Tamara Marie: You’re listening to native speakers speaking in their own voice about things that are important to them, and they're doing it through music, and if you learn that way, not only can you connect with people and be singing along with the songs at the party with everyone else when you travel or when you're hanging out with your friends, but you also kind of develop like this sort of natural ability to sort of hear the rhythm of the language.


[music]


Kerstin Cable: Welcome to The Fluent Show, a podcast all about loving, living, and learning languages. Hello, listeners. My name is Kerstin Cable, as always your host here on The Fluent Show, and I’m here to talk about anything and everything interesting from the world of learning another language. In today's podcast, I’m bringing you an interview with Tamara Marie. She is a certified language coach and Spanish speaker and Spanish teacher and teaches in a very special way. She teaches con salsa. Salsa. The dance, salsa. The sauce, salsa. The… State of mind? You'll have to listen to find out. This is a fantastic interview. I really enjoyed talking to Tamara, and because she made me feel comfortable and I have long kind of dreamt of bringing you a bilingual episode with Spanish, I decided to dive in at the deep end, and I took the opportunity to ask Tamara a few questions in Spanish in this episode. You will hear her reply in Spanish, and for about eight or nine minutes our conversation mostly evolves in or mostly conducts itself in the medium of Spanish. If you are not a Spanish learner, as with all my bilingual episodes, I encourage you to keep listening and remember that being uncomfortable not understanding is a deep part of learning another language. My own Spanish is pretty rusty, so you are going to hear me struggle. You're going to hear me make a mistake, and I didn't edit out those moments in the end, because we're a show about learning. We're a show not about showing how perfect you are in your target language. We're a show about practicing despite the mistakes and despite the uncomfortableness, and I don't want to be any different to anyone else who you hear or yourself, really, when you hear yourself speaking another language. That's why we do this.


Now, since the topic is salsa, let me also mention our sponsor and recommend a special video to you you'll find in the show notes, which is on the topic of salsa the dance and salsa the spirit. I kind of had a look around Yabla (that's our sponsor) in Spanish, in the Spanish Yabla videos and found you a relevant video. Now, if you've never tried Yabla before, I do recommend it. It's a fun platform where you can find videos on all kinds of topics, from music and music documentaries, as well as music videos, to just vlogs like you'd see on YouTube, news articles, even really current ones, you know, if you want to hear about coronavirus, there's probably a video in your target language where you can practice listening to that. They've got kids’ TV shows, they've got sitcoms, they've got it all. They really have it all, even reality TV shows, which is one of my favorite ways of learning another language. Yabla is special because the way that they treat the video is perfect for language learners. You can find bilingual subtitles in your target language and your source language. You can switch off either subtitle whenever you want. There's a loop function that lets you watch any bit of subtitle again and again, and there is also a really easy way of slowing things down. Every word is clickable. On the iPad, every word is tappable. I've been watching a lot of Yabla on my iPad, and it's a great way of even bringing up vocab in. You can export your vocab list. You can play vocab study games. It's all right there. It is an all-in-one solution if you want to learn with video or even with music videos, so do check it out. And Yabla is a paid platform, but we've got a free trial lined up for you, so go and take a ride. Go and drive it for free at yabla.com/fluentshow. That is yabla.com (Y-A-B-L-A dot com) slash fluentshow. Thank you so much to Yabla for supporting the show.


Now, let's get to the salsa; I don't want to keep you waiting any longer. Tamara was a fantastic interview partner. Thank you so much to her. You're going to hear a lot about the origins of salsa as a music style, as a way of life, how learning Spanish has helped Tamara connect to her ancestry as a Black woman in the USA and given her a new perspective on her own identity. That was a fascinating part of the conversation, and then we got into language learning, talked about what the Caribbean music scene can teach you about authentic and diverse Spanish, and how to switch off your thinking mind as a language learner, and that is gold. That is a really valuable conversation, and for a lot of us, including me, we just need to hear this many, many times. So get ready, get comfortable, grab yourself some salsa I guess, and let's go over to Tamara Marie.


Buenos días. Hello. Welcome to The Fluent Show.


Tamara Marie: Buenos días. Gracias for having me on the show.


Kerstin Cable: Oh, I’m so excited to be talking to you. I’m so excited to bring a little bit of salsa to The Fluent Show.


Tamara Marie: Salsa is always necessary. What is life without music, right?


Kerstin Cable: Very true, very true. This was kind of my first question for you, but I want to start off on: What is salsa to you?


Tamara Marie: Wow. That is a very… You would think it would be a simple question, right, but salsa, it actually has lots of different meanings, which is one of the reasons why I really love that word and I've really described sort of my whole approach to language learning, but basically it was… Most people know salsa is a dance, right? It's a salsa dance that you see. It looks very complicated. It looks… There's a lot of spinning and a lot of turns, and people just really love to watch people dance salsa, like here we think of like Dancing with the Stars, right, where people are sort of like dancing like this very elegant way. But there is a much more, I would say, almost like street way of dancing salsa, which is more less ballroom and more sort of, I don't know, Afro-Cuban style, like in your body, right? So it's like this way of dancing that really is the way that people dance in the street (right?), people that listen to salsa music. So it's also music. It's a dance, but it's music.


And most people also may know, if you know any Spanish at all, salsa is sort of like, it's another word for sauce, right? It’s like what you dip nachos in, right? That sauce. So it's interesting because that word ‘salsa’ highlights how just one word, you know, without context can be misunderstood. And as a language learner, especially when I started learning Spanish. I realized how important it was to connect with the people and the culture to have a real context for what I was learning. You can't just learn a dictionary and learn grammar. You really have to connect with the culture. So to me, salsa really represents having that cultural awareness, being immersed in a culture when you're learning a language and not just sort of trying to become, you know, a perfect speaker of the language technically, but really getting to understand and know the people that speak the language. And that's really what I did, you know, when I learned Spanish. I immersed myself in the culture. I started dancing salsa, I took salsa classes, and I started listening to salsa music, and that's what really helped me stay motivated to learn Spanish.


Kerstin Cable: Do you think salsa is a unique concept to Spanish or unique to a particular type of Spanish?


Tamara Marie: Well, I would say it's really interesting. I think salsa is actually American. And people might debate me on that. They go, “No, salsa is from Latin America.” Well, yes, but it has its roots in New York City in the United States, because before that time there was son from Cuba. There was like Latin jazz. There were different genres of music, and people would dance, but there wasn't sort of this one umbrella for Latin American music until this label called Fania back in the ‘70s actually started branding this Latin American music under one umbrella, and he called it salsa. So to me, it's actually a very, very American thing, believe it or not. It's this mix of different cultures, of different Latin cultures, that makes up what we call salsa.


Kerstin Cable: Oh, that makes a lot of sense to me. As a sort of half-informed person on Latin American music, I wouldn't be able to put my finger on, you know, if somebody said ‘salsa’, I wouldn't be able to put my finger on where or where it might not come from.


