared again and again on the canvases around me, but never quite in the same way: familiar streets washed in colour, glimpses of tiled courtyards and orange trees, grand landmarks alongside ordinary corners of the city that someone had decided were worth painting. Among them were more abstract pieces and personal styles that made the pleasure of browsing as much about seeing the city through someone else’s eyes as finding something to take home.

I spent a long time wandering between the paintings before one finally made me stop. I liked it enough to ask the artist how much it was, an easy question I had used plenty of times before and one that could have ended with a simple gracias before I carried on around the square. But I wanted to know more about the painting, so I asked.

I Forgot I Was Speaking Spanish

What surprised me most was how little I was thinking about the language itself. I was instinctively recognising the words I knew and, when I didn’t know one, working out enough of the meaning from the context to keep following what he was saying. I wasn’t stopping to translate every sentence into English, think about my response and then reverse the whole process to build it back into Spanish. I was hearing the words in Spanish and responding to them.

That felt completely different.

The painter explained more about his work and I understood most of what he was telling me. Not every word, and certainly not every detail, but enough. More importantly, the gaps no longer seemed to matter in the way they once had. I didn’t freeze because I’d missed something or start mentally searching for the perfect sentence before answering. I simply followed what I could, responded to what I understood and let the conversation carry on.

At some point, I realised I was more interested in what he was telling me about his paintings than I was in the fact he was telling me in Spanish. The language itself had slipped into the background and, for a few minutes at least, I wasn’t practising Spanish or trying to prove to myself that I could speak it. I was just talking to another person about something I was genuinely interested in.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know that I stumbled on a few words, I definitely hesitated more than once, and I am more than aware that the poor artist who had to suffer my attempt was probably being extraordinarily kind and patient with me, but I was speaking Spanish. With a native!

That was the moment that felt different. Not because my Spanish was suddenly perfect; it wasn’t, not by a long shot, but because for the first time I had stopped thinking about speaking Spanish long enough to simply speak it.

I’m Still A Long Way From Fluent

None of this means I suddenly came away from Seville fluent in Spanish. I’m still a long way from that. I still miss words, misunderstand things and occasionally find myself staring blankly at someone who has just spoken to me at full speed. There are still plenty of moments when I know exactly what I want to say in English and simply don’t have the Spanish to say it properly.

The conversations with my tutor had broken the initial barrier and given me the confidence to start speaking. Seville had shown me that I could take that confidence outside a lesson and simply use the Spanish I had.

All those years ago, I arrived in Seville with a carefully rehearsed sentence and fell apart the moment a conversation moved beyond it. This time I stood in a market talking to a painter with absolutely no idea what he was going to say next, and that uncertainty no longer frightened me.

I’m still learning Spanish, and I probably will be for a long time. But somewhere between that waitress all those years ago, my patient tutor, and a Sunday morning in Plaza del Museo, I stopped being afraid to speak it.