Staying neutral

Last Friday, November 25, there were demonstrations and events all over Spain for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. As you enter the majority of Spanish towns and cities you will see a purple sign telling you that this town is against gender violence - that's one of Pinoso's on the left. When women in Spain are murdered by their partners or ex partners the murder is always given prominence in the news. There is a well publicised, 016, national helpline against gender violence. In Pinoso every first Friday of the month at 8pm, there are a few minutes of silence to remember the victims of gender violence. Spain was the fourth country in the world to introduce same sex marriage. The Yes is Yes Law that has just come into force, and which is having a stormy introduction for some dodgy legal drafting, is legislation which makes prosecution of rapists and abusers much less difficult and less traumatic for women. A new bit of legislation came into force today that stops gender stereotyping in the promotion of toys. The Trans Law allows for people to elect which sex, if any, they wish to be with almost no administrative or legal fuss and there are laws in the pipeline in respect of human trafficking and prostitution. There are other procedures, like women getting paid time off work for serious period pain or men getting paternity leave, that have been in place for a while. The point is that Spain is pretty go ahead on gender legislation.

Now if you're old and British, like me, you may remember a time when there was a lot of guff in the UK about things like saying milkman, chairman of the board, housewife. Was it ladies or women? Were women strong enough to drive buses? I worked for a charity at the time and we spent ages arguing about whether I could use Chair in the minutes instead of chairwoman or chairman for the person who chaired a meeting. How many times did someone painstakingly explain to me that a chair was a piece of furniture not a person? Language is a powerful tool on the road to equality and, so far as I know, that's a battle that has long been won in the UK. Firefighters, police officers, cabin crew, actor, headteacher and scores of similar words just get used naturally, without a second thought. Even the most reactionary manages policewoman and the like.

Spanish, like lots of other languages, has gender for words. Some words are masculine and some words are feminine. The word for a woman, la mujer, is feminine. The word for a man, el hombre, is masculine. The, the word the, is a marker for the gender of the word - la or el. All words have gender even when it isn't obvious. La silla, the chair, is feminine but el sofá, the sofa, is masculine. Sometimes the choice of gender for the word seems a bit perverse - a couple of slang words for a penis are polla and verga and both are feminine whilst one of the slangy words for a vagina, coño, is masculine.

People tend to adaptability. Take councillor; the Spanish is concejal or maybe concejala. It was something on Facebook from a local councillor that was the spark for this post. The official dictionary says that it's the same word, concejal, for a man or a woman - just change the article - articles are a/an and the in English. So, for a woman you'd say la concejal and for a man you'd say el concejal. But nowadays lots of people want to stress that women have status within local councils. So, the activist line is to use la concejala for a woman and el concejal for a man. Personally I'm all for this. Sometimes the feminised word already has a different meaning but when the woman postie buzzes on the door phone and says cartera I don't wonder why a wallet or a portfolio is talking to me on the intercom. I can work out that cartera might have two distinct meanings and I know it's the postwoman/postal operative/mail carrier, at the door. Lots of Spaniards apparently don't. The line they take is that the official dictionary says such and such and that's good enough for them. 

The official dictionary in Spanish is an odd fish. It's like most dictionaries in that it usually describes a word and maybe gives an example of its use. Another of its purposes is to maintain the language spoken in over 20 different countries unified. For that reason the dictionary is sometimes more like a long vocabulary list. Not that it does, but it might, say that to shampoo is the action of applying shampoo. If you don't know what shampoo is then you have to look up a second word. The official dictionary is slow to include new words, it often takes years and years. The people behind the dictionary don't care for anglicisms. People in the street might say cyberattack (ciberataque) or hashtag (hashtag) but you won't find them in the dictionary. I've had discussions, verging on arguments, with Spaniards about the dictionary being controlled by old white men in grey suits but let's just say the dictionary tends to the conservative.