Tamara Marie: Yeah, and it's actually, it's quite a debate, and I don't get into it because I’m not Latina, and I don't want anyone shooting me [laughs], but the reality is, you know, some people say, “Oh, salsa comes from Colombia.” “Salsa comes from Cuba.” “Salsa comes from Puerto Rico.” But the fact of the matter is, it comes from all of those places. There's different rhythms. Like there's guaguancó, like I mentioned before. There’s son. So there's all these different types of rhythms that, if you really are in the culture, you can recognize them, but as someone outside of the culture and as a huge community developed of people in the diaspora of Latin America that moved to New York City and that moved to Florida in different places in the United States, they really developed this identity of being Latino because it really only is relevant when you're not living in the country that you're from. Right? So there was this need to kind of come together, and you had Dominicans, you had Puerto Ricans, you had Cubans, they all kind of mixed together in New York and they and they sort of developed this thing that was like, “This is our thing. You know, this is our thing. We're all Latino, regardless of where we're from.” So it's actually a really interesting history when you look into it, and it's also, like I said, it really speaks to why you need to know those things when you're learning a language, so you can really understand where some of these terms come from. You don't just kind of use them like, “Oh, yes, salsa. I know what that means,” but do you really know what it means?


Kerstin Cable: You've mentioned New York, New York City, twice now, which is really, really interesting, because we're talking about learning Spanish, so you think we'd be having like, you know, we'd go straight to, okay, the Caribbean or Mexico or Southern America, or Latin America, or possibly even España, Spain, but we're talking about New York City, and I think that's part of your cultural background, and you've mentioned you're not a Latina. So what is your cultural background? What brought you to Spanish, or if not, what is it that attracted you so much to Spanish?


Tamara Marie: Well, it's an interesting question, and I get asked that a lot because… So my background, I was born in the U.S. I’m from the East Coast of the United States. I’m Black. That's about all I know, so I don't really have a place to point to, except I did do that Ancestry.com test where they tell you like where your ancestors are from. So the closest I've got is, I think, Togo in Western Africa. But I don't really know, quite honestly, because that's just the part of being Black in America is that you don't know where you're from. It's part of our sort of collective history that we’re kind of brought here, and we don't really know our family tree going beyond the shores of the United States. So for me, I feel connection to culture wherever I am, I mean through traveling, there's so many places I've been where people say, “You look like you're from here,” whether it was Brazil or whether it's Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic. There's places that I go, there are Black people all over the planet. So for me, the connection that I had to the music was more of just an interest at first. It was like, “Oh, I like how that sounds.” Like, “I would love to learn how to dance that,” and really like, I started taking Zumba classes. That was my, I call it my gateway drug to salsa dancing. I was at the gym and I saw this class, right, and the lights, yeah, the lights were turned down low (right?) and there was like this, like four-foot-eleven Latina chick on stage with like all this energy, and like the music was pumping. I was like, “What is this class? I have to like find out what this is.” Right? So that's how I started. I went to Zumba and I got this courage like, “Oh, yeah, I know how to dance salsa now. I've been doing Zumba.” Right? And then I go out to like learn how to dance house, and I realize I didn't know how to dance at all. So I started taking salsa classes. I started listening to the music. I started traveling, so it really just evolved from that, and I really wanted to understand what I was listening to.


And one thing, there's like one pivotal moment, I think, for me that really made me realize that I need to get more into this than just the surface level, and that was a song that's really, really popular. It's a classic salsa song, and most salceros, so people who dance salsa, dance to the song all the time, and it's called Rebelión, and it's by an artist called Joe Arroyo, and he's from Colombia. Okay? He's actually from Cartagena, which was actually a really popular slave port back in the day, so to speak. So I remember listening to that song, and I heard in the chorus, he says: “No le pegue a la negra,” which is like literally, “Don't hit this black woman, don't hit my woman.” And I was like, “Wait, what? What is he talking about? I need to look into this.” Right? So I got the lyrics of the song, and I actually found out it's actually about a slave rebellion in Cartagena, Colombia. And I really, at the time, had no concept of the connection between sort of the history of Black people in the United States with the history of people in South America and the Caribbean because we just weren't taught that. And even though I had educated myself outside of school about like African history and things like that, I didn't understand the cultural connection and the connection to the music, so looking into things like that made me realize, like I was really ignorant to a culture that really is about me, you know, so it kind of helped me make learning Spanish more than just learning the language, but really connecting with another part of my culture that I didn't know about, even though there's people that just happen to speak a different language than me.


Kerstin Cable: That's a really powerful story that is really fascinating as well, and to… Yeah, there's something about, and I think especially with… I don't know. Especially with Americans, a lot of people in the USA, I think because the USA is such a young country, when you've got European people, we all kind of, we don't really do the thing where we trace our ancestry as much and say like… And I certainly wouldn't tell anybody I am French if I've got French ancestry, because I feel just like I’m German and that's not just something... We just don't question that kind of thing. In the same way that in America, you will find somebody who's like third, what, fifth-generation Swedish, so they have like one Swedish great-grandmother and they will say, they will often say to you, “I am Swedish,” or I've had a lot of American (what I would class as an American, U.S. American) say to me, “I’m German.” So there is in the U.S. kind of culture generally, I think because it's a young country made up of immigrants, probably, there's this look towards, you know, defining your ancestry, and I had not really connected that that is a thing that is in a way really… You're right. It's easier for white people in the USA because there's less of a kind of wiping out and vagueness in the documentation of how people came. Right?


Tamara Marie: Right. Well, in some cases I know from coming through Ellis Island in New York City, which is kind… We’re back, we're talking about New York again. You're right, I didn't expect to be talking about New York this much. But where the Statue of Liberty is, right? Coming through Ellis Island, which is where most white immigrants came to the U.S., they actually did keep fairly decent records, and they also, it was interesting... I believe the story is, they could, you could choose your own name, so some people who had a name that sounded either maybe it was very a Jewish-sounding name or Italian-sounding name — because at the time in the U.S. it wasn't good to be an immigrant from certain places just depending on when in our history you look, right?


Kerstin Cable: Oh, yeah.


Tamara Marie: So people would actually, when they asked them their names at the dock, they would come up with like a more “Anglo” sort of quote-unquote sounding name, so they would cut off names, they would change them there. So when you look at sort of the history, when people go back and look, they find like sort of where these changes happened. But yes, because Black people were considered property, we didn't have surnames, so we didn't have last names. So basically, you were associated as property from the plantation where you were, so actually, the name that, my last name that I had when I was born is not a name that I use because I don't associate it... It's actually British, and I know that I’m not like British, so I never really wanted to use that name. So it's something like Malcolm X popularized, like everyone goes, “Why did he call himself Malcolm X?” Well, X means unknown (right?) in math, so he was saying, “I don't know where I came from,” and it was very militant at the time. But to me, it's just common sense. Right? So we were given first names, and Black people weren't allowed to get married. So there's all these things, right, that kind of did not only wipe out our identity in terms of who we were, but didn't allow us to sort of establish a new identity here because we were legally kept from, you know, establishing citizenship and establishing, you know, even a first and last name, because we just were property. So know that we don't have records. No one said, “Oh, I picked up this slave from Angola, right, and here's his granddaughter.” No. So we really have absolutely no idea.


And there's actually a fascinating series about this, I think it’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He's a professor at Harvard in Massachusetts, and he's done like a whole series where he takes celebrities (white, Black and whatever), and he traces back their lineage for them, and they do all this research and they give them these books and they reveal like, “Oh, your great-grandfather was a slaveowner,” or, “Oh, your great-grandmother was in the Holocaust.” Like they do all of these, like really, really interesting reveals, because yeah, here, we have such a disconnection to our past, so-called, from the eastern part of the world, so we are a pretty young country and there is this need to sort of connect.


