Studying law in Spanish when you grew up thinking in English

There’s a term for people like me: no sabo kid. Kids of Mexican parents, raised in the US, who speak Spanish fine at home and struggle with it everywhere else. It’s mostly a joke, and it’s a little less funny when you sign up to study law in Spanish.

Everyday Spanish didn’t prepare me for legal Spanish. It’s formal, it comes out of the civil law tradition, and a lot of words look familiar but mean something different. Obligaciones, for example, isn’t “obligations” the way we use it in English. It’s a whole area of civil law about the legal ties between people: where they come from, how they get fulfilled, and how they end. Then there’s the amparo, a constitutional lawsuit people use against government acts. There’s no clean English word for it. The closest I can get is some mix of an injunction and a constitutional challenge.

What’s helped

Just listening to lectures wasn’t working for me. I’d follow along and then a week later couldn’t explain anything. So I changed how I study:

• I read a whole unit in a physical textbook instead of jumping between videos and slides.
• I close the book and write down everything I remember, by hand, on a legal pad.
• I compare it with the book and look at what I missed. It’s usually the same things: pairs of opposite terms, hierarchies, and full lists.
• I keep a short Spanish-to-English glossary. Not to translate the law, just to have something to hold on to.

The upside is that I can’t assume I know what anything means. I have to stop, look it up, and compare it with what I know from the US. It’s slow, but that’s where most of my questions come from.

I’ll keep posting notes as I go: concepts that surprised me, terms that mean different things in each system, and things I wish I’d known at the start.