The biggest problem though comes with plurals. Generally, in Spanish grammar masculine gender takes precedence over feminine gender. Instead of saying brothers and sisters you "should" use the equivalent of brothers in Spanish to describe, well, brothers and sisters. One way around this is to mention both genders - hermanas (sisters, feminine) and hermanos (brothers, masculine) which can get unwieldy. Sometimes there is no dictionary accepted masculine or feminine form. That's when the politically progressive invent a word and when the traditionalists scurry for their official grammar and dictionary. They have a point to prove.

It's become even more dodgy recently now that there are people who define themselves as either male or female. There are occasional examples of people in the news trying to include a third, gender neutral, word. For instance to say "Hello everyone," the traditional Spanish phrase is "Hola a todos" but that's masculine. So to be inclusive it became "Hola a todos and todas," (masculine and feminine). Include the gender neutral form and you get "Hola a todos, todas and todes." In the written form the @ symbol (an o and an a combined) is still common but sometimes you'll see an x instead - todxs.

It often surprises me how reactionary lots of Spaniards are about this. I'd still be arguing about furniture if I worked here!

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That official dictionary is El Diccionario de la lengua española, the Dictionary of the Spanish Language produced by La Real Academia Española, The Spanish Royal Academy.

New words and more staying at home

One of the reasons our water heater stopped working was that water was coming down the chimney and soaking the electrics and electronics. We've had lots of torrential rain recently and, the other evening, at around half past midnight the chimney began to drip again. I shimmied up onto the roof and covered the chimney with a plastic bag. The chimney has a hat like cover but it doesn't seem able to keep out the rain when it comes down in bucket-loads. The next morning I was back on the roof to cobble together a wider brimmed hat. I described the repair as Heath Robinson to someone on Twitter. For those of you who don't know William Heath Robinson (1872 – 1944) was an English cartoonist, illustrator and artist, best known for drawings of whimsically elaborate machines to achieve simple objectives.

Heath Robinson is a part of my linguistic armoury just like crikey, whoops a daisy and wide boy. Old fashioned words. I've been away from the UK for a while now and Spain is a country where there is a tendency to call a spade a spade. Nobody here seems to wince at calling someone with one arm a manco or someone with one eye tuerto and the immigration office is called that - well it's called extranjería actually but the point is good. Being out of the UK means that words get to me long after they have become common street currency. When I first heard Brexit I thought it was a stupid term. A smokescreen of a word. Social distancing and self isolation strike me as just as ponderous. When I lived in the UK though I was happy enough to accept linguistic changes of the same style without a murmur. In fact, in general I have no problems with the newer forms of English. Most of them are simply US usage and they reflect the importance of the USA as the powerhouse of the English language. I still notice two times instead of twice, more noisy instead of noisier and forms like "I'll get a beer" and "I'm good, thanks" but they don't particularly jar. Often I think the new forms are well conceived. A Briton was complaining to me about the noun, a big ask. I quite like it myself. Descriptive, easy to use and I'm not aware of any simpler alternative. The older forms are still available anyway. They may give me coffee in a cardboard cup with a lid but nobody has ever tried to force me to drink through the little hole so far.

It's odd though because with being home so much recently I've seen quite a lot of "box sets" on "streaming platforms" and I find that I often don't understand what is being said even though they are speaking English. I still have problems understanding Spanish as well and sometimes the two languages bump into each other so that I find that I can't think of the English for the Spanish word, which I understand,  just as I often don't know the Spanish for an English word.

Listening to this afternoon's speech by our President, Pedro Sanchez, on the tele caused me almost no problems at all with understanding. He speaks slowly to sound Presidential; lots of we're a great nation, pulling together, steadfast behind the heroic health workers etc. I suppose it's the speech writers and autocue machines really rather than him. You'd think the US Government would buy one for Donald Trump so he didn't sound like an incompetent clown but they haven't so he does. Pedro told us that he will be taking the extension of the estado de alarma, (lockdown to you), to parliament for another fortnight's extension.