And I think that's why, even like in Latino culture, like I said, it developed out of this idea that we're all here in the U.S., but we all have roots other places, so we're not 100% from there, we're not 100% from here. We're this hybrid. Right? We're something in between. So it's really is a new identity that we've had to forage for ourselves here in the U.S. as Black people, Latino people, white people too, because we just, we're something else than what we came from, but we still find a need to connect with that to kind of figure out who we are now and where we're going. So it really is unique and interesting, I think.


Kerstin Cable: And you mentioned identity, and that’s really what pulls it back into language again, isn't it, where language is identity? And you said before about the identity of salsa, almost, or this feeling of salsa, this kind of general feel of the Spanish that we, that really Caribbean Spanish… God, I feel like I sound so academic trying to put this even into words. Sorry, this is the driest summary ever, but this kind of whole feeling, this new thing, the way that the Puerto Rican and Dominican and Cuban and whatever, Haitian, cultures from Caribbean kind of melted together and brought their Spanish together and created the salsa. It puts it into such a good context and makes it so clear how you fit into that and how that fits into you, and how it really then becomes part of your identity to pick that up.


Tamara Marie: Yeah, exactly, and I think too, you know, it's interesting because a lot of the music now that’s really worldwide (right?), a lot of American culture has been exported throughout the world. That includes, you know, Latin American culture, Black American culture. I remember the first time I heard like a hip-hop group in Japan (right?) like rapping I was like, “What? What's going on? That was our thing.” Right? So it's really interesting how the U.S. is great at exporting its culture, and I think with Latin American culture in particular, a lot of it does come from the Caribbean, and people tend to not associate Spanish with the Caribbean as much. I think people think more of like Jamaica or Trinidad or something like that, but there actually is the largest population of Spanish speakers, or, I should say the majority of people in the Caribbean as a whole, when you take all the islands are Spanish speakers, because you've got Puerto Rico, you've got Dominican Republic, you've got Cuba. And that, it is actually really prevalent in the Caribbean. So it's really interesting how we don't really think of that as Latino culture, and there is something to be said for, you know, yes, it's really different to be from the Caribbean than from South America, but from a cultural perspective, when you sort of like everything’s sort of mixed together and sort of exported as this sort of package of, you know, salsa music, we have also now bachata, reggaeton, there's all of these different genres of music, and they're popular throughout the world.


So the Spanish that we’re taught in school, for example, is either from Spain or from Mexico. Right? And even not just in formal education. In a lot of language courses, a lot, and even in the media there's a lot of Mexicans, often lighter-skinned people as well, or in like the telenovelas. So what you see sort of put forward is this idea that there's this very European or very white sort of Spanish, but the reality is, the way the language is spoken is not that way. The culture that gave birth to salsa also sort of exported this different type of language, so it comes down to things like one just kind of quick example of like the accent, if I was to say, “I’m tired,” right, in Spanish, I would say estoy cansada. However, if I’m from the Caribbean, I would say estoy cansa. Like the d kind of disappears, so it's sort of like just…


Kerstin Cable: Wow.


Tamara Marie: … a feature of that accent. So if you're listening to music that's from those places and you hear these sort of differences and you go, “Well, that's not... I don't hear vosotros, and, you know, no one told me that words get cut off this way,” like you just don't have an awareness of that, so you get really demotivated. At least I know I did, speaking for myself, like, “Hey, I've been studying Spanish, but I can't understand the song. I can't understand people in my neighborhood because they're from Puerto Rico, they're from Dominican Republic. They don't speak like what people tell you about in academia, right, that the Spanish language is,” but the young people are listening to the music. Right? I had an exchange student from Spain, and she knew Romeo Santos, which is a bachata artist in New York City who has Puerto Rican and Dominican parents. Right? But she knows his music. They don't dance to it there, but they know the music, so they're being exposed, like the world is being exposed to this way of speaking Spanish that is sort of frowned upon by academic sort of standards of language, which I think is kind of a shame, because it's not that it's an incorrect way to speak. I think that it's just a different way of speaking Spanish, and a lot of the words that are in the Spanish language from Latin America actually come from the Indigenous cultures in the Americas, which is why there are so many differences, like even with English, right, English in the United States and English in the UK are very different. There's a lot of things I don't understand. If I was to go to London, right, there's words that I don't know. Right? So here it's the same thing. So the Spanish language in Latin America and the Caribbean specifically have a lot of words that are coming from the Indigenous people in those areas and they've all sort of mixed together with what we call Spanish here. So it is very different, and if you don't know and understand that, it's really, really difficult to understand the language, because it's not the way it's taught in school.


Kerstin Cable: You're almost, you're kind of stealing my thunder for one of my two questions that I’m able to ask you in Spanish, so I want to know more about this and I’m going to ask you in Spanish and see how much I can keep up with your reply. ¿Cuáles son las cosas que distinguen el español en el Caribe al español en otros lugares?


Tamara Marie: Hay muchas cosas la verdad, pero uno es el acento que mencioné antes y otra es algunas palabras como la palabra maracuyá, que en inglés es passion fruit. La primera vez que yo probé maracuyá fue en Puerto Rico, y en Puerto Rico se llama parcha, pero yo no sabía. Yo no sabía que tiene varias palabras para describir una sola cosa como una fruta. Entonces eso es una cosa. Cada isla tiene sus propias palabras para describir las cosas que vienen de esas islas. Eso es una cosa. Otra cosa es el acento cómo se cortan o se comen a veces, dicen, se comen la letra d cuando está entre de dos vocales como cansada cansa, cansado cansao. cosas así.


También creo que es la manera de ellos hablan porque hablan muy, muy rápido. Se cortan las palabras y hablan muy rápido, y para mí es difícil. Estoy tratando de hablar lentamente ahora porque yo, naturalmente, yo hablo muy rápido en inglés también. Sí. Entonces, porque ellos hablan muy rápido y también se cortan las palabras, es difícil entenderlos a veces porque hablan tan rápido y con palabras distintas y también con palabras cortas. Entonces esos son las diferencias más comunes del español del Caribe y de otros países.


Kerstin Cable: Sí, claro. ¿Qué son las muy grandes problemas que tú…?  Como… Yo puedo decir que tú… ¿Noticias?


Tamara Marie: ¿Notaste?


Kerstin Cable: Okay. Yeah, que tú notas cuando la gente… I’ve gone off-script and I’m trying to speak Spanish without a script. This is what’s happening here, listeners, so let’s try again. ¿Cuáles son los problemas muy grandes que tú notas cuando la gente empieza a hablar el español como idioma nuevo, y particularmente el español del Caribe?


Tamara Marie: Creo que es las cosas que he mencionado, como la velocidad que ellos hablan es muy rápido, entonces es muy difícil… Ah, y también la S.


Kerstin Cable: Sí, sí.


