My life is a 24-7 game of Taboo. Taboo, if you are not familiar, is a game where you have to describe the word on a card to your team without saying a list of commonly associated words, an act which earns you an obnoxious buzz from this special remote. I go to say something and buzz I don’t know that word. buzz That one won’t work either. buzz buzz I don’t know what conjugation to use. Mental buzz censorship is everywhere I look.

After my first week of extreme buzzing, I finally adapted. One strategy is to use circumlocution and describe the word I want with the vocabulary I know; talk your way out of the problem. For example, needle would be ‘the thing you use to sew.’ It’s usually a poetry technique so as to not directly state the word, but works perfectly well here.

You have to be a flexible, creative thinker as if you are doing the Sunday crossword or some other word game. I like that it’s hard to say clichés (simply because I don’t know them) because, as much as I use them, I think they are too much of a crutch, an excuse to not express yourself fully. One of my housemates needs to learn this skill because she tries to do strict English-Spanish translation and always resorts to using one of us as human dictionaries, assuming there is only one way to express what she wants. I do run into problems, though, when I try to be creative to describe something only to find out that it doesn’t translate well into Spanish.

When reading signs, menus, and the texts for my Spanish classes I tend to have good luck using the roots of words and then guess its meaning. For a while, I would go through the pain-staking process of looking up every unknown word, but now I just aim for getting the overall point (which is a better strategy anyway, even for English texts).

My classes in Spanish are not nearly as hard as I was expecting (especially the listening part–it’s so much easier to understand than to respond or create) because there is a natural thought progression and you usually know where the professor is going with an idea. There are also a lot of cognates like information is información, privileges is privilegios. Just from knowing English things in Spanish can be easier to understand. I can’t imagine trying to go from a non-Latin based language. In contrast, I still run into a lot of trouble at the dinner table because conversations jump all the time and the topics are quite specific, often full of slang or idioms I don’t know and matters that I would never before have encountered.

Since the present tense is the easiest structure to use, I will use dialog when recounting stories to repeat exactly what I heard someone else say and try to engage the listener so as to mask my mistakes and still get the idea across. Infinitive forms of verbs are also easy to use, so I construct sentences in the same basic forms so as to just insert the infinitive and avoid sounding too ignorant. With “I need to___” or “I am going to___” you can actually say pretty much everything.

Of course, context clues are the best tool. The physical situation, facial expressions, and gestures all help more than you realize when speaking your native tongue. I have avoided phone conversations for this reason, but when I had a problem with an airline ticket with Spanair, I surprised myself at my ability to understand and communicate with the operator, though I was very nervous and blushing the entire conversation.

And the easiest strategy of all is the cop-out method, where you completely change your thought and not mention anything to do with the difficult term. In the more extreme case when none of the above strategies works, you just give up entirely or cave-in to dictionary use. You can’t call me a wimp for having to look up the word tacky or to use the whiteboard in the kitchen to draw a safety pin.

I get by with my broken Spanish, though I wish it was better, of course. Sometimes I catch myself saying really stupid things, like using the regular rules for a word instead of the irregular that I know it is. I can only laugh when I translate what just came out of mouth because even I know it’s absolute garbage, let alone to a native speaker. On the other hand, I am both proud and excited to say that over the past few weeks clear Spanish has been just falling out of my mouth without having to think about it. Be it Spanish or even English, I think there is no hiding from the buzz.