The same old chestnut

Sometimes I think my Spanish is OK. Other times, I despair. Most of the time, when I have a longer session speaking Spanish, despair is the overriding sensation. 

Right at the beginning, it was verb tables, pronunciation, grammar, trying to understand the structure and learning vocabulary. Even today I try to find a few minutes a day to read through my vocabulary books. Every now and again, as I stumble over some verb tense in a real-world conversation, I go back and have a bit of a read through those verb tables or something on object and subject pronouns because I seem to be a little confused. It amazes me how difficult it is to retain some of the basic grammar, learned vocabulary or phrases after all these years.

My Spanish is miles better than it was when I got here, but it's still terribly pidgin. The only place where I still can fall completely apart is on the phone; but even there I generally manage to scrape through nowadays. In general, in a normal sort of conversation, I do fine. I've had no trouble at all dealing with my cancer treatment and my stays in hospital in Spanish. If someone tries to speak to me in broken English—as they do from time to time—I just plough on in Spanish; giving way simply confirms my inability. Only if the Spaniard I'm talking to turns out to be a fluent English speaker, and very few are, do I yield and speak English.

I went to have a natter with my pal Jesús last week. It was the first time for quite a while and we've been on and off for years now. The original idea was that we'd do a bit of an exchange; an intercambio. We'd talk for a while in English and for a while in Castilian. To be honest, Jesús has never shown much aptitude for English; he finds the sounds almost impossible to imitate, and I don't think it was ever a serious proposition, but we've continued to meet over a coffee for ages now. There have been plenty of missed sessions, and, with being ill recently, I'd more or less given up. When we met this time we spoke not a word of English. We nattered about everything from politics to the cost of the bus fare up to Barcelona. I'm very happy that I can do that, hold a conversation in another language, but to be honest, after 20 years here, I should be able to. I was also, as always, appalled at the deficiencies in my control of the language. As I pound out a spurious version of Spanish I can hear the half-formed sentences, the wrong vocabulary, the mispronunciation and stumbling over certain words, the repeated errors and the strange phrasing.

Recently I've gone back to taking some online classes after a hiatus of a few months. To call them classes is a misnomer. I haven't done a Spanish class for maybe twelve or thirteen years now but I've never stopped slogging away at trying to improve. For instance I've read 45 books this year and thirty-six of them have been in Spanish. I still listen to the Notes in Spanish podcasts/videos and have a few radio programmes which I listen to as catch-up podcasts that cover everything from an "on this day" history programme to an arts magazine and a series of historical, political and topical documentaries. I listen to morning news programme on the radio and it's unusual for us to miss at least one of the TV news bulletins either at 3pm or 9pm. There's more: Spanish is all around us and if it's simply listening to Spanish music or seeing Spanish-language films at the cinema then I'll do that too.

I do a couple of things online too. I use a platform called italki. The basic idea is that I connect with someone via a video call and pay them to talk to me in Spanish. I like to persuade myself that real conversations are my best chance of improving because they are realistic and jump from topic to topic with lots of asides thrown in. Quite unlike those fake sessions about the environment or eating out so beloved by language tutors. I like the online sessions (italki just happens to be the one I bumped into) because it's both impersonal and personal at the same time. I often feel like I'm getting to know a lot about the tutors; they will express political leanings; they will tell you about their family, about things they've done and places they've been but, at the same time, they are just figures on a screen.

The online system makes it very easy to use them for my own ends. Unlike a class where you pay for twelve sessions on a Tuesday at 7:30 in the evening (or whatever), I pay for the sessions as I please and I can shop around for what I consider to be a good price per hour. I try a new tutor; if they're racist, if we don't click, if they talk too much, if I don't like their style or if they want to follow notes or introduce exercises—I simply don't buy another session off them. If I want to change the time or day from this week to next week, I usually can so they have to fit around my schedule rather than me around theirs. It's the same with holidays and the like; if I want to go to the theatre and they only have slots that clash with my theatre visit I forget about them for that week. I don't have to drive anywhere and if the session starts at half past I don't need to think about it till twenty five past. The tutors might have all the disadvantages of the gig economy but not me. I can go to another tutor or forget it for that week. If I want to talk to someone five times in one week or if I want to talk to someone for three hours on the trot or if I want to talk to five different tutors in the same week I can. And if I suddenly stop I don't need to tell them why.