Tamara Marie: Recuerdo eso porque yo lo hago a veces cuando yo hablo, sí, porque digo algo como e en vez de es porque es un hábito que tengo del español del Caribe, ¿no? Entonces, sí, se cortan la s también. Entonces cosas así son muy difícil porque para mí, la primera vez que yo fui a la República Dominicana, yo fui con un amigo y estábamos en aeropuerto, y su primo me saludaba como Ay, Tamara, ¿que lo que? y yo estaba ¿Qué? ¿Que lo que? That which is what? ¿Qué? No entiendo. ¿No? Pero eso es una manera de decir ¿Cómo estás? ¿Qué andas? Cosas así. Entonces… 


Kerstin Cable: Ah, que lo que.


Tamara Marie: Sí, que lo que. Es algo muy dominicano, perdón [unclear 29:03]. Es algo muy dominicana. Entonces cosas así. También en Cuba se dicen asere como decir algo como amigo o, no sé, ese tipo. Es como Ah, asere, asere, ¿cómo estás? o ¿Qué bola? en vez de decir ¿Qué tal? Entonces cada isla tiene su propia manera de hablar, su propio acento, y eso creo que es un problema por algunos estudiantes porque están escuchando un curso que dice, Hola. ¿Cómo está usted? Yo estoy bien, gracias. ¿Y usted? ¿Sí? Y nadie habla así, especialmente en el Caribe, entonces es muy difícil convertirse la manera de escuchamos en los cursos a hablar con una persona del Caribe porque ellos hablan una manera totalmente diferente. Entonces esos son los problemas, y por eso, es por eso yo tuve que crear mi propio curso de español del Caribe porque cuando yo fui al Caribe me ya noté que, Ay, yo no puedo entender. No hay recursos para aprender español del Caribe, y entonces yo tengo que crear mis propios recursos porque yo tengo que… Mira. Me gusta viajar. ¿No? Me gusta viajar a cualquier país y especialmente en el Caribe porque tienen salsa, tienen las playas bonitas, tienen todo lo que quiero. También tiene comida muy buena. Entonces para mí, viajar al Caribe es algo que yo voy a hacer toda mi vida si puedo. Entonces para mí, fue muy importante entender la gente del Caribe porque ellos tienen la música, ellos tienen las islas, ellos tienen de todo. Entonces para mí fue importante crear una manera de que las personas que quieren aprender la cultura, el idioma, del Caribe puedan hacerlo de una manera fácil porque es muy difícil entender cuando alguien habla de un país que es muy distinto ¿no? que no…


Kerstin Cable: Sí, sí, sí. Claro.


Tamara Marie: Si no estás acostumbrada, ¿sí?


Kerstin Cable: ¿Tienes un lugar perfecto en el mundo donde se habla en español?


Tamara Marie: Wow. Eso es difícil. No sé. No sé. Para mí… No sé, porque he viajado mucho y me gustan muchos países, pero la verdad es que dicen que Colombia tiene el mejor acento de español, ¿no?, porque la manera de ellos hablan en Colombia... Y también Colombia tiene una costa Caribe, ¿no? Mucha gente no saben, pero Colombia, en el norte, tiene una costa que es parte del Caribe, entonces Cartagena es una ciudad en Colombia, pero es una ciudad caribeña, entonces… Pero creo que en Bogotá, en el interior, hablan diferente, Medellín, hablan diferente, pero normalmente la gente dice que en Colombia tiene un mejor acento y también Colombia tiene el Caribe, también tiene el interior, tiene las montañas, tiene las playas, entonces yo creo que Colombia, pero no sé si es seguro, pero me gusta el acento de Colombia también.


Kerstin Cable: Vale, vale. Vamos a volver a safer ground, for me.


Tamara Marie: Al inglés, al inglés.


Kerstin Cable: Al inglés, al inglés, o al alemán. No, vamos a volver al inglés. So I can tell that te gusta mucho Cartagena in particular, and it’s not a place I've ever paid any attention to, so I’m really curious about it. Now, what about, do you feel any connection to European Spanish?


Tamara Marie: La verdad es que no. Really, I could say no. It's interesting, because I've only been to Europe once, and it was actually to go to Berlin. I've only been to Germany, believe it or not. So I haven't spent a lot of time in Europe.


Kerstin Cable: We are much prettier than Berlin, really.


Tamara Marie: I've had people tell me that I have to go to Spain. It is on my list, but I can clearly hear the difference in accents, which is something that, you know, as a beginner and even lower-intermediate learner I could not hear, but now, when someone opens their mouth and they're from Spain, I can tell like immediately. If someone's from Argentina, I can tell immediately. So yeah, I just have this connection with the music and the culture of the Caribbean, and it's also the way that I speak. So even when I was in Colombia, they told me that my accent was like a mix of like Dominican, Cuban and Puerto Rican Spanish, and I was like, “Oh, that's perfect, but I wasn't trying to do that. I don't even know how that happened.” But yeah, it just, that's just kind of where my connection is for so many reasons that no, I don't really get down with like the European Spanish, but I understand it. I mean, I kind of get it. It's still spoken pretty fast. I think people will say that Spaniards speak fast as well, and people speak fast in the Caribbean as well, but it's just sort of a different way of speaking. I will say this, and I don't know if you knew this, Kerstin, but the connection between Spain and the Caribbean, obviously, the history of the Spaniards sort of so-called discovering the Americas (right?)...


Kerstin Cable: Yes.


Tamara Marie: ...but beyond that, like the region in southern Spain Andalusia is the most similar to the accent of the Caribbean, because it’s said that's where a lot of the, we'll call them, explorers came from. So some of the characteristics of Caribbean Spanish you'll also find in Andalusia. I actually had a friend from Puerto Rico, and he said that he was in the military. He said he traveled throughout Spain, and he said he didn't understand what anyone was saying until he got to Andalusia. He goes, “Ah, now you understand me.” So there are definitely some similarities linguistically from sort of the history of travel from Spain to the Caribbean.


Kerstin Cable: It's amazing how many linguistic traces we have, let's call it, exported. I mean, because I’m thinking about Australia when you say that and how Australia has got, the Australian accent has got certain traces of sort of British from the time, but there is a lot of like, it was used as a prison colony, so it wasn't exactly clean-cut upper-class English that made it down there. It was a different kind of English, and there's obviously lots of local influences, and that also, it developed. So we think, you know, like the... I don't know. The connections between us around the world are so close and so present, which... I don't know. It's for sad reasons, but maybe it's nice to feel connected?


Tamara Marie: I think there is a beautiful thing to it because, like I said, as I've traveled, I think one of the things that learning language has taught me and traveling with that, you know, because I think you get one experience when you travel, you get one experience when you learn a language, but when you do sort of both of them together, you get a different sort of awareness and appreciation for the connection that we have. One, that a lot of these differences don't really matter at the end of the day (right?), that you'll always find a way to communicate, but also that you can sort of trace this commonality.


I know for me, one of the most beautiful experiences I had when traveling was when I went to Cartagena (and I just went there in January, so before the world change), and it wasn't a planned trip. It was a crazy travel story which I will save for my podcast later because I've been meaning to tell the story about how I ended up in Cartagena in the first place, but it actually was funny. It was actually from that Joe Arroyo song, because in the beginning of it he says las calles de Cartagena, and I just remember hearing that from the song, and I was sort of in Central America not knowing where to go, and I said, “I know. I'll go to Cartagena. Joe Arroyo said, ‘Go to Cartagena,’ so I’ll go there.” It was literally the music that led me there.


