A long, long grind

I've been trying to learn Spanish since Methuselah was a lad. I remember being well pleased when clay tablets gave way to parchment and quills. Alright, not quite that long ago but it really was a textbook with cassettes and Sunday morning programmes on BBC2.

In my case the catalyst was a trip to Barcelona. At Victoria coach station I bought a ticket for the first bus going to somewhere warm. It was nearly Greece. Barcelona was great. There was no doubt that I was going back. When I had trouble getting a beer in Tarragona my task was clear. My partner of the time thought my plan to learn Spanish was a stupid whim. Back in Blighty, at our local bookshop, she steered me towards the cheapest Spanish textbook; the cheaper the book the less money wasted. She was very surprised when I signed up for evening classes and astounded when I went back after Christmas.

I didn't really learn much Spanish in the classes but I learned a lot of Spanish because of them. I think the classes were a couple of hours long, so, given a ten week term and three terms a year, a full year would be 60 hours of class time with maybe a dozen in the class. The big advantage, for me, of classes, and I've done a lot on and off, has always been that they give a structure and an impetus. I did as my teachers bade. I wrote essays, I ground through vocabulary lists. I repeated and repeated verb tables to learn the tenses. I might not be able to use those verbs in a real sentence but it did mean that I could recite, parrot fashion, all sorts of tenses and all sorts of irregular verbs. Years later, living here, teaching English to earn a crust, I recognised my verb table recitation mirrored in the way that my students knew the alphabet or the numbers. They could recite the 26 letters or count to 100 easily enough but write a random number on the board or ask them to spell their email address and they were up that famous creek and paddleless.

That first flirtation with evening classes only lasted a couple of years. My spanish learning became a bit on and off. A couple of weeks wandering around Extramadura or Christmas and New Year in Mallorca as a holiday rekindled the spark. Sometimes I'd sign on for a course and struggle through a whole academic year, or not. Sometimes I'd just buy a new book and CD course.

I'm still trying to learn Spanish. I've been able to order a beer for a while though I still sometimes, exasperatingly, get that wrinkled brow, pulled up nose look from the servers. I repeatedly have to wage a little battle with the waiter or waitress to continue to speak Spanish as they decide that their English is better than my Spanish. I was once in a restaurant with a woman who lives with a Spanish man, who speaks Spanish to her husband's family all the time, who is more Spanish in manner and custom than British. She found herself confronted with a waitress who was determined to speak to her in English. In a sly way that rather cheered me up, it reassured me that I wasn't alone, but it made her very, very cross.

Unless you're one of those people that has a natural flair for languages take it from me that none of the quick fixes really work. For most of us it's pure graft. Even if you are an intuitive learner you can't order egg and chips without knowing at least three words - probably four in Spanish. In my opinion it's the speaking, being in a conversation, that actually makes the difference. Listening to Spanish, reading Spanish, writing Spanish all help but unless you can talk, listen and respond then you're not really there. If you live with a Spanish speaker or you pass a good part of your day in a place that speaks Spanish (school, office etc) you'll probably get pretty good pretty quickly. For the rest of us, we're not going to get very far when ordering a coffee or turning down the carrier bags in the supermarket is the most practice we get.

The methods are manifold. I sit in a bar and swap English for Spanish. I sit in front of my computer and swap English for Spanish with a bloke who lives in Toledo. I pay good money to sit at my computer and talk at someone in Gandía who occasionally corrects me. I read nearly all my novels in Spanish, I go to a book club, I watch some Spanish telly, I go to some Spanish films at the cinema, I go on walks and visits and to talks which are delivered in Castilian, I listen to several podcasts a week, most of which come from Spanish radio so that I pick up a bit of Spanish life and culture as I grapple with the language. Generally I've given up on textbooks and things designed specifically for learners but, for reasons of loyalty, I still watch the videos, produced by a Spanish woman and her British husband, the couple who first introduced me to podcasts years and years ago. The only text book I still know to find on my bookshelves is Neil Creighton's Spanish Grammar book - Punto por Punto. It's not a good read but it has been useful over and over and over.

When it comes down to it though it's still talking, listening, reading and writing. The videos on YouTube, the WhatsApp messages to the plumber, the podcasts, the online classes, the interactive quizzes, the Zoom or Skype based intercambios, the TikTok grammar lessons and the Deepl language translator are all very shiny but they offer very little fundamentally different from my very first BBC text book backed up by the tapes and the TV programmes. It's the access that has changed. Living in Spain accessing Spanish is dead easy but, even if I were in the UK or in somewhere like Botswana I wouldn't now need to tune in to the exterior service of Radio Moscow on the short wave to listen to Spanish. 

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¡Dígame!, the CD cover in the photo, was the course book, a BBC course book, that went with that first course at Peterborough Regional College. The CD came after the cassette.