You guys, my brain is tired. And confused. Oh you know, just one of the many adjustments to bilingual life in Madrid. And you think, ‘well, duh Kristina. You moved to a Spanish-speaking country, you’re going to have to speak Spanish more.’ And you’d be right. It’s obvious. What isn’t obvious is how much this is messing with my brain.

Now, most expats or people in my job come here with little to no knowledge of Spanish. They come here, learn and end up fairly fluent, but they start off pretty much at zero. I’m a native Spanish speaker; I learned Spanish first and then English. My entire life I’ve continued to speak Spanish and at one point I worked for the Latin American HQ of a company, so about 50% of my work was in Spanish. I would go from talking to a coworker in English, then to my boss in Spanish, to preparing reports in both languages. But things were separate. I knew insurance terms and HR terms in Spanish because that was the job, but most of my day outside of work was in English.

When I moved to Nashville, my Spanish suffered. The little Spanish I spoke was when I talked to my Abuela on the phone, which wasn’t often. It’s one of the big reasons I wanted to move here, to really refine my Spanish. What I did not expect was the craziness that is currently happening in my brain. To help explain, I’m going to walk you through a day in my bilingual life in Madrid, from a language perspective.

My Day:

6:40 am: My first alarm goes off. It’s the song Every Little Thing by Carly Pearce. English.

7 am: My second alarm goes off. It’s the song Pasos de Cero by Pablo Alboran. Spanish.

7:50 am: I put on my headphones and listen to music. I’d say it’s a 60/40 split English to Spanish, for a solid thirty minutes.

7:52 am: I run into a lady from my building who’s just coming in from walking her dog. Most of the times I get it right and greet her in Spanish, but every so often my brain gets confused and I get halfway through saying “good morning” before I realize I meant to say “buenas.”

8:20 am: Walking into school I usually run into students or teachers. If they’re my students or bilingual teachers, I say “good morning” in English. If not, I greet them in Spanish. This is pretty much the way the entire school day goes. Sometimes the bilingual teachers don’t feel like speaking in English when we’re outside of class, so we flip flop between English and Spanish. Honestly sometimes I express myself better in Spanish so I’m the one who switches over.

During the school day my job is to teach English, so I don’t generally speak Spanish to students unless I’m translating something. Breaks in the teachers lounge are in Spanish though, so I’d say 80/20 English to Spanish during the school day.

After school: I don’t have a fixed schedule, but after school I generally come home to eat lunch. I speak with my roommates in Spanish. I talk to my mom maybe three times a week on the phone in English (mostly).

After my day job, I live my life in Spanish. Grocery store? Spanish. Shopping? Spanish. My private classes I teach? We speak in Spanish because their level is too low to hold the whole lesson in English.

Most of the friends I’ve made are either Spaniards or Latin Americans, so we speak in Spanish too.

When I mutter something under my breath or I’m annoyed, I usually express it in Spanish. I dream in both languages, it really depends.

So while this isn’t a problem or a bad thing, it’s just weird. And confusing. There are so many times where I’ll be talking with my English-speaking coworkers and I can’t think of the word in English. They’re usually really basic words, but the Spanish version comes instead. When I’m with other bilingual people, we do this weird Spanglish mix because it’s the same for a ton of us.

For most people who come to be a language assistant, this may not be an issue at all. For me, it’s both a blessing and a curse. Mostly it’s just another weird quirk to my bilingual expat life in Madrid!

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