Tensing up

I'm sitting in a hostel on my third night in Buenos Aires, and there are a lot of things I should be worried about. Where I'm going to live next week, and which classes I'm going to take during my semester abroad, for example. But I really only have one concern right now, and that's the uncertainty of trying to perfect my Spanish in a dialect I've never heard before. What's making this difficult, among many other things, is the Argentine use of the word vos.


Vos is the informal second person pronoun they don't teach you in Spanish class. Most commonly used in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, vos almost always replaces the pronoun tu and comes with its own set of conjugations. So instead of a tu eres (you are), Argentinians say vos sos. Instead of tu tienes (you have), they say vos tenés. Having had the pronoun tu ingrained since childhood, I am finding it difficult to learn and use an entirely different tense.


My inability to correctly use vos, along with my general incompetence in Spanish and my use of maps on crowded streets, distinctly marks me as a foreigner. The consequences aren't that serious — they'll still understand you if you say tu — but conquering it is something I still want to do. 


And just because I haven't had a negative experience with the dialect barrier doesn't mean it won't happen. A lot could still go wrong. Specifically, I'm afraid I'm going to seduce an Argentinian supermodel, only to watch her walk when I accidentally use the wrong pronoun. Just playing. I'll be so on my game no one will notice. But on an optimistic note, I can last almost four sentences into a conversation feigning as a native speaker before getting tripped up. And one time, as I was running the usual Spanish monologue in my head, I produced a reflexive pronoun construction naturally, without having to think about it like I usually do. It was nos pagan (They'll pay us). When it happened I spent about 30 seconds reviewing the sentence in disbelief, but it's happened a few times since then and made me feel like I'm on my way to actually learning the language.