And I go there, and they have a plaza named after him and a statue. I took a picture with it, but when I was there, the people there, they have this town called Palenque, and it actually was the first free city established for free Black people in the Americas, and I learned about it when I was there, and I was invited to go there by a woman I met on the street. And when I went, this town looks just like Africa, and the woman introduced me to, like, her family, and then I met some different people there, and they greeted me and said that we're family. They're like: Todos somos de África (we're all from Africa). And they have their own language there too, which is a whole other linguistic story for another time, but they greeted me as family, and they said they recognized, Yo soy de Estados Unidos, “I’m from the U.S.” They're like, No, no, no. Todos somos familia. And you could really feel that connection they felt there is that they were preserving something of African culture in the Americas, and they were connecting it to me even though I was from the U.S. that they said that we're all family. And I just thought that was a beautiful way to look at things, because you could easily focus on the bad things. Right? You could say, “Oh, my gosh, but you guys got here because, you know, the founder of the city was escaping slavery and all these types of things,” but they're focused on, “This is our space. We’ve preserved our culture, and we still feel connected to you because we recognize that we have the same root.”


So I think that's one of the beautiful things about it that you really don't appreciate until you have those experiences. And had I not spoken Spanish, I wouldn't have been able to have that conversation with this man, who was blacker than any man I've ever seen in my life, in the middle of Colombia. So it was a beautiful thing, and I think that that's what language allows us to do. We can connect not only with cultures of different people, but also find something about ourselves that we didn't know through travel and through learning language.


Kerstin Cable: And travel, yeah, travel, and I can see dance there as well, which is this kind of, you know, dance is a language without words, you know. It’s a way of communicating.


Tamara Marie: Yes, yes.


Kerstin Cable: It's a way of communicating, and it's a way of communicating our feelings, which is what we find so difficult with our words so many times, and which is what we find particularly difficult when we're learning another language, where it's almost impossible to express even close to what it is that you want to phrase in your head, you just can't do justice to how you're feeling. And I can… So to teach the language through music in the way that you encourage people to learn with music, to teach the language through, even through dance, has so much potential. It's so, so powerful, and I wondered, how do you integrate that into your lessons?


Tamara Marie: Well, it's really interesting that... So you mentioned that, right? So I think one of the biggest struggles that we have as language learners is that we're so technical and so like, “Oh, we want to get the words right. We want to get the diction right. We want to get the grammar right. We want to sound native,” so to speak. But we miss out on the emotion, like you talked about, right? And I think learning through music allows you to sort of put yourself in the shoes of someone else and really begin to feel what they feel. And also for you… I mean, I know at least for me, like when I’m having a bad day or I’m going through something, like music is like the most uplifting thing that you can do, so I always tell people like, you know, if you're like, “Oh, I’m trying to learn this language, and I’m having a hard time, and I’m struggling,” you know, if you listen to a song, I mean, even if you don't understand all the words at first, you know, it'll uplift you, and it'll take sort of the heaviness away from studying and trying to be perfect, and it'll just allow you to be with the language and with the music and with your own emotions, and once you get to that state, as you know, you can't learn anything if you're in a stressed out state, so music just kind of relaxes you and allows you to get into that flow where you can actually begin to absorb what you're learning and retain it in the first place.


So one of the ways that I use music is, one, is helping people realize that you have that connection to yourself, to the emotions, to the culture as you're learning the language. And what I do sort of more technically is, I take out from the lyrics of the songs and I use real Latin music. I don’t... These aren't like songs that I, you know, make up for like language learning, because I know there's some things like, “Let's learn the alphabet in, you know, Spanish.” Right? It's not like that. I actually use real music, and what I do is, I take lessons from it. So if there's a phrase that you can actually use in conversation, we'll sort of like piece that out and then we'll talk about, “Okay, here are some ways that you can begin to use it.” So one example of a song that I use that I really like because it's an uplifting song is called Vivir Mi Vida by Marc Anthony​ and it's “to live your life”, right? And in the chorus he says Voy a vivir. Voy a reír. Voy a bailar. So, “I’m going to laugh. I’m going to dance. I’m going to live.” Right? He says it over and over again, and it's the chorus of the song. So you hear it repeatedly, and if you're singing along, you go, “Oh, I just learned the simple future,” but you weren't trying to learn the simple future. You were just singing along with Marc Anthony. But now I can say, “Ah, voy al supermercado.” Right? “I’m going to the store.” Or Voy a comer, “I’m going to eat.” So I take those lessons out of the song lyrics and say, “Hey, you're learning this in the song. You already know how to pronounce it because you've been singing along with it. So now, let's just try to use that in your daily conversation.”


So that's what I do through my lessons is, I break down the song lyrics, explain some of the cultural aspects as well, because Marc Anthony, like throughout the song, he also says like wepa (right?), which is a very Puerto Rican thing to say. So like I explain that stuff and I say, “Hey, he says this because he's from Puerto Rico. This is the only place you're going to hear it. This is what it means, so use it at your discretion (right?), but if you go to Colombia, maybe no one knows what you're talking about.” So just, I explain those things because I think they're very important to understand. You know, language isn't this generic thing you could just pick up and take anywhere. You sort of have to understand those nuances to really have an appreciation for the culture and the language.


So that's what I do when I do it through courses. I do self-study. I also do live classes. I have a membership, so I offer it in different ways for people to get them wherever they are and how they prefer to learn, but that's the basic way that I use the music through learning.


Kerstin Cable: You've mentioned something earlier that people say, which is, “I want to sound native,” and for me, that was such a strong indication and such a... I hear that so much and I get it so much also from learners of any language, and who doesn't want it? Like we all want to sound like a native. Of course you do. But it's such an, I guess, a giveaway of the thinking mind and how the thinking mind is getting involved in language learning, because if you've got that kind of thing in your mind, you are holding yourself to a standard, my friend, that you're possibly never going to reach, so you're forever comparing, you’re forever measuring, and I find that really, really dangerous. I love how you explain that, “Look, just listen to some music. Listen to a song. See what makes you dance. See what makes your body move. See what makes you sing along.” You give people a way to switch the thinking mind off.” ¿No?


Tamara Marie: Exactly, and the irony is, Kerstin, I'll tell you this because it happened to me, and this is how I really got started with teaching other people, because before it was just something I did on my own, and when I would be out dancing, I often… Now, I’m not a singer. I can't sing, so don't be under any illusions that I’m, you know, somehow gifted musically, but because I was like learning the songs and I knew the lyrics, like when I dance I naturally kind of sing because I’m in a good mood. Right? I’m like, “Hey, I’m dancing.” And through that, like a lot of people I would dance with thought that I was a native Spanish speaker, and I said, “Okay, well, that's just kind of a fluke because I've been dancing,” and, you know, whatever. They quickly found out that I wasn't when they spoke to me because I would tell them, “Yeah, I’m from here.”


But it's interesting too, though, that one time I was in, I was doing a language exchange, and I was in this cafe. And the cafe was about to close, so I was like, you know, I was on Skype call and I was like, “All right, let me close up my computer and everything.” And the guy that was closing down the cafe, he started asking me, he's like, “Oh, so you're... Where are you from?” “I’m from the United States.” He goes, “No, seriously. Where are you really from?” “I’m from the U.S.” He starts laughing. He's like, “I thought that that was your native language,” because I was on the Skype call and I was speaking Spanish, so he heard me speaking Spanish. He thought I was a native speaker, and again, I thought, “Oh, this is a fluke.” Right?