After nearly every online session, I get very angry with myself. In the conversation I had yesterday with Omar, in Galicia, we talked about dubbing films into Spanish and the different ways of dealing with cultural differences in the subtitles and about the markup on cinema popcorn before we wandered onto something about why official Spanish correspondence is so stultifyingly boring. It turns out that he and I have completely different ideas on the need for clear language by the way. That might sound pretty good but I've learned several strategies over the years for making those conversations seem more fluid than they really are. The main one is to lock onto one thing in the affirmations or responses coming from the other person and responding to that. It helps to give the impression that I understood everything when, in fact, I missed most of it. I also have quite a wide vocabulary and that makes me sound more fluent than I am. The truth is though that I'm often reduced to a list of words bound together with inappropriate and random verb tenses while I continually mix genders and almost never use idiomatic expressions be they single-word interjections or those stock phrases that we all pepper our own language with.

As well as the italki I do something similar online with exchange sessions except there the commitment is more regular. I'm not sure whether Manuel found me or if I found him but we met through some online intercambio system. We have a set time and we are pretty strict about half an hour in English and half an hour in Spanish in each section. If we can't make the session then we are pals enough to say so; we simply tell each other via WhatsApp that we have a birthday party or a funeral when we should be nattering so we put it off. I think we've almost become friends and if we were ever actually to meet in person we wouldn't be starting from scratch.

Given all these inputs, I can only think that I must be a bit of a slow learner still having problems—but such is life, I suppose. Some people pick things up easily while others slog away without gaining much traction.

4: Routines around Spanish

This is the fourth in the series about the very ordinary things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in the Spanish angle. This one doesn't quite fit into the "job" bracket but, well self imposed rules are easy to break.

If you've ever read any of my blogs, or talked to me, you'll know that I jabber on about my hand to hand combat with Castilian Spanish all the time. My joints may ache, my breathing may suggest that the end is nigh but I'm not giving up indeed I'm working on the principle, so clearly outlined in that old Anglican hymn, Christian answer boldly. While I breathe, I pray. 

The impetus to learn Spanish came from the difficulty I had in buying a beer the very first time I visited this country. For years, I didn't really put much formal time into that learning - going to a one hour a week evening class in Spanish at the local tech doesn't really add up to much over the year. The real point of those early years is that it's when I put in the hours and hours of sheer drudgery that is learning a language as an adult; grinding through unending vocabulary lists, memorising hideously boring verb tables and trying to understand bookfuls of arcane grammar rules. 

As a part of this language struggle one of my regular jobs, that isn't really a job, is that I meet someone in a bar in Pinoso every week. We've been doing it for years now. The original idea was that it would be a language exchange. The truth is that my chum speaks hardly any English and he probably never will. He's never applied himself to it. That should be to my advantage, as we spend most of the time in Spanish, but he isn't really interested in how I speak Spanish. He's much more interested in pursuing whatever we're talking about. I always come away from the sessions cursing my gaffes and errors

As well as the meetings in the bar I pay for a Spanish lesson using the italki platform – one of several networks of online language teachers. I know lots of people are loathe to use online teaching but I see nothing but advantages. It's cheap, it's flexible, you don't have to go out in the cold and rain, you don't have to sign up for anything and you can abandon tutors with complete impunity.

I've never really expected a lesson from the italki people I've talked to. Most of their teachers do offer proper structured courses but I've only ever wanted a bit of conversation. The woman I'm talking to, each week at present, and I don't have the same world view. That does guarantee that we have a pretty realistic conversation that jumps from topic to topic. I'm never happy with the quality of the conversation and I never feel there's an improvement in my level but, at least, it maintains a routine. 

Actually I also speak to someone else online. This time it's an exchange - half an hour of English for half an hour of Spanish. I found this chap through either the conversation exchange or the my language exchange website. I think we click pretty well and I enjoy the sessions. As well as general chit chat he often has particular questions about words and phrases. We never have the least difficulty filling the time. Again I'm often disappointed with my Spanish but it's ameliorated somewhat by the whole thing being more bilingual than the italki session.

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.