Life in Culebrón

My sister-in-law is, apparently, learning French. She and my sister, who is learning Russian, were talking about Duolingo, the telephone and computer language learning app. I really don't care for Duolingo in Spanish—it's too strict, too dogmatic and often arguably wrong. I was once asked, in a schoolboy quiz, how many sides a threepenny bit had. I was on top of that obvious trick; everyone knew there were 12 sides, but there were two more—the heads and tails—making 14. I showed I'd caught onto their little trick by putting my answer as 12+2=14. "No," said the quiz setter—"12." An injustice that still rankles 62 years later. If that quiz setter were not dead, he'd work for Duolingo. Lynn—for that's my sister-in-law's name—said that it wasn't the general stuff but the artificial intelligence bit that she actually liked. She said she had conversations and did spoken grammar exercises with Duolingo AI. I've seen the adverts, of course, b...

I've been trying to learn Spanish for ages, long before we got here 17 years ago. In fact I started my first Spanish class in 1983. I'm talking about evening classes, maybe an hour or two per week for a ten week term. It takes a long time to clock up the hours especially when you consider that you're usually in a class with maybe a dozen other people. The important thing about the classes was the routine, the commitment. Doing a class meant homework exercises, grinding through verb tables and learning lists of vocabulary. However many times someone tries to sell you a course that they promise will teach you Spanish (or any other language) in a few hours just consider this. Imagine you want to learn a poem or a literary quote in your native language. You'll know the words and you'll know the pronunciation, all you have to do is remember the words in the correct order. How long do you reckon it might take? It used to take me ages to learn those "O" level Sha...

Sixteen years ago today, on 7 October 2004, I parked up in Santa Pola having travelled the 1,349 miles from Huntingdon behind the wheel of a 1977 MGB GT. My travelling companion was a black and white cat called Mary. Our destination was the flat where Maggie had been living for over a month whilst she worked as a teacher in nearby Elche. The journey took two days and cost 200€ in fuel, 120€ in tolls, 55€ for accommodation and just 25€ in food. Now, if anyone had asked, I'd have sworn that on the first full day in Spain I went and signed on the equivalent of the Council Tax Register, the padrón. In fact my diary tells me otherwise. The only interesting thing I did that first day was to go, with Maggie, to a Spanish class that she'd booked us in to. It seems I didn't get around to signing on the padrón till the week after. Even then it wasn't my first bit of officialdom - apparently I'd managed to get a social security number a few hours before. Strange how memories b...

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...

When Spaniards talk about electricity, in the house, they talk about light or at least they use the word whose principal English/Spanish dictionary translation is light. Or take tyre; there is a Spanish word for tyre but the commonplace word translates as wheel. It's pretty normal that a word we'd use in English has a direct translation into Spanish but the Spanish and English usages are different. Sometimes we have one word - slice for instance - whilst Spaniards have several and sometimes it's the other way round. I was talking about this with my online tutor this morning. We got onto how words change with situations. It's unlikely that you would use the word piss directly with your doctor and equally improbable that, down the boozer, you'd talk about urine, micturition or passing water with your mates, though you might use the last if you were talking about a drive through the Lake District. The tutor said that he always found funerary language difficult. The w...

One Friday, ages ago, at the monthly few minutes of silence organised by the Plataforma El Pinós contra la violència de gènere  I got talking to a couple. The bloke was a patent and trademark lawyer and he wanted to learn a bit of English.  We swapped phone numbers and later arranged to meet in a bar every week to speak to each other for a while in Castilian and for a while in English. Oh, and just in case your Valenciano is a bit rusty, a clumsy translation of the event would be The Pinoso Platform Against Gender Violence. It's important here that I say Castilian or Castellano and not Spanish because there is no doubt that Jesús does not consider himself to be a Castilian; he's Valencian. He identifies as Catalan. At first that caused a bit of tension. He's really quite vehement in his nationalist views, but over the months it has become just one of those things that we are able to joke about. As he explains some Catalan point of view to me I am often reminded of that...