So I never gave myself credit for it, but what I realized, because I was learning in such a relaxed state and I was just singing along with the music, I naturally picked up the accent, so it wasn't something I tried to do. I didn't strive to sound like I’m from Puerto Rico, but sometimes when people talk to me, that's where they think I’m from. So I think that the irony is that when you let go of that sort of grasping and striving for perfection, that you actually kind of relax yourself into it, you kind of lean into it when you're in a flow state, and music is the perfect thing to get you into that state, so lots of people learning through music. You naturally pick up the accent, and you don't have to really worry about it too much because it comes from just imitating the sounds you hear in the music.


Kerstin Cable: So true, so true, and such a powerful, such a good example as well. I've often felt this as well that you... I want to say to people, you know, the more you relax into it, the more you chill, the stronger everything else will become. It's a bit like... I’m trying at the moment to learn how to roller skate, and one of the…


Tamara Marie: [chuckles]


Kerstin Cable: Yeah, I know. [laughs] One of the things that they tell you is very much like, “Don't look down. Don't look down,” because you're on the roller skates, you're feeling really unsteady. So part of you just wants to look down just to make sure... I don't know what I’m even trying to achieve, but, you know, like you want to look down to make sure like your feet are still there or whatever, but you're not going to move the right way. If you look down, you're essentially, you're ruining, walking for your like… You're just confusing your feet, or I don't even know what happens. So the more you look ahead and you put your arms out and you do all the things that feel kind of counterintuitive at the start because you're so desperately trying to control it, the more you let go and just give your body, trust your body’s strength and just look ahead of you, that’s when all of your natural balance kicks in. And it feels to me like what you're saying about learning, it just reminds me of that. It's just this sort of “don't look down” way of learning a language.


Tamara Marie: Right. Exactly, exactly, and I think the less that you're preoccupied with those things, the better your performance is, even though you're not thinking about it, so yeah. I think it's definitely the case.


Kerstin Cable: We get to have a play, we get to have some fun and we get to… So this isn't really about like, everybody has to listen to salsa now. It is about finding the type of sounds, finding the type of music, finding the kind of culture that appeals to you. And something that I think you say in the intro of your podcast is learning a language culture first.


Tamara Marie: Yeah, definitely, and I think the interesting thing you say (and everybody has to listen to salsa now), but yes, you should find the music that you connect with, but one of the interesting things about the salsa community is that there is a global community of people who dance to Latin music. Salsa, bachata, which is another genre of music that comes from Dominican Republic, is very, very popular now, reggaetons from Puerto Rico. So, like there's all of these genres of music.


But for salsa in particular, there is an international community of people who dance salsa that are not Latino, that are not Spanish speakers, and they're dancing to this music, and I go, “Well, do you understand even what you're dancing to? How can you embody this music through dance if you don't understand where the people come from, if you don't know anything about the culture?” So I think there is a real disconnect when you have people and sort of like you're dancing that line between, you know, cultural appropriation and sort of like what is it that you're really connected to? Is this just something you're trying to do for show to kind of show off, kind of like this idea of like, “Oh, I’m a polyglot. I speak 400 languages,” or, you know, “Oh, I’m a dancer, but I don't know anything about the culture”?


So I think it’s this thing of like really authentically getting to know the people and the culture through the music, through dance, through travel, through whatever it is that gives you a true connection to it, because once you do that, it's no longer a foreign language. It's something that's part of you, so even if you're not technically savvy… Right? Like for me, like I mentioned the song Vivir Mi Vida. That's a song that helps me. Like when I was going through a tough time, like that song is a part of my DNA, like you can't take that away from me. I’m not trying, I’m not striving to become a thing. This is just part of my life now. So I think that's what you're striving for with any language is to find a way to make it a part of you, and that's how it becomes no longer a foreign language, and that's how it really becomes part of who you are.


Kerstin Cable: Yeah, it's about… It’s like living it versus performing it.


Tamara Marie: Exactly, exactly.


Kerstin Cable: Yes, absolutely. I so agree with you, and I feel like that about… When I think about… Like the language I have struggled with all year not because it's so hard or it's so easy… You know, for me, it's not about like whether… I don't worry about that so much, but the language where I continue been saying, “I just can't... I’m enjoying it, and I’m enjoying it on a theoretical level, and I’m enjoying testing myself and my mental ability to learn these bits, but I’m lacking the connection.” It's been Mandarin Chinese, which I can now sort of put sentences together, and my teacher is very excited, and that's all very nice, but that’s kind of it for me. It’s like it's “all very nice”, and I don't have the drive to tell anybody… Like I’m not learning it even to brag about it. I’m just kind of, I wanted to try and see, and it's been something I've really been grappling with, like what is it that made me fall in love with Welsh but not fall in love with Mandarin Chinese? And it’s like you say, it's the living it, the connection to it, and that is what makes you, I think that is what makes you really good at the language. That is what makes all the difference. And for some people it has to be, “I am moving there,” and nothing else will do, but I think it doesn't have to be that. You can connect with a particular culture through many, many means, and music is one of the most powerful ways I can think of to do that.


It even reminds me, you know, when I was little and I was a German kid, we had so much English around us. Most other, you know, definitely most European countries, we've got so much American culture. We've got so much English, you know, everywhere around us. It's, like you say with the Japanese hip-hop, we totally have German hip-hop. It’s something that came over to us, so that by the time we learn English, it's not about like saying, “I can learn English.” It's about like wanting a piece of that stuff that's always been around us, almost.


Tamara Marie: Yeah, and I think it's interesting too, because for English I think a lot of people learn it because they feel like they have to (right?) for either to get a job or for business reasons. And I know when I was volunteering at this program teaching English, I remember the first time I came across someone who said that they really liked American music, and I was confused because for me I just, I was like, “What? What are you talking about?” They're like, “No, I really want to learn English.” They were really passionate, but you could tell the difference between them and the people who were learning it because they wanted to get a better job. Right? They were so much better because they really enjoyed whatever the American music was that… It wasn't a genre I like, so I don't remember what it was, but yeah, but because she had connected with it that way, that really helped it stick.


So I think, yeah, motivation is interesting. I think if you don't find that connection, it's going to be really hard. I know for me with Portuguese, I followed a similar track, but for me it was samba. So I really like samba. It's a challenge, but I’m like, “Ah, I can dance salsa. I can dance bachata. I can figure out bachata.” Haven't done it yet, but I have been taking samba classes online, and that also helps me connect with some music. So I've learned about some new songs that I really like and some different musicians. So that's been helping me reconnect with my motivation for Portuguese, because after I left Brazil, I kind of was like, “I don't really need it right now,” but it's kind of helped me reconnect to kind of find that thing that I could help push myself forward with my Portuguese. So yeah, I think it's important that everyone finds what it is for them.


