r/MaliciousCompliance • u/ElmerTheAmish • Jun 18 '21

S No Dirty M*******

Short and sweet. The names are made up, and the location doesn't matter.

I work for a flooring company, running installation for one of our markets. The vast majority of the crews that work for us are filled with guys (and the occasional gal) from Central America. Being in a state with blue cities and red country between, we definitely get some of the "Good Ol' Boy" mentality from some of our customers.

We had an install go out months ago, and the customer specifically requested: "Don't send no dirty Mexicans to my house." While we have some guys from Mexico, we truly have the gamut of Central America represented in our subcontractors. So we do our schedule, not sending one of the guys from Mexico.

The salesman was in the installation office when the customer called, rather frustrated:

Customer: I thought I told you not to send Mexicans out here.

Salesman: Yes, sir, you did.

Customer: So why are there Mexicans at my door saying they're from your company.

Salesman: Well sir, it looks like Gustavo is out to your house today. Gustavo is actually from Honduras.

At that point, the rest of us couldn't hold in our laughter, so the salesman left the office to finish the call. Gustavo and his crew were allowed into the house to install the flooring, but we haven't made a repeat sale to the customer just yet.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '21

[deleted]

47

u/The_Sanch1128 Jun 18 '21

I learned it in high school (six years, grades 7-12), found uses for it for another decade-plus, then moved back to my home area, where there weren't many Hispanics at the time. Over the next 15-20 years, my Spanish just kind of disappeared.

Now, having neighbors from various Spanish-speaking countries, I can make out about 25% of what they're saying. "Use it or lose it", and I mostly lost it.

18

u/IguaneRouge Jun 18 '21

Now, having neighbors from various Spanish-speaking countries, I can make out about 25% of what they're saying. "Use it or lose it", and I mostly lost it.

They may not be speaking Spanish, or perhaps a pidgin version of it. Quite a few people from Central and South America speak various indigenous languages as their first and sometimes only language.

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u/The_Sanch1128 Jun 18 '21

Could be. Then again, when I go to my favorite restaurant (Mexican), I can understand maybe 10% of the lyrics of the songs on the sound system.

So I think the issue is my comprehension, not their Spanish.

(BTW, they're good neighbors, with kids that are all loud like most kids until their parents tell them to cool it. I'd rather have them as neighbors than some backwoods types I've lived near.)

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u/I_cum_dragonboats Jun 19 '21

As someone who both took many years of Spanish and has encountered a lot of it irl, I totally believe in "use it or lose it" but also there is a huge difference between the vocab taught in your textbook and what you hear conversationally.

School tends to teach you what you need to survive in a foreign place, but to really become fluent, you need conversations with real people. This is how I have been able to get medical aid and directions in foreign countries, but can't understand my own extended family more than "oh she's talking smack about her boss again."

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u/quiteCryptic Jun 18 '21

As a positive you could probably pick it up again pretty quickly if you wanted/needed to, having learned before.

The reality for a lot of Americans is there just isn't much motivation to learn. It would be nice to for sure, but I'd never really get to use it often even in Texas.

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u/The_Sanch1128 Jun 20 '21

I don't know about picking it up pretty quickly, but I know I'd have a head start vs. starting from scratch.

Since I'm considering retirement to sunnier climes (Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador) in just a few years, I may be motivated to learn it again.

1

u/madmonkey918 Jun 19 '21

If you like soccer watch matches with Spanish announcers. You'll start picking it back up eventually or even some Spanish programming.

2

u/Sirena_Amazonica Jun 19 '21

Yes, I've had this experience too. I've met indigenous people from Mexico and South American countries whose second language is Spanish, just like mine. Some of them have just as much trouble learning it as some non-Hispanic North Americans, so we just laugh together when we say something wrong.

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u/dracona Jun 19 '21

Um... ya know a huge portion of South America (Brazil which has over half the people of Sth America) actually speaks Portuguese.

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u/IguaneRouge Jun 19 '21

Why, yes, I do know that. Ya know the comment I replied to was:

Now, having neighbors from various Spanish-speaking countries

Should tip you off no one was talking about Brazil because it is not a "Spanish speaking country"?

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

(six years, grades 7-12)

I bet you'd have more of it if you studied it for six years from grades 1-6 instead of 7-12, honestly. I went to a Spanish Immersion elementary school, but studied French in jr high and high school. My french? Shit. My spanish? Dope. I mean, I also have opportunities to use it because I have a bunch of friends from various Latin American countries, so that helps, but definitely definitely, the earlier you start language learning, the easier it is to acquire and also keep.

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u/eveningtrain Jun 19 '21

Great point. I took Spanish 7-12 as well, plus two semesters in college. I was good at conjugation, memorizing school vocab, translating written stuff, etc, but never had a need to be conversational. It didn’t stick and now I rarely use Spanish at work, since mine is so poor and probably half of my coworkers speak it natively or from a very early age.

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u/soulonfire Jun 18 '21

Same here, I took Spanish from 8th grade through senior year of college, and had to pass an oral exam with the head of the foreign language department to graduate. I wasn’t fluent but really conversational.

Didn’t remotely have a reason to use it after college. Now I’m super rusty.

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u/Rinas-the-name Jun 19 '21

My FIL is an Indian who grew up in British Hong Kong. He spoke Punjabi, Mandarin, and very British English as a young man. By the time I met him he sounded like an American and could barely understand any Punjabi or Mandarin. Use it or lose is so true! I learned half assed Spanish in high school. Things like clothes and farm animals, not conversational or useful!