I heard yesterday that a newspaper survey found that 54% of Spaniards thought that Central Government was doing a poor job. Once upon a time I used to organise sporting and cultural events for young people. I grew to hate disco dance. Over the years I was attacked several times, usually verbally but sometimes physically, because irate mothers held me responsible for the the way some experts had judged the dance performance of their daughter or her team. I'm sure the Spanish Government has made lots and lots of errors in it's handling of the corona virus pandemic but I suppose it would have been the same civil servants and the same experts advising the Government whatever political hue it was. I've also noticed that there is a great similarity between the moans about the handling of the crisis whether that's aimed at Pedro's Socialists or Boris's Conservatives. I don't know but I suppose that re-arranging a country in a couple of weeks is nearly as difficult as dealing with disco dance mothers!

I'm a bit worried that the new two week extension will toughen up the rules about wearing masks in the street. We don't have a mask. Amazon offers several but delivery dates are into June by which times the cats could well have run out of food and eaten us. But, at the moment, all is well in Culebrón and, in a rather surreal way, quite pleasant.

Keep safe!, stay well! or ¡cuidaos!

Bar library nexus

On Friday afternoons, in Cartagena, Maggie and I used to go to a Spanish language group organised by one of the local language schools. We paid a couple of euros and the language centre sent a teacher or two to moderate the session. The group was made up of lots of us foreigners - principally Brits and Dutch but with the occasional Czech and Zimbabwean thrown in - and the idea was that we all spoke Spanish to each other. It was organised into largish discussion groups dependant on the number of attendees with some chosen topic of conversation. The numbers dwindled when the language school upped the price to five euros and, eventually, so few people attended that it was knocked on the head.

Maggie wondered about doing something similar between Spaniards and English speakers in Pinoso but somebody else beat her to it. Every Wednesday one of the local bars, Cafe Coliseum, acts as the venue. The organiser is an efficient young woman, who I'm sure introduced herself to me but whose name I forget. She divvies us up into little knots for conversation. I usually end up with two or three Spanish speakers to talk to. I drink a couple of non alcoholic beers whilst I'm doing it and vainly try to eat the nut mix that comes free with the beer flavoured pop.

I have no idea why the group exists. I suppose it could be an act of altruism on the part of the nameless young woman but it's more likely that the bar saw it as a way to increase trade during the early part of a quiet evening, Early Wednesday can't be a big night for a bar in a village of fewer than 8,000 people! I've never thought to ask and I don't really care too much. The outcome though is that I'm meeting more locals and getting a bit of Spanish practice too.

An odd side effect has to do with the library. I joined Pinoso library when we first moved here. The library was in a different building then. I was quite an active borrower until life got in the way. Work kept us away from Pinoso for long periods so I joined other libraries, in other towns. Then the world went digital and Maggie bought me a Kindle which offered cheap books and the major advantage, for reading in a language that isn't my own, of a built in dictionary.

The language thing in the bar meets more or less opposite the super modern library that we now have in Pinoso. I have a bit of free time between the start of the language group and the time that I reach Pinoso after leaving work. Each evening I have to record what I did with the classes I taught and, for the majority of those classes, share that information with one of my teaching colleagues. Rather than sitting in the car with the laptop to do the recording I took to going into the library. As well as lights and desks they have free WiFi too so I asked about the process for getting a password. It revolved around me being a member of the library. The amazing thing is that I am. Despite my library card saying, very clearly, that it expired in 2007 the library people have constantly renewed my membership.

Nice to see a performance indicator working for me for a change.

Knobs and knockers

I didn't use to notice English much. Maybe it came as a bit of a surprise when the radio alarm burst into life and I hadn't the faintest idea what Brian Redhead or John Humphrys was saying to me for the fleeting seconds of semi consciousness before I woke up. Then that was a long time ago. The fact that there were still clock radio alarms proves it.

I'm very aware of language now. For one thing I live in a place where speaking easily isn't, like breathing, just second nature - it's something that has to be striven for. On top of that, my students, well the ones who don't shout all the time, ask me questions about English. They seem to want rules. They want rules of grammar. I'm not a big believer in grammar. A set of rules invented after the fact to make sense of something that is essentially random in my opinion. I don't know a grammar rule without exceptions and, in many cases, the exceptions are much more common, in everyday speech, than the regular stuff. If language weren't illogical then Arabic speakers, French speakers, Chinese speakers and English speakers would obviously have chosen the universally correct word rather than using بيض, œuf, 雞蛋 and egg to describe the same thing.