Kerstin Cable: And that's why you can't, you know, like we can't formularize, formulize… [laughs] this culture-first thing. We can only say like, wait until you really, you get the butterflies (right?) and you're starting to feel it. And for me, like Welsh, for example, there's a music scene. I really like indie music, and there's a strong music scene there, so I very quickly found music that made me feel like, “Yeah, I can go to a festival and watch this. I can go and see gigs by these bands and I’m going to have a great time,” and it connected me so, so much. Now, in your podcast (see, I’m paying a lot of attention to your podcast intro, because I thought it was a really good mission statement), another thing that I heard was, “Shut down the language apps,” and I thought, “Oh, why? Can an app ever have salsa?” But I’m beginning to get a sense of why an app doesn't have the salsa.


Tamara Marie: Yeah, it's interesting. So one of the things I say, “Shut down the apps and close the grammar textbooks,” (right?) because I think that as learners, like I said, we approach things like very academically. And, yes, you should be proficient in your language. I’m not suggesting that you just make mistakes for no reason and you never actually try to learn from a book, but I think that what gets people stuck is that they spend all this time with their noses in books and they're on these apps, but, you know, I have people who've told me like I've had clients, “Oh, yes, I've been learning Spanish for two years now,” and I say, Ah, hola. ¿Cómo estás? And they're like, “Uh… Uh, hi.” And I’m like, “Whoa. Wait a minute, like, you should be able to answer that.” I mean, you know, so I think that part of what happens is that we get so caught up in learning that we don't actually get into doing and being with the language. So we spend a lot of time like, “Oh, yes, I got a trophy today in Duolingo,” or, you know, “I was on Drops and I learned like four new characters,” which is great; you need that foundation. But I think at a certain point, you need to sort of step away from some of that stuff and actually just try to use what you know. Even if you just know like five words, use those words. I always tell people, “Just start speaking when you can and talk to real people, because otherwise you're never going to get over your fear of speaking.” And I think that a lot of people get caught up in that learning mode, and they don't actually start using the language, and then it's really hard to find that connection when you're not actually using it and you haven't connected with, I don't know, a dance, or a song, or a person, like something to really make the language come alive for you. Right? Because what do they say? Languages that aren't spoken are called dead languages. So if you're not speaking it and you're not using it, it's really not alive for you.


So I think that that is an important part that you've got to step away from those apps at some point once you have that foundation, and it's usually earlier than you think it is. You know, a lot of times, you're like, “Oh, I get to A1 level and then I can start speaking.” You know, no, you don't really need to wait for that. Do you know a few words? Use them. Right? So I think that's part of the thing that really helps you also move forward faster, even though it's uncomfortable, I think if we stay stuck in that mode of, “I’m just learning and I’m not doing, I’m not speaking, I’m not being,” then we're never going to get to fluency.


Kerstin Cable: So true. Yeah, and it's that it's right, you're hitting on that thing that I think we, a lot of people tell themselves, which is this almost like thinking, “I’m not allowed to.” Right? “I must get to the end of the Duolingo tree before I have permission to possibly say Hola, ¿cómo estás?” And that is just not true. It is just not true. They're two completely different world. You're making me… It’s weird. You're really making me see the connection between, you're making me feel like there's something so physical about learning a language. No, there's something so physical about speaking a language and really embodying that language. I guess, body, right? And it reminds me again of roller skating, like I can't sit here on the internet and read five articles about how to skate and then watch a few YouTube videos, and it's going to make me any good at skating. Right?


Tamara Marie: Right. Right, and I think too, it's funny. I think, you know anything about personality, I know a lot of people just kind of in language learning community it comes up sometimes of, you know, do you feel like your personality changes when you speak different languages? Right? And I think it’s a way of exploring different aspects of yourself. Right? Because there's things that I say in Spanish or in Portuguese that, you know, are very different versus like a language like Arabic that I just started learning again that is, it's so different, that they're so, there's things I just wouldn't express or I wouldn't know how to express or would express very differently in those different languages because of all those different cultural influences and because of sort of who I am. Right? So trying to make a joke in a language, too, is another thing of like, oh, you really realize like you're trying to like search for, putting your personality into the language and not just kind of sounding like a textbook robot. Right? So yeah. I think that you've got to sort of try those things out so that they can really become a part of you.


Kerstin Cable: It's such an individual way of viewing language learning, or at this point it is very much — because, like you say, it's not the academic way, and it is not really a testable way. Right? You can't test how somebody, like, I don't know, your salsa meter tells me you've got 60% salsa in you in your Spanish. We can't measure this. So it gives me an idea of something I wanted to ask you about too to kind of conclude is the existence of Spanish Con Salsa as an online business, like why did you choose to teach in the way that you do?


Tamara Marie: Well, it's really because, you know, from a perspective of authenticity, like I mentioned, I noticed that people were trying to learn Spanish, but they're struggling with this thing of like, “I don't want to speak,” or they didn't understand people and they would go, “Well, I don't understand. I've been learning Spanish; why don't I understand my neighbor?” Or, you know, for example, or, “Why don't I understand people when I go out dancing and I’m trying to have a conversation? Everyone speaks so fast.” Like all these things people are struggling with, and I go, “You know, what is it that I did,” and I kind of deconstructed my own process and I started helping other people learn that way. So initially, you know, I had planned to just sort of do it more of an academic way. I got my language coaching certification. I said, “Okay, I really like being a coach. I like helping people through conversation,” which I still think is very important, but part of the connection I was missing with just that approach was, you know, I noticed I would be talking to my coaching clients and they would start saying, “Oh, yeah, I was listening to this Daddy Yankee song,” or whatever, and I'd be like, “Oh, yeah, let's talk about that.” You know, and I like, “Yeah, that's how I learned too,” so it just sort of became a natural thing that rolled into some of those conversations.


And as people would ask me, “Well, what did you do?” I just kind of mapped out, “Okay, well, here's what I did. This worked for me.” Like, “Well, how do you speak the way you speak?” I don't know. This is just what I did. I didn't go take a pronunciation course. I just, I've been listening to a lot of Marc Anthony. Right? So I just kind of use that way because it's what worked for me and because there are so many people who do love Latin culture and love the music even though they may not be Latino, and [unclear 01:01:45] there's also a lot of Latinos who don't speak Spanish, and they have family, they have grandmas they can't talk to. They've got children that they want to speak the language. So they're all looking for that connection to their own culture too, in a very practical way, and they all grew up listening to the music. So it just was a natural fit of, you know, something that I did that I knew worked, something that was, you know, people were just interested in, and it just made sense. So I started teaching that way, and eventually I developed a course Spanish Con Salsa and also developed a membership for people who want more of that interaction, that more community aspect. So we have like, you know, weekly conversation practice and groups. They have 101 practice to really get people from just kind of singing along with the songs in the shower to actually speaking to real people. So that's kind of the next hurdle after you get comfortable with listening.


But yeah, I just found that it was something that worked, and also for listening comprehension, it's really, really important, because all this thing about, “Spanish is too fast,” right? People say that about most languages they learn. “Oh, this language’s native speakers talk too fast.” But the problem is because…


Kerstin Cable: Yeah, as if it's a native speaker's fault.


