I enrolled in a Spanish class and my first lesson is tomorrow.

Why am I doing this (por qué)?

It’s been something that I’ve been thinking about for years now, but I never seriously tried it for a myriad of reasons:

1. It’s not immediately practical to me. I don’t work with any Spanish speakers or in any environment where Spanish would be useful. Also, I basically have only one Spanish speaking friend who is already perfectly capable of English, so using Spanish among my personal circle would be nothing more than a party trick. And I don’t like the idea of learning a language just to impress people, something about that mentality just rubs me the wrong way.

2. I am now 32 years old, and I didn’t necessarily want to go back to school to learn Spanish. Nothing against my Gen Z compatriots, but having bought my fair share of mango Juul pods to try and fit in with youngsters in the past, I can no longer bring myself to put in significant effort to make friends with people ten plus years younger than me.

3. I have already spent (wasted, depending on how cynical I’m feeling on a given day) a lot of time learning Chinese and Russian, with frankly little to show for it. I stopped studying Russian seriously about three years ago, and my Chinese classes about two years ago. Time would be better spent picking up my studies in the languages I’m already invested in and familiar with, rather than starting something new that I could just as easily drop like I did everything else.

Wait, what was I doing again? Right, listing reasons why I’m taking Spanish.

Addresses to the above reasons

1. It’s true that Spanish is not useful to me now, but Hispanics are the fastest growing group in the United States (it’s either Hispanics or Asians, frankly I’ve heard both thrown around as the top dog, but either way the point stands). And I think it will keep growing, despite everything that’s happening right now. So for now, I choose to hold onto the amorphous notion that it might be advantageous in the future, and it’ll probably be easier for me to learn at least something at 32 than at 52. Also you never know, I went to a Venezuelan restaurant a few months ago and the waitress only spoke Spanish, so maybe it’ll be a more generally useful skill sooner than I think.

1b. And about that party trick quip, I still stand by it. Few things annoy me on some strange, petty, superficial plane than seeing a Youtube video entitled “X person shocks natives with fluent Y”. Of all the reasons to study Spanish, shocking natives is not on this list. But I will also say it might be interesting to see people’s reactions to seeing an Asian looking person speaking Spanish. My guess is that with the growing number of Chinese people living in Mexico, this won’t be a big surprise to anyone but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested to see some reactions.

2. I located a Spanish school in Seattle which caters specifically to adults. From what I can tell, the school doubles as a cafe and students are encouraged to use an immersive approach to learning the language, and the more casual, natutal environment helps with making small talk, ordering food, etc. This seems pretty far removed from my college Russian classes which was very grammar heavy and my company was split between ROTC guys, student communist activists, and vaguely Gothic people only a few of whom showed a deep motivation to use the language regularly (that includes me by the by, in case I was giving off too much pretentiousness). So I figure trying one semester is probably worth a shot.

3. I’m not particuarly interested right now in grinding Spanish to become as fluent as possible. The only thing I’m really hoping to get out of this class is some good phrases to know while traveling and maybe joining a ragtag group of misfits. I don’t anticipate my Spanish study to take up more than 30 minutes a day, leaving plenty of time for Chinese and Russian, which to be clear is walking around listening/pausing/listening/pausing self-described “intermediate-level podcasts) and looking at unsavoury meme on unsavoury meme websites, respectively.

Honestly, this list exercise could probably be boiled down to I’d like to make friends and have some fun. Will Spanish turn out to be a good vehicle for that? Naively I believe so, but I am always open to being wrong. The class I signed up for had an upfront cost that averages out to about 30 dollars per class, a price I can easily stomach even if it turns out to be a total waste of time. Just yesterday, I accidentally left my car in a retail spot (not entirely my fault, my garage clicker farted out halfway through me opening the main garage door and the resident garage door) and it spent a full day in a towing lot until my wife notified me as she was leaving for her morning shift that our car had seemingly walked right off the property. The price I paid to get my car back plus taxes and storage fees is almost twice the cost of this class, so my tolerance for payment anxiety on things I actually like is riding quite high at the moment.

¡Vamonos!

post-script following the first lesson

The entire class is taught in Spanish, which was not entirely unexpected since the brochure did mention immersion, but I was caught a bit off guard when I walked in with a few other students and they immediately thrust themselves into introductory converations with the teacher. I even checked the time, to make sure I was indeed attending the correct class.

Taking a Spanish class in Spanish is not something I really expected to encounter coming into the end of 2025. I’ve never taken New Year’s resolutions too seriously, after all, why wait until a specific calendar date for an attempt at being better, when you could just try now. But I’ll admitbut there’s a small unjaded part of me that thinks there’s few better ways to enter a new year with a brand new experience.

The teacher seems very skilled, organized, and well-practiced. We are encouraged to speak in class as much as possible, in Spanish if we can manage but using English when needed. The class does come with Quizlet flashcard decks assembled by the instructor, and I noticed that she makes use of a neuroscience tip I had heard about a while ago where you extensive use images and actions and link them with words to help review words. For example, there is a certain image and gesture the class uses which is associated with “Disculpe”. In class, the gesture is shown to us at various times, and we are tasked with remembering the gesture, knowing it’s connected with “Disculpe”, and then saying the word aloud. When reviewing Quizlet at home, the image is on the front of the card which can then be flipped over to reveal the word itself. The gist is that the more tactile you can make your connection to words an meaning, the stronger your memory will be for that word. Kind of a neat idea, and something I have never experienced before so I’m excited to do a little A/B test later on comaring my Spanish knowledge with my Russian. I studied Russian far longer, but there’s the long hiatus to consider and also my class had little to no speaking of Russian, so in that sense I might alraedy be ahead in Spanish.