My feelings towards learning Spanish tend to see-saw.

The last couples of weeks I’ve been hanging out a lot with English-speaking foreigners, lazily sticking to English with my Argentine flatmate and coming to class hungover and despondent.

I was on the verge of giving up. Little angry storm clouds had gathered around my head: Spanish sucks. This is boring. What’s the point? Guess I’ll always be one of those crap, ignorant, arrogant Westerners who can only speak English.

But on Monday night, in a bar with classmates, I found myself in a group containing a non-English speaking Ecuadorian, so her French friend asked us to speak in Spanish.

And to my delight I discovered words and phrases coming out of mouth that I didn’t know I knew. Suddenly I realised that I had improved. That unwittingly I had been absorbing these last few weeks. And the payoff? I was marginally better at communicating with this person I would have otherwise not been able to speak with at all.

Thanks to my rudimentary skills, I found out that she had moved to Buenos Aires to study orthodontics. There was a secondary but just as important reason – her heart had been broken. After two happy years, her boyfriend had dumped her. She didn’t know why. Was he scared of commitment? (I commented that at 28 he was too old to behave like that). Or was it another woman?

After months of moping at home depressed, her mother told her she needed a change of scene. Hence now she was living in Buenos Aires and having a great time.