¿Cómo se dice LARPing en Español?

“Translate the following sentence into English: Her parents gave her money,” my Spanish teacher commands.

This should be an easy question. I’ve known the answer since Spanish II. Yet my mind draws a blank and enters panic mode for an answer. “Le… lo dan? La dab? La daban?” Now I’m sitting there vomiting incorrect object pronouns like the Stuy vending machine, dispensing a bag of pretzels when I clearly hit C4 for Doritos, while my classmates sit there holding in their laughter disguised as pity.

I maintain my poker face, stay silent, and provide a nod every once in a while. I also use my favorite expression here and there: “Este… este…” which is just a universal language for “I am thinking, but I’m also not thinking because I have no clue what the teacher just said.”

This happens to me most days. In fact, this has been happening to me for four years. And at some point, staring at a worksheet as if it had just killed my family, I realized: I’m not bad at Spanish. I am just LARPing as a confident Spanish speaker.

Every day, as soon as I walk into the classroom, I don my brazen persona. I remember my strategic habits: the occasional pause, the overly confident American accent, and the no-holds-barred mispronunciations. I act as a capable Spanish speaker to an audience of indifferent classmates and my disapproving teacher, who glares at me like the Duolingo owl after I’ve skipped three lessons in a row.

I’m not alone, however. Spanish class seldom produces only Spanish speakers. Every class has a few LARPers. There’s always someone who freezes up mid-sentence, confidently swaps a word by one letter and sends the whole class into their jajajajas. A few days back, a kid said “tengo mierda” (I have [poop]) instead of “tengo miedo” (I’m scared), and the laughter that followed sounded as if everyone had lost their minds and finally gone loco.

All these skills take years to develop; I’ve practically been gathering them like infinity stones. In Spanish I, which somehow took me more than a year to finish despite being, definitionally, one year of Spanish, my seventh grade self fixated more on Billy La Bufanda than any type of conjugation. However, my Spanish teacher did tell us what not to say: “Tengo trece anos.” In eighth grade, my Spanish teacher was more preoccupied with making his daily Nescafé than educating us on the preterite. I think the most useful thing I learned in that class was how to plug my ears as twenty theater kids sang the Encanto soundtrack at the same time.

Upon taking the Stuyvesant language placement exam, the essay prompt hit me like a sucker punch. It read “¿Qué hiciste los fines de semana?” or in other words, “What did you do over the weekend?” I couldn’t even tell you what a hiciste was, let alone a fin de banana.

My first homework was on irregular preterite forms: all the LARPing in the world can’t save you from multiple-choice questions, and I scored a whopping 26. Qué triste. When I later inquired how I even made it into Spanish II, my teacher reviewed my test and showed me the comment he had written on the side of my essay: “This kid doesn’t know how to use the future, and clearly doesn’t have one either.”

I learned a new Advanced LARPing technique in Spanish II: speed. If you say a wrong answer fast enough, nobody will be able to correct you, and your wrongness will never catch up. I’d been using the present tense for absolutely anything and everything: my Spanish teacher would ask me what I did over the weekend, and I’d tell him “Voy a la tienda” (I go to the store), a sentence that was not in the past tense, didn’t answer what he asked, and was totally false, considering I did not go to a tienda of any kind. However, after death-staring my teacher and speaking with conviction, I said my part and moved on before anyone could bother to correct me. 

I also learned through this class that LARPing isn’t guaranteed to work. On a cold, rainy Thursday, a student, intending to tell the teacher he was embarrassed, instead informed the teacher that he was pregnant. “Estoy embarazado,” he said with the smug confidence of someone who thinks they can speak Spanish after watching Dora as a kid. The class fell dead silent. My teacher said nothing but “Felicidades,” and moved on with his lesson. 

By Spanish III, what had started as a last-resort survival mechanism became more and more of a compulsory habit, where my choice of technique had progressed way beyond speeding through incorrect sentences to something closer to method acting. I went from simply saying things quickly to adopting a cadence that suggested I hadn’t even considered the possibility that my answers could be incorrect. Whenever I was corrected, I nodded slowly as if I was making sure he was paying attention rather than being the one taught. If I didn’t know the gender of an object, I would toss my eraser in the air and see if it landed logo-side up. If I wasn’t sure how to conjugate or say something, I mumbled it in a vaguely Spanish-sounding manner such that nobody would pass any judgment. The backpack? La backpack. My homework? Mi homework-o. The carrot? El carroto (plus the atrocious effort at rolling an r). Did this improve my Spanish? Not at all. It did, however, make me hard to correct, which was in some ways its own valuable skill. My biggest accomplishment was my teacher only calling me a sinvergüenza (shameless? scoundrel? to this day I still don’t know) once in the whole year.

AP Spanish took a fast glance at my LARPing resumé and deemed my four years of experience as no mucho importante. No longer could I doze off into my conjugation tables or while my teacher was going on a rant about some author. Now, I had to listen to native speakers talk at a normal pace and respond, in real time, with correct verb tenses, correct gender, precise vocabulary, all of it. What was I, a robot? What kind of sick human being could possibly do this? The “Esto…” technique, once the indisputable champion of my repertoire, was now rendered useless by a timed listening and speaking section that didn’t pause for my mid-high school crisis. Nothing I tried would work anymore. It seemed that this would be the end of my LARPing career, and the start of a school year of dread and suffering.

This brings me back to the parents-give-her-money example, the verbal diarrhea of pronouns, the nodding, and the slow, inevitable realization—albeit four years too late—that I was never actually learning Spanish. I was learning how to make it look like I was learning Spanish, which was its own separate skill with refined techniques that are far easier than actually learning in my enrolled class.

I suppose I must learn and study español the proper way. One could say I’m very excitado for the AP myself. Somewhere out there, I’m sure my old Spanish teacher is finally glad I learned how to conjugate a word in the preterite, and that I learned more tenses than one. But although I have retired from LARPing, I am sure others have not: some brave soul, perhaps one from my Spanish II class, is still, as far as he knows, expecting.