Whether your interest lies in statistical modeling, making scribbly art or managing a bakery, knowledge of multiple languages indisputably opens up communication channels, conversation topics and goodwill. I entered my semester in Madrid with these facts in mind, fully aware of the importance of Spanish immersion and determined to do full justice to said immersion. In hindsight, this determination seems both humorously blasé and absurdly optimistic. Madrid has firmly and comprehensively proven that my too-deeply-ingrained and utterly ridiculous idea that I could learn a language by osmosis is, quite frankly, wrong.

“Being around Spanish will help!” I said to my pre-semester-self. “Being around Spanish people will force me to practice in ways that I haven’t needed to before.”

It turns out I couldn’t insert myself quite as easily as I had imagined into this real-life practice, or quite so easily into the lives of the elderly madrileñas tottering Madrid’s narrow streets, pooches in their sol-wrinkled hands and cigarette-graveled neighbor-to-neighbor greeting-shouts in their mouths. Language did not seep into me the same way the Spanish sun has; words, I’ve learned, are something that require a little more than just passive absorption.

Simply being around Spanish, being in and between and passing through and under and over conversations and arguments and whispers and fights, did not teach me Spanish. It did make me realize that I had to actually listen to understand, which sounds ridiculous. But somehow, at some point in my entirely monolingual childhood, I stopped listening to other languages as if they had meaning, and began to appreciate them simply for the sounds: the rhythm and the cadence and the tone of something that was foreign to me. This may sound lyrical and pretty, but it is also not very useful. Turning Spanish into an extended song did not help me to communicate with people in it.

If I’m really honest with myself, my experience learning Spanish could have been better and the things that are lacking are mostly my fault. However, at some point in the semester my stubborn defiance of fluency became a beautiful admission of my love for the English language — at least that’s what I like to tell myself — and a renewed and constant awareness of a reality that I didn’t necessarily feel a part of.

To be fair, grammar classes this semester have been fruitful, though sometimes I feel as though I’m just learning how to talk about my family and my vacation in increasingly complicated verb tenses rather than expanding my vocabulary or learning how to comfortably form a colloquial sentence. I can tell you about my weekend using two different subjunctives and the pluperfect, but I don’t have the words to explain my strong feelings on contemporary art, domestic labour in the UAE or 50 Shades of Grey. I can tell my native-Spanish-speaking roommate the precise instances in which Spanish calls for the use of the simple conditional, but I still can’t understand a good proportion of her conversations when she Skypes with her family.

Oh yes, and the cute Spanish boy that I was going to have a fling with and simultaneously use as language practice: nice try. I don’t much like flirting in English. Doing it in Spanish felt at best like a self-parody, in the vein of this One Semester of Spanish’s Spanish Love Song, and at worst, like an embarrassment. Never fear, I tried Tinder too. Temporal dissonance allowed for Google Translate, which helped, but the whole thing still felt false. The Tinder boys’ incessant, “De dónde eres?”, also gave the game away pretty easily; I, the neozelandesa, was constantly addressed in English.

On a more serious note, living in a language that is not your own is a fundamentally humbling experience and one that I will never forget. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that in 95 percent of the conversations I was having in Spanish, I would come across as possessing an IQ 50 points lower than my actual one, simply by virtue of not having the right means of expression. In Spanish classes this is less than ideal but certainly tolerable. In real life it is, generally, terrible.

The frustration of wanting to contribute to conversations but never quite being able to reach for the right words at the right time, the isolation of watching people around you connect through words and feeling almost tangibly that those threads of connection are not yours to touch; these are the things that I will remember from now on when I speak to anyone, ever. Because it’s not only second language that causes social isolation and I am grateful to Spanish for allowing me to realize that.

So, in lieu of contributing anything meaningful to the Spanish — or English, for that matter — canon, I’ll leave Madrid and its apartment-stacked cobbled streets, its gin-guzzling abuelitas, its watery café and jamón-stuffed absolutely everything, its overflowing cañas and overflowing streets of summers-goers, its incomprehensible age and its precise flavor; I’ll leave with a simple, “Nos vemos,” and a promise to listen.