Getting Under Nathan

5: "Don't speak Spanish to me."

Chapter 5 - "Don't speak Spanish to me."

My first day of university didn't really feel like my first day of school. Something about it felt completely different. Maybe I was more grown up and naturally felt more confident; maybe I was still buzzing from my date with Nathan the night before; or maybe I just realized that every single person here was in the exact same position as me. Nobody knew each other and it was perfectly acceptable to just start a random conversation with a nearby person about where you were from or what you were studying. I quite liked that. I couldn't imagine another situation where I'd meet or talk to so many different people in such a short amount of time.

Spanish was my first class and as soon as the teacher walked into the room, I knew it was not only going to be completely different to my Spanish classes at school, but also completely different to how I'd imagined. On the numerous occasions that I'd envisaged life at university, I'd pictured myself sitting in a huge lecture theatre with hundreds of other people whilst the lecturer taught us grammar and vocabulary on the huge screen. Right now, I was sitting in a small classroom with about ten or fifteen other people and a teacher who was speaking Spanish at about one hundred miles per hour without stopping to take a breath. I was so paralysed in shock at how different this was going to be that for the first few minutes all the words went straight over my head and she could have been talking Chinese for all that I understood of it.

Glancing around me, I could see that some people were looking as shocked as I felt, which was comforting, but others were simply nodding along with the teacher, which was disconcerting. I had to remind myself that I was studying at a decent university; I may have been the strongest in the class at school, but now that I was at university I was amongst the best of the best. Everyone here had been the strongest in their class and some were inevitably going to be much better than me.

I forced myself to relax and focused my attention on the teacher. Although I couldn't understand every single word that she was saying, I found that I could actually understand the majority and could therefore fill in the gaps and get the gist of what she was talking about.

"I can tell this is going to be intense," a girl next to me murmured once the teacher had paused for breath and was writing something on the board.

"I know," I murmured back. "I feel like I'm way out of my depth."

"You're not the only one," she assured me.

A boy at the far end of the classroom then raised his hand and asked a question in what seemed like fluent Spanish. He didn't even seem to be thinking about the words that were coming out of his mouth.

"Fuck my life," the girl next to me murmured. "I think I'm gonna drop out..."

Classes at university were only forty-five minutes long but that one class seemed to drag by. I sat silently in my seat, praying that the teacher wouldn't pick on me to answer a question. I knew that I'd become paralysed with fear at the thought of speaking Spanish in a class full of people who seemed to be nearly fluent. Luckily there didn't seem to be much class participation today, perhaps because it was the first lesson and the teacher was spending the whole time talking about the course and what we'd be studying.

Towards the end of the forty five minutes, she handed out some sheets and told us to work in pairs, or rather 'parejas', to complete the grammar exercises. I was thankful to be working with the girl who seemed as terrified as I was at this whole new approach to Spanish; if I'd have been working with one of the more fluent members of the class then I knew I'd have been too self-conscious of my ability to contribute much to the exercise, despite grammar being one of my strengths.