[Sethomas]

There seems to be more people than usual who speak Spanish as a first language now, or maybe I'm just now noticing it. I dunno.

I took it in high school because it was one of only two languages offered, and I wanted to show off my interest in languages to colleges so I took both (the other was French). I'm not good at either, nor any other language I've studied.

I never took Spanish seriously because even though it's extremely useful in American job markets, it's not all that important for my dream job compared to other languages. For Religious Studies research, the best application I've found is that it helps me read Ladino pretty well.

Anyways, I've never been good at it but lately I've been getting much better at taking what little I know and speaking it intelligibly since we always get Mexicans at work and I'm the only person there who can form a sentence in Spanish. Practice really helps, even if my vocab doesn't grow.

I started wondering about an experience I had in a conversation about learning languages with a couple of people. The main contributer to the conversation was from Colombia, so he was native in Spanish yet happened to speak English better than most Americans. He spent a long time making fun of himself from his time when he first studied in America to justify the next phase when he mocked English-speakers learning Spanish*.

He kept speaking Spanish very slowly in a fake American accent (even though there were more Swedes there than Americans), using all the unnecessary pronouns, and he came to the verb "salir". He said, like, "Me goooo-sta salir! Yoh kee-ehr-oh salir esta noche! Yo salgo con mis ah-mee-gohs! Yo salgo con TODOS mis ah-meee-gos!"

So, I didn't really get the joke but I figured that salir had some sexual meaning I was never told. I can't find anything that direct online to explain it.

I just wanted to ask because I had a mental image of some freshman Spanish student asking, "Quieres salir con yo?" (instead of conmigo, I wasn't taught why I shouldn't say that until long too late). The idea of going up to someone and asking "wanna be fuckbuddies, you cunt?" is excellent, though.

*This kind of paints him as a dick, but he wasn't, he was a cool guy. His best story about himself was when he was giving a speech when he had to talk about his home country to a large audience. He quoted himself in a thick Colombian accent that he didn't usually have when speaking English, saying, "When people think of Colombia, they think of drugs. This is bad. Colombia has many things other than drugs. People do not know that Colombia is a great place to find bitches. Colombia has some of the most beautiful bitches in the world. Colombia is the only country in South America that has bitches on both the Atlantic and bitches on the Pacific."

(If it's not obvious, he was trying to say "beaches".)