Tamara Marie: Right. Like I say, “No, they're talking at a normal speed. You've got to really tune your ear to what they're saying,” but the thing about music is that it's not this contrived sort of classroom dialogue thing. It's like you're listening to native speakers speaking in their own voice about things that are important to them, and they're doing it through music, and if you learn that way, not only can you connect with people and be singing along with the songs at the party with everyone else when you travel or when you're hanging out with your friends, but you also kind of develop like this sort of natural ability to sort of hear the rhythm of the language, even though, yes, you know, music isn't conversational in most cases, but you really get that rhythm and the flow of the language through the music, and because those melodies stick to your brain... Like I always tell people, like everyone remembers the alphabet song. Right? It's like your first linguistic activity and it's also the first song you knew, right? So you remember that melody. You remember that… Even if you have to think of a letter, you might go where, “Okay, what letter comes before p? Oh a, b, c, d, e, f, g,” so you have to kind of run through that in your head. Right? So music sticks to your memory 1000%, and a lot of language learning is for getting things that you learned already. So, you know, for your memory, for your listening comprehension, for improving your accent, it just sort of has all of that naturally combined in the music, and it's a three-minute song. You know, you're not trying to listen to a four-hour audiobook that you're going to get lost in the first 30 seconds, because nobody has a long attention span these days.


So instead of listening to the news in Spanish or listening to some dry content from a course or some contrived information that was put online for language learners, listen to native speakers in their own thing, doing their own thing in their own language, and then you'll start to hear and understand how native speakers talk. Like amazing, right? So if you actually just listen to native speakers, it's hard at first, but the more and more you get accustomed to it. I always tell people you have to put in the reps. Right? Like just like if you're going to the gym, you're trying to build a muscle, you can't do it just once. Right? You can't, “Oh, I’m going to go to the gym once a week.” Right? No, you've got to go like almost every day, at least three times a week (right?) to make progress. So it's the same thing with listening. You've got to repeat, repeat, repeat, and songs are perfect for that. They're short, like three minutes long, the chorus repeats itself several times within the song, so you get these short bits of language that are repeated over and over again. It's like the perfect recipe for your memory and for language learning, so I just found that it worked really, really well and that people often can't tell you like, “Oh, I don't know why it works or how it works,” but it's like this magic voodoo, right? But it really isn't magic. It's just repetition, it’s melody, it's rhythm. It's all those things that, as humans, we naturally gravitate towards and that stick to our memory and also help us feel comfortable and relaxed in that state that we can really retain information.


So that's how I started, and, you know, Spanish Con Salsa, the podcast, came out of sort of an extension of that business because I really found that, you know, podcasts always helped me with language learning. I love podcasts. I love podcasts in general, and it's something that I wanted to do for a long time, and one day it was actually through an accident I had. And I actually had broken my arm, so I couldn't type, so I couldn't do my blog anymore for a couple months. Right? So I said, “Oh, I have a microphone. I can talk. Let me get a microphone,” so I did a podcasting course and I, like, set it up and I set a launch date, and I recorded some episodes, and I got started. So that's how, so through an unfortunate circumstance, I was able to turn that around and to make it the Learn Spanish Con Salsa podcast, so...


Kerstin Cable: I love that. Do you get some pushback from learners who come to you and they expect a clean-cut Spanish lesson, or do you now just attract the people who already get it?


Tamara Marie: I think I've had like one person who said, “Oh, this isn't for me. Maybe it's because I’m an older guy and I don't connect with the music,” but I think that happened like one time. I think that, in general, yeah, people are either appreciative because there’s music they already kind of know but they didn't understand it, or they go, “Oh, my God, I never knew about this artist. This is really cool. Now this is one of my favorite songs.” So it's really like a way to add to your playlist as well. So that's also why it works, because they're listening in the car, listening around the house, so I’m helping them sort of build their playlist. So it's actually, yeah, people usually are in a good mood when they're listening to music, so I haven't had like people who didn't connect with it. And, quite frankly, I do, like I said, I tie in, you know, some of the grammar, I tie in sort of the more academic side, but I do that through the music. So, for instance, I teach the simple future through Marc Anthony's song Vivir Mi Vida because it's just perfect for that. Right? And then I just kind of add on to it, and yeah, I do include grammar lessons. I include some like pronunciation exercises. I include listening exercises. So I do give people sort of a little bit of everything within that, but I start always with the music.


Kerstin Cable: Now, final question I have for you is: If there was something that you could change in the world of language learning, what would you like to see change?


Tamara Marie: Wow, that's an interesting question.


Kerstin Cable: That's why it's last.


Tamara Marie: Yeah, because you're going to make me think about this.


Kerstin Cable: You’re warmed up now.


Tamara Marie: I have to come up with something profound to say. Wow, I think it's… In the world of language learning, I think there's a huge misconception that somehow language learning, or being multilingual, or being a polyglot is this thing that you have to achieve and it sort of gives you some stripes under your belt, like this whole notion of... I love that people are passionate about languages, but I think that it can make some people feel intimidated. I know for me, like the first polyglot event I went to, I felt so ashamed that I only spoke Spanish that I literally put “sarcasm” on my badge. You know, because you have the badge, you put all your flags or your languages you speak, so I put English, Spanish, and sarcasm. I was like, “Oh, now I have three languages.” Right? So it was like kind of my little joke of like, you know, I almost felt like, “Well, maybe I don't belong in this space,” but I realized later that, you know, yes, I do. And I think that some of that can be off-putting to people who may be struggling to learn their first language. So this idea of, like, I don't know, like almost just kind of doing it for this thing of achievement.


And I also think that there are people who are speaking multiple languages just as a fact of their lives that are not being identified or even recognized by a more academic type of language learning community. So I think about one of my favorite comedians, Trevor Noah, is actually from South Africa, but he now has a show here in the U.S. called the Daily Show. It's kind of like a spoof, like a fake news show, so it’s really funny, but he did this book. He talked about sort of his upbringing with his mom, and in South Africa, you know, there's so many different languages. He said his mom speaks five languages, his mom, who is not this educated… She's not a professor. She's not this super educated woman, but she spoke five languages because she lived in a place where she wanted to be able to connect with people. So she speaks, I think it's like Xhosa, which I’m not pronouncing correctly because I can't do the clicky thing, Zulu, obviously, English and I can't remember other languages. So I think it's interesting that you have people who, just as a fact of life, like people who are refugees or people who just live in a culture where it's expected or just normal, that are not really recognized. I think some of those people should be highlighted because I think the way that they learn languages is so natural to them that they don't really think it's a big deal like some people do who are very passionate about language learning. They're like, “Well, I had to speak these languages.” Right? So I think some of those people have some lessons that we could learn from because they're not taking it so seriously, but they've been very successful at it, and they're often ignored. So I think that's one of the things I'd like to see changed.


Kerstin Cable: Oh, that’s fascinating! That's two very, very, very good points. Thank you so much for sharing those, and I agree on both of them. Here on The Fluent Show, I've got a set way to sign off, which is, I say goodbye from me, and then my guest gets to say goodbye in any language of their choosing. So before we do that: Listeners, if you want to check out Tamara's, I’m just going to say it British, Tamara's wonderful offerings, and you want to also bring a bit of Spanish in your life, the website is spanishconsalsa.com. Is that right?


Tamara Marie: Yeah, it's spanishconsalsa.com, and for the podcast you can just look for Learn Spanish Con Salsa in whatever app you're listening to this podcast.


Kerstin Cable: Awesome, so give it a listen, and now it's goodbye from me (goodbye!) and goodbye from Tamara Marie.


Tamara Marie: Adiós.


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