Students aren't happy when I tell them that, for quite a lot of things, the answer as to why we use this formula or that expression is because we do and there is no rule they can learn to remember it and no better explanation to be found.

Lots of the people I have worked for have told me that I should always speak English when teaching. Generally, I try to but, to be honest, when it is a direct swap and I know the Spanish I just give the translation. How long would it take to describe an egg? How many other words would you need to describe along the way? And I don't think that saying huevo is the Spanish for the English word egg is going to spoil anything. After all, when all the the roundish reproductive bodies produced by the female of many animals consisting of an ovum and its envelope of albumen, jelly, membranes, egg case, or shell, according to species translation is over the typical Spanish speaking student is going to remember, or forget, huevo.

I always think that things, in the sense of nouns, have a direct translation. Logically things like car, boat, bone must have direct translations. Some things, the less solid things, may have cultural differences built into the language so that we need to add a bit of interpretation to find an equivalent or useable word. Take an idea like nice, agreeable, pleasant and you will guess that the English variations lead to other variations with differenet nuances in Spanish.

I've run into a couple of odd cases recently though. Spaniards don't seem to have a single translation for door handle. That's a standard house sized door with a standard household handle sort of door handle. Hook came to my attention again recently too. You'd think that a hook, in the sense of a reduced size version of a Captain Hook like hook bought from an ironmongers, as an option to a screw or a nail, would be easy enough but, in a class with just six students, there was no one word that was acceptable to all of them.

Funny old world isn't it?

Bad language

If you do not like foul or uncouth language do not read this post.

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When the radio did it's exploding into life thing this morning the first song on was called A la mierda something like "fuck it!"  or a bit more literally "shit it!"

A couple of my pupils, lads about eleven years old express surprise by saying "What the fuck!?" in English. I heard the same phrase used by The Gran Wyoming, a well known TV presenter, who hosts an irreverent daily round up current affairs and news on a TV programme called el Intermedio. Motherfucker, is also a relatively frequent word on Spanish lips. It always catches me unawares. It's a word I would not use lightly. I put it down to a lack of understanding of the violence of these sort of phrases in English.

Now I am not the best person to comment on the intricacies of Spanish but this overuse of expletives, foul language and swearing seems to me much more commonplace in everyday language than in the UK or, more accurately, it has a different focus. I swear a lot and I know that young people in the UK do too. But the use is emphatic, it is there on purpose, to shock, to underline to rebel. I don't find the usage the same in Spanish. Here it is often just a different adjective or nearly as innocuous as Golly!

A little  while ago the River Ebro flooded and caused a lot of damage. Pedro Sanchez, the opposition leader, made a statement: "Qué coño tiene que pasar en este país para que Rajoy visite la ribera del Ebro?" I'd maybe translate it as "What the hell has to happpen in this country before Rajoy (the President) comes to see the Ebro." But coño would be a strong word for us - the c word. Coño though can be quite friendly if said with the right inflection. I suppose we Brits do the same with bastard. But the fact is that it's in the mouth of everyone, including the five year olds I sometimes teach. It's not a word limited to Guy Richie characters; in Spain. it's an ordinary, everyday word.

Maybe it's to do with use. I seem to remember that the French word for mackerel, maquereau, can be an insult. It wouldn't have much force in English or Spanish. In Spain I understand on the other hand that zorra, the female fox, a vixen is a pretty strong way to express whore or slag and it is definitely at the forceful end of bad language. You little vixen sounds nearly Enid Blyton to me.

It is strange though. The number of apparently nice  children who use the word shit as an expression of mild surprise, who want to shit on something, refer to me, in what is undoubtedly a friendly tone, as coño or who pepper their language with fuck this and fuck that as they talk still causes me surprise.

¿Is that correct?

I've been doing a Spanish class recently. Not that I expect it to make me any more understood in the street. I just feel I have a responsibility to try to improve my Spanish somehow. I would have preferred an intercambio - the half an hour of Spanish for half an hour of English language exchange - but, despite a fair bit of effort, I couldn't find one. Well, actually, that's not true. Alvaró and I met a couple of times but then he went off to seek fame and fortune in Guildford.