I heard a news item that said that someone had died. The name sounded, on first hearing, to be Mujica but in fact it was Múgica. The first, José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica, is an ex Uruguayan president, who has YouTube video after video overflowing with avuncular socialist wisdom and the other is Enrique Múgica Herzog who was, in Francoist times and during the transition, an important Spanish politician. The Uruguayan I knew in the same way as one knows Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs. The Spaniard I didn't know at all. I've mentioned a pal who lives in el Cantón, a small village just over the border into Murcia, a couple of times in the last few blogs. His village seems to be being pretty "solidario" at the moment and they've made a couple of videos ; the together, as a team, we can win sort of videos. One of the clips, the second part of the video, shows people from the village singing along to Resistiré , a song from the 80s which has ...

Chinese buffets are an example. The first time you go to one it's all a bit confusing. The second time, less so, and by the third time you actually get what you want and in the order you want it. I've heard that crows learn quickly but I think we humans are faster. I've been helping a friend in his meetings with the medical staff at the hospital. If you've read this blog before you will know that I mumble and groan about my Spanish speaking ability all the time. I do speak Spanish though. I gurgle and trip over words, my Yorkshire accent becomes more pronounced and I abandon any clever constructions I may think I know, especially during the first few words, but I usually muddle through. Hospitals are much less easy to understand than Chinese buffets but, crow like, I suspect we'll soon pick it up. Spanish hospitals speak Spanish which adds a layer of difficulty for non Spanish speakers. Not only do you not know which door to wait outside or knock on but it...

I think it would be true to say that the majority of Britons who settle in Spain intend to learn Spanish. The general view seems to be that, after a year or so, we should be getting by followed by a general and constant improvement until we are fluent after maybe four or five years. A longish term project but with immediate gains. That's a vast generalisation. Some people never have any intention of learning Spanish. Others, particularly those who maintain regular and constant relationships with Spaniards through living, working or studying together, may expect to, and actually do, learn the language much faster. There are as many opinions on learning Spanish amongst Britons living here as there are Britons. I often think that a chap who runs a famous English language learning organisation here in Spain has it right. He was talking about English but the idea holds good for Spanish. He maintains that most people learning English get to whatever level they want or need and then f...

Just outside our kitchen door the sun is shining. In fact Culebrón is bathed in glorious sunshine, as it has been for days, but it's just outside our kitchen door that concerns me. That's where I read whilst I drink tea when I have time. It's nice outside our kitchen door. There are lizards and swallows and blackbirds and wagtails and a symphony of butterflies and all sorts of beasts chirping, chittering and squawking from the hedges and greenery. It's private too, private enough for me to take off my shirt, which is something I would never do in public nowadays. The flabby fat makes me feel unwell and I wouldn't want to scare the horses. As you may know I do a bit of teaching work. The English classes have been tailing off with the summer. My students, quite rightly, realise that there are more interesting things to do than fight with the pronunciation of island (izzland). But, suddenly, I have an intensive summer course or two to do. Exam courses; exam cramm...

I went to a little bilingual talk last night about the history of the nearby village of La Romana. It wasn't at all bad. The local expert, Francesc Gallardo, did his stuff and answered, knowledgeably, the questions he was asked. He was ably assisted by a woman, Anabel, who handled the translation. She was the same woman who did the talk back in December . I had no real trouble understanding nearly all of the Spanish part of the talk and my English was up to the English part though that didn't seem to be everyone's case. I'm not talking about the Spanish; I'm talking about the English. I thought we had some most amusing culture and translation problems. In the Q&A session someone asked in English about a building that had a "big flat stone" inside, "probably" for processing grapes. The translator turned the English into Spanish and talked about grapes and wine to the Francesc, the speaker. He said he didn't know of any bodegas (winer...

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 ...

I don't have any work between the end of June and the beginning of September. No pay either so it's not quite as good as it sounds. And with Maggie working mornings our options about getting out and about have been a little more restricted too. This is one of the reasons that I've got through quite a lot of books over the summer. That and because I prefer short books. Reading ten books with 200 pages is only like reading a couple of big thick books. Anyway I get bored with one style, one set of vocabulary and the same basic theme. Generally I've read books in Spanish - partly to try and improve my language but also so that  I have a bit more local culture under my belt. After all you don't need to have read every Kate Atkinson or Stieg Larsson to be able to have a conversation about their style. Talking about what you have read is a common enough conversation so the more points of reference I have the greater the possibility of maintaining that dialogue. The onl...

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 ...