Learn Spanish with a Telenovela

I spent my middle school years in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the early 80s, the height of Miami Vice fever.

In an incredibly lucky twist of fate, the church secretary was an “auntie” of mine and her husband, John, was a southern transplant from New Jersey who worked a boom mike for MIami Vice. I got taken to the set to meet Don Johnson and PMT who were so unsubtle in their states of being coked up that it was even obvious to me, a fairly sheltered thirteen year old. I got glossy 8X10 headshots signed by both of them, and Don Johnson wrote on mine, “Hugs and Kisses in all the right places, xoxo Don.” Needless to say, some of the happiest memories of my childhood have to do with images of high speed drug chases in cigarette boats on the crystalline waters of the Intercoastal Waterway.

So it’s no surprise that Arturo Perez Reverte’s drug trafficking novel starring an unflappable heroine (pun intended), Teresa Mendoza, would appeal to me. Teresa traverses several continents, running from her past and learning to be “la patrona” “the boss” of her own future. Perez Reverte is such a detail oriented author, that if you wanted to learn how to operate a business in which you either sold, bought or simply transported cocaine, tobacco, hashish or heroine between Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Gibraltar and North Africa in cooperation with a host of international co-workers from Russia, Galicia and other exotic locales, you nearly could from reading this book. Although (spoiler alert) in the end it seems like maybe it isn’t the greatest lifestyle choice after all.

The book is a bit slow, especially in the end which is kind of ironic. The Wall Street Journal referred to the novel as “John Le Carre meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez” which I think is funny(and quite the overstatement!) because as Teresa becomes more of a successful drug lord, she also becomes more of literati reader, and she complains that she finds A Hundred Years of Solitude boring.

Ha! Well, Teresa, don’t tell my Latin American Geniuses professor, but so did I. And I’ve never read John Le Carre, but as far as actions novels go, I can only guess The Queen of the South coulda used a little less Garcia Marquez and a little more La Carre. (I know, blasphemy)

But I did make it through it (barely) in the end by skimming the extremely detailed narrations of cartel logistics. I think many fewer people would choose to be narcos if they knew how much Math and paperwork is required.

But…fear not…excitement is coming your way because they took this novel and turned into a TELENOVELA!! streaming on Netflix made by Telemundo in Spanish called La Reina del Sur. There is a completely separate English version of the novel on Netflix called Queen of the South. I’ve only watched the first thirty seconds of it, but I feel pretty confident that compared to the telenovela in Spanish, it’s garbage.

So I know a lot of you are looking to do some self improvement during Covid, maybe learn some Spanish. I taught college Spanish for lots of years and students were always asking me, “How can I really learn to speak Spanish?” because they know no matter how good the teacher is, walking into a classroom at 18 years of age with a total vocabulary of gracias and cerveza and thinking you are going to become fluent is as delusional as an attractive lawyer thinking his lover isn’t going to kill him for ratting her out to the DEA just because she’s a woman. I would always tell my students to go to a different country and get yourself a boyfriend or girlfriend who doesn’t speak any English.

But since the wall was really to keep us in, you’re going to have to learn Spanish via telenovela instead.

The first scene in the novel and the telenovela is quite violent, just to warn you, but for whatever reason…maybe because I knew Teresa was going to come out victorious, it didn’t really bother me, and I am like the biggest wimp in the universe when it comes to TV violence. I had full blown PTSD from watching the first episode of Ozark and now I can never look at Jason Bateman the same way again.

Besides the violence in the telenovela is softened by the melodrama and the fact that you are focusing on LANGUAGE LEARNING. Read the book first so you already understand the plot and what’s going on, then if you are a beginning Spanish learner, set the subtitles to English and see how many words you can catch in Spanish in each scene. Try to jot down a list of at least ten vocabulary words before the next narcotraficante is executed by a former employee whom he betrayed. If you are a more advanced Spanish learner, set the subtitles to Spanish. I recommend watching it on your computer and having a tab of Spanishdict.com pulled up right next to it so you can quickly type in words that are new to you and learn what they mean. In this way, you will retain gut busting obscenities and expressions of alliterative misogynistic violence that are specific vernacular constructs of Mexico. Later you will learn some hair raising Iberianisms as well when Teresa flees to Spain and takes up with a hot Galician narcotraficante. So intercultural!

But if this is all a little too spicy for your blood, you can always revert to the sanitized high school/college language classroom telenovela, Destinos.

God bless this super old language learning curriculum! It is still available for free on the internet. https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-to-spanish/unit-iv-un-viaje-a-la-argentina-2/

I can practically recite every word. My favorite episode is in Unit 4, A trip to Argentina because I love the way Raquel packs her suitcase and all the important travel vocabulary you can learn from the contents of her bag.

Raquel, you had me at shoulder pads! But whether your 80s diva inspiration is Aqua Net or

the DEA and your fellow narcotraficantes want to hang you in a net,

just remember, learn some Spanish and