So, unable to get  a bit of Spanish for free, I asked a local academy about paying for a weekly grammar class. It's not that exciting but it's structured practice, of a sort, with correction. My teacher is a pleasant and well organised young woman.

"Why not write something for me to correct?" she suggested. So I did. I've done something the last couple of weeks and I was working on this week's piece today. Writing the essay is pretty straightforward. With a biro I can write nearly as quickly in Spanish as in English but as I two finger type the clean copy I see tons of errors, wonder about lots of grammar and spend ages checking spelling and especially accent marks. Tidying up the text can take a long time. I did try writing direct to computer but the mechanics of my two fingered typing inhibit any spontaneity.

Today I was being a bit more playful with my writing than I have been the last couple of times. Well that is if you consider this sort of thing to be playful - The British Empire ran on tea, well tea and gin and tonic - oh, and quite a powerful navy. I included speech in the writing to liven it up a bit too. I started using inverted commas then I remembered, vaguely, that in Spanish the inverted commas are used to quote what someone notable said - Joan of Arc or Henry Kissinger sort of quotes. I asked Google and got a nice piece about how to deal with reporting speech in Spanish. In essence Spanish uses long hyphens, which join to the words and stick with them across line breaks and suchlike, to isolate the speech from normal narrative. There are different rules for how the hyphens are placed under different circumstances and also how to deal with other punctuation marks like full stops and question marks in and around the hyphens. I read it, it made sense and I instantly forgot it.

I was thinking about English punctuation. Do you know, I haven't a clue (probably if you read these blogs critically you do know.) I don't know about how to use parentheses - is the full stop correct and is it in the right place within that last set of brackets for instance? I don't know about single, as against double, inverted commas, I don't know where other marks go in amongst the brackets, quotes, hyphens and what not. My big ally is that I suspect that lots of other people don't know either. Whereas the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves may well have cheered up the sort of person who writes to the BBC about the pronunciation of envelope I'm certain that any ordinary person who slogged through it will no longer remember much, if any, of it.

So, I foresee a truly interesting conversation about how to correctly punctuate Spanish in one of the next classes. Life surely is a riot.

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And here is the text, in Spanish, from a blog called Tinta al sol, about how to do it for anyone interested.

Según el Diccionario panhispánico de dudas de la RAE, lo primero que hay que aclarar es que los diálogos en un texto narrativo no van precedidos de guiones, sino de una raya, que es ligeramente más larga que un guión.

Esta raya antecede a los diálogos, tras una sangría, y sin dejar espacio entre la raya y el comienzo del parlamento.

La raya también enmarca las acotaciones del narrador, y debe cerrarse sólo si el diálogo continúa tras el comentario del narrador.

—Hola, ¿cómo estás? —dijo ella tras verle entrar—. ¿Vas a salir?

—No, no saldré —dijo él sin mirarla.

Cuando se utiliza un verbo de habla para el comentario del narrador (decir, exclamar, afirmar, responder, etc.), éste va en minúscula, aunque el diálogo haya terminado con un signo de puntuación del mismo valor que un punto, como un signo de exclamación o de interrogación.

—¿Eso es todo? —preguntó ella.

Si el diálogo del personaje continúa tras la acotación, y la primera parte termina con coma, punto, punto y coma o dos puntos, este signo de puntuación se coloca tras la raya del cierre.

—Todo —respondió él—. Y tanto que es todo.

Cuando el comentario del narrador no lleva un verbo de habla, la primera parte del diálogo se cierra con un punto, y la acotación comienza con mayúscula. Si el diálogo continúa después, se escribe un punto tras la raya de cierre.

—Estupendo. —Ella se volvió para que no viera su sonrisa—. Me llevo la llave.

Support for corvidae

The music festival season is just beginning to warm up in Spain. We usually try to get along to at least one event. It's good to hear a band that goes on to greater things - "Calvin? great musician! First time I saw him he was on the tiny fourth stage just by the latrines at half past six in the evening" It's good to hear new bands in general and I always look forward to those vegetable noodles they serve in the overpriced food areas too.

