Such instruction is definitely to be expected during a dental treatment, but it was indubitably amazing to realize that I could live my life in another language. Without thinking, without translating or pausing, I just did it. My realization about fluency happened during the root canal, when the odontologist instructed “Abre la boca”-open your mouth. As inconvenient as it may be to need emergency dental procedures in your first couple weeks of study abroad, I must say that there’s something to be learned from quickly pacing into an emergency room, unsure if the strange looks the staff are giving you are from your language abilities or your swollen face. However, over the course of my first three weeks here in Santiago, it became clear that something was wrong, especially when the one side of my jaw was puffed up like a bowling ball. To save this blog post from too many boring details, I’ll sum it up quickly: right before leaving the US, I had a filling on my first (small!) cavity. Confident as I may have been that I could study and take classes, I’ve since come to realize the existence of an ultimate level of fluency-basically, how to get a root canal in Spanish.
Whereas in my spring 2022 semester I was terrified to speak about Latin American literature in SPAN212, I was now headed to take all of my subject courses in my second language. My knowledge of the language, I felt, had grown significantly in the year prior. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the feed.īefore arriving to Santiago de Chile-and even when I was perusing study abroad programs months beforehand-I knew that I had only one goal for this semester: return completely fluent in Spanish. CASA Santiago: Chilean Universities Program, Chileīrinn is one of the Semester Abroad Global Correspondents writing and sharing her experience abroad during the Spring 2023 semester.
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