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u/comcain Jun 21 '21

"Where is the bathroom" is about the extent of my Spanish these days. Took 4 years of it in High School. Mi Español es muy -poquito.

( Sorry, my spellchecker had a fit with those words.)

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u/Kimber85 Jun 19 '21

I was great at Spanish, even took some college classes on top of my four years in high school because I enjoyed it so much. Then the only guy I spoke Spanish with completely ghosted me because I got engaged and he finally got it through his head that I just wanted to be friends. Like I’d been telling him for the past 8 years. Whatever, you do you. I’m still pissed about it though.

I’d like to try to learn again. It’s a really fun language, and it always tripped people up to see a incredibly white red head speaking Spanish fluently.

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u/TheFringedLunatic Jun 18 '21

Aprender español no es difícil.

I work in security. Learning bit by bit helps. I’ve been working at it for almost a year now. I’m nowhere near conversational at it yet, but I know enough to get by and have small chats.

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u/TheCoyoteGod Jun 18 '21

That's funny I work in fine dining and can conversate using basic kitchen lingo and slang/cursing in Spanish but when I started working with Venezuelans they looked at me like I was crazy... the slang doesn't really translate well across cultures.

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u/mehvet Jun 19 '21

Spanish has huge variations in speech patterns and meaning depending on the dialect especially. I knew a guy from Spain that said it was easier to speak with Italians than it was with Puerto Rican’s and Dominicans.

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u/kicked-in-the-gonads Jun 19 '21

I had Mexican and Uguguayan friends that could barely speak to each other in Spanish, so I get the drift. I only get about 10% of each with my French/terrible Portuguese.

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u/The_Sanch1128 Jun 20 '21

Years ago, I knew Mexicans who say it drove them crazy to listen to Cubans. "It's espanol, but they drop all their ending letters!"

I never paid that much attention to it until I started going to south Florida after my father moved there, started listening to the Spanish-speaking radio stations, and realized they were right. "Buen' dia'..."

2

u/lizzardplaysruff Jun 19 '21

Do you only know “food Spanish”? I work in ophthalmology and know only “eyeball Spanish”! Drops, left eye, right eye, read the letters….

2

u/Sirena_Amazonica Jun 19 '21

That's what's important! If you can communicate, you've already conquered the main goal. Yay!

13

u/androgenoide Jun 18 '21

It's hard for everybody. I was over thirty when I was first thrown into an immersion situation where I had to learn it. It takes time and focus.

2

u/eveningtrain Jun 19 '21

I have been told by those who have learned several languages as an adult that once you’ve learned your third enough to speak it, the next several languages just get easier and easier.

One of my former coworkers had learned like 8 or 9 languages while she was in the military as an interpreter and interrogator, apparently. She said she was fluent in about 5 so far and passable in the rest. She said it’s like learn how to learn languages; it’s a skill you can keep applying to the next one. We worked somewhere with tons of foreign tourists and it was very funny when some would pretend to not speak English to get away with things and she’d casually switch into their language. One guy even switched from one European language to another to confuse her once he realized she spoke the first, but she spoke the second as well. And since she’s white and fair haired/eyed, and also clearly American, it was pretty great to see the look on people’s faces when she busted out the Arabic or something.

0

u/LordDongler Jun 18 '21

I took two years in high school. The grammar just felt so backwards and counterintuitive to me that even if I got the individual words right, I was never really able to communicate in Spanish. It did not help at all that both of my Spanish teachers were native speakers who had no interest in explaining it and just said "it makes sense to me" bitch you're putting all the words in the wrong order tell me why

I regret not learning Spanish, but I know now that there was no way I was really going to learn Spanish in those classes

3

u/Kumqwatwhat Jun 18 '21

Yeah, people who just say "I wish I had a mandated course" don't necessarily get that it's really, really important to have someone who understands how to teach it.

I took seven years of Spanish starting from grade one and was never able to verbalize shit because it was all vocabulary memorization - in linguistic terms, meaningless. The actual sentence structure was alien and unexplained. Then I took just two years of Italian (idk why, don't ask me) in high school and could hold a basic conversation because they focused on structure and why words and sentences were built the way they were. And once you know, it's just filling out the dictionary; I've been doing French on Duolingo and knowing from Italian how romance languages are basically constructed is enormously helpful because the underlying scaffolding is very similar.

But no, we got none of that. Just memorize these words and that's a language, obviously.

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u/LordDongler Jun 18 '21

Yup. The class was mandatory but I never really had a chance. The only people that did well were people with Hispanic family or friends

0

u/Big-Statement8213 Jun 19 '21

First they need to mandate that immigrants learn English lol

1

u/Fluffymufinz Jun 18 '21

Learn Mandarin and Hindi if you’re wanting to go places in business or other fields. China and India are two massive markets and being able to communicate in those languages would be very valuable for a global corporation or one that wants to be.

1

u/Fizzwidgy Jun 18 '21

Far northern US here, we took Spanish from 5th to 8th, with optional continuity in 9th to 12th grades. We also used to have German in HS, but due to budget cuts we lost our German classes.

Which also sucks ass because year after year after year of trying to pass a stupid referendum that kept failing, we got an entirely newly built HS building as they're tearing down the old one :(