So I was reading an article, in Spanish, from a national newspaper. It was suggesting ways to keep the costs of festival going to a bare minimum. It suggested coachsurfing (sic). Fortunately for me coachsurfing was hyperlinked and when I followed the link there was a little piece about couchsurfing (sic). Taken along with the rest of the article about how nice someone had been to some tourists I decided that it was about an internet method of finding a floor to kip on. Someone who would put you up on their couch for a fraction of the price of the cheapest hostel. I have no idea whether couchsurfing is in use in the UK but there is a fair chance that it is - it's just new to me. I may know what wotless and glamping mean but it's imppossible to keep up with all the linguistic changes from a couple of thousand kilometres away.

Back in our living room I was watching some late night current affairs programme. The subtitles were on. They repeatededly mentioned crowfunding (sic) which is a fair phonetic interpretation of the word the people were using during the debate. I guessed straight away that it was not some crow support charity but a mispronunciation of crowd funding. Similar things happen all the time. I'm never quite sure whether the word is basically an Englishism given a Spanish twist - like WhatsApp becoming wassap or whether some Spanish person has decided that an English word or phrase will do the job better than a Spanish word and invented something that only exists here. Not to stray too far a really simple example of the latter would be the word parking, which is a well established and widely used Spanish word, that translates as car park or parking lot.

English words crop up in the middle of educated Spanish speech all the time. Today, in maybe an hour or so of radio listening, I noticed base camp, hotspot and peacekeeper. Often the words are pronounced to Spanish pronunciation rules so that they become unintelligible to my Brit ear. It's quite strange to maybe hear a new phrase or word on the radio or TV only to realise, when I see it written down, that it is some perfectly simple English word. Change the stress, as my students do, on ear to make it sound like a West Country exclamation and you'll appreciate how easily and quickly it can happen.

At least I've worked out a strategy for one thing that used to flummox me all the time. I get to the cinema and the title is in English. I often tried, unsuccessfully, to guess the Spanish pronunciation. Now I just say the title in English and follow it up with a Spanish phrase which says "I hate it when the titles are in English." We all have a bit of a laugh and the success rate on trouble free ticket buying has skyrocketed.

Slightly off

I signed up for a weekly Spanish course yesterday. I haven't quite given up on the language yet - despite what Maggie says, and what I know to be true, that I will never speak Spanish adequately.

I have just finished a blog post. Looking for information I was wading trough official bulletins, where laws and official notices are published. I could understand them but I wouldn't pretend that it's easy reading. It's the same with books, I normally read in Spanish but, at the moment, I'm reading a book written by an Englishman and it seemed perverse to read it in translation. I have to admit that it's much more comfortable reading in English.

We took Maggie's car for an ITV yesterday, the road worthiness check. The tester took the car off us and drove it through the various test bays himself. I have the feeling that he was only doing that with us immigrants. Easier to do it himself than explain the various actions he required of us.

Bank yesterday too to comply with some legislation. No problem really but the odd falter so that I chose to be economical with the truth rather than explain a complicated situation.

I stupidly lost a pair of sunglasses. I went to the three shops that I'd been in to ask if I'd left them there. In two of the three cases I stumbled slightly as I asked. Nothing serious, just a slip of a tense that needed correction or a falter over the pronunciation of a word, not a problem I notice with English.

I wanted an appointment with my accountant. I used WhatsApp to avoid a telephone conversation.

A Spanish friend asked me for my opinion on a service he was considering buying. At the end of my reply, which I rewrote several times before running it through Google translate and a spell checker, I added my usual - I hope you can understand what I meant to say.

Easier to buy the poor supermarket meat than ask (and queue) in a butcher.

And so on.

It's nice living here. It's home. But the truth is that language affects every aspect of everything we do from watching the telly to getting a beer. Anyone who isn't fluent in both the culture and the language will always be a bit out of it.

