Four syllables bad, two syllables better

I'm up to three sessions a week now with the online Spanish learning - a bloke in Alicante, another in Manresa in Cataluña and a woman somewhere that's really Barcelona but isn't actually Barcelona - like Croydon isn't London. The hour long sessions are just conversation so none of us have to do any prep. The conversations go hither and thither; we've talked about squatters, the pluses and minuses of vanguard cooking, the differences between elections and political representation in the UK and Spain and other similar topics. I often trip over words and pronunciation but, generally, the conversation flows well enough and I often surprise myself with the obscure vocabulary that I seem to be able to dredge from the deep corners of my rapidly decaying brain. The tutors are uniformly complimentary but I've noticed that I keep my end of the conversations simple. I'm hoping that it will become more complicated with the amount of time that I'm now spending on speaking Spanish but I fear I may be deluding myself.

When I was teaching English to Spaniards I was once asked to explain verb inversion. I didn't know what it was but it isn't actually all that tricky. Verb inversions happen most commonly in questions. Apparently something like -they are working- is considered to be "normal" while -are they working?- is considered to be inverted. That wasn't what the students were asking me about though. No, they were asking about an obscure but essential element in their curriculum at the Official Language School where they were all doing their exams. Take a word like seldom. If you put seldom at the beginning of a sentence the word order has to follow a pattern. It's not good English to say -Seldom you hear a politician apologise. We change the words around and say - Seldom do you hear a politician apologise. It's the same with other words like never and hardly. Never have I heard a politician apologise. That was the verb inversion the students wanted to know about.

I was a bit surprised by this. It was something I'd never noticed in English. I was so impressed that I set up a little experiment. I asked a few English speaking pals in a bar to use the word hardly in a sentence to see if we all, intuitively, changed the word order. My experimental design was poor. Everybody used hardly perfectly. The problem, for my experiment, was that nobody used hardly as the first word in the sentence. They didn't say -Hardly ever do I pay with cash- they said, instead -I hardly ever pay with cash. I went back to the students and told them to forget about verb inversions. I told them it was an example of archaic language that very few people use when speaking. Their response was an indictment of Spanish education in general. Not in our exams they replied. Ah yes, an education where trainee carpenters learn about, and are examined on, trees and the different qualities of wood they produce as well as the history of wood working tools but where they never quite get around to making a bread board or a shoe rack.

Back to my English pals in the bar. They did what I do when I'm speaking to the tutors online. I circumnavigate the difficult constructions with perfectly good, but simpler, phrases. Instead of saying -If I were to go to Madrid I would visit the Mercado de los Motores- I say -The next time I visit Madrid I'm going to go to the Mercado de los Motores. Or -I missed the bus yesterday because I got up late- to avoid the much more difficult -If I hadn't overslept yesterday I wouldn't have missed the bus.

For years my excuse for my halting conversation has been that I hardly ever speak Spanish. You don't need much language to do the supermarket shop or order a beer and I've always argued that my opportunities for longer conversations have been few and far between. These sessions will rob me of that excuse and only leave the reality of old age and fewer functioning neurones.