Day to day

I remember some adverts at the cinema along the lines of "Which teacher changed your life?" It was a recruiting campaign for teachers; the idea being that teachers could make a real difference. Without the Ms. Williamsons or Mr. Gwizdaks there wouldn't be as many great novels or so many life enriching scientific discoveries. I've never really believed in the concept of inspirational teaching. I do not doubt that some teachers are better than others, that some teachers explain concepts better than others, that some teachers are more empathetic than others but, in the end, I think it's the student that counts. I was an average sort of student and I got average sort of results in a whole bundle of subjects. Who taught me seems to have been irrelevant. Nowadays anyway the very idea of a teacher as the fount of all knowledge seems so Victorian when my phone can tell me much more about chemistry than Messrs Lofthouse, Bottomley and all my other school chemistry teachers put together.

I'm certainly no inspirational teacher myself. I don't particularly care for the job and I do it because I get paid. I'm reasonably organised and I'm reasonably lively so I don't think I'm a bad teacher or anything but I'm certainly nothing out of the ordinary. I've now worked in three different "academies"  which seems to be the accepted translation of the word academia which is usually used to describe a private language school here in Spain.

One of my academies had a flexible learning system built around units of learning but two of the academies, including my present one, use a standard and very simple system which is a bit odd to British eyes. The students pay a fixed fee per month for a set number of classes. The classes are usually graded by ability or by age. So, take an example. In March this year if your classes were on Monday and Tuesday you would get ten classes but, if they were on Wednesday and Thursday you would only get eight. Actually that's not quite true because Father's Day, Thursday March 19th, is a holiday so there will only be seven classes for the Wednesday/Thursday brigade. It's a swings and roundabouts system and most people simply hand over their cash and come every month. You can play the system of course and some people do. December, for instance, is plagued with holidays so lots of students do November, miss December and come back in January.

English is a regular topic of conversation in Spain. There's a belief that without English you cannot succeed. Professionals often need English. Teachers, for example, have to have a high intermediate qualification in English (B2) no matter what subject or area they teach. On the radio there are often pieces complaining about the intrusion of English into the everyday language. It seems to be pretty cool for Spaniards to drop in a few English words to the conversation. The funny thing is that the variations in pronunciation mean that many native English speakers do not recognise the words as English. On top of that many supposedly English words aren't used correctly. Cross and camping for instance are well established, everyday words used by all Spaniards but the first is a cross country race and the second is a campsite. There is camping close to the start of the cross would, I suspect, confound most Brits.

So there is a sizeable market for English language teaching across the age range in Spain. The backbone of the majority of the academies though is children.  Responsible adults want their children to succeed. They send them to do English because either they are doing well at school and want to reinforce the success or because they are doing badly and want to make up the deficit. In reality the level of even the best of the youngsters is excruciatingly bad. I have no idea what's going on with English language teaching in Spanish schools but it isn't working for the youngsters I bump into.

It may be, of course, that for me at least there's no need for younger students to apply themselves. Most of the youngsters would rather be manipulating a games console, kicking a football or chatting with their pals than doing English and as long as they do well, or better, at school their parents will leave them alone. There is no real need for them to try and speak or understand English for me. I can offer neither substantial threats nor incentives. So even the nicest of them, the ones who seem keen, chatter all the time. Spain is a noisy country which means that everyone knows that you need to raise your voice to be heard. The result is that chatter often turns to shouting. Amongst the less interested, on top of the noise, there is fighting. They fight each other and occasionally they fight with me in the sense that they will try to wrest a board marker from my grip or force closed the book that they don't want to study. There is a lot of pinching and kicking amongst them and a fair bit of stabbing each other with pencils. Tearing up worksheets is the norm. I hate English (said in Spanish of course)  and a point blank refusal to participate in the activities are common. Several of the younger children seem to delight in dropping their trousers or throwing snot around. Most endearing. The environment is not one that fosters speedy language learning and one of the real differences between me and a properly trained teacher is that I have no idea about classroom management.

Personally of course I'm still struggling to learn a bit more Spanish, to improve my fluency and what not. So for the past few years the parallels between my own struggles with a language and those of my students have made the whole thing quite interesting. I don't find it quite so aborbing anymore now that I spend most of my time asking people to get off the table or to stop shouting.