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.

Bàsquet: els equips cadet i infantil inicien la competició

I am often quite concerned by my Facebook feed. Apparently I have friends, acquaintances and friends of acquaintances who believe that wearing particular clothes is dangerous, that seeking a better future is intrinsically wrong and that arguing that people should be treated equally is woolly minded thinking. I listen to Trump and Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orbán knowing that Jair Bolsonaro is about to join their ranks and I wince. I think of my home country and its isolationist anti cultural bigotry and I wonder where it all went wrong.

My dad used to talk about how, in his youth, there was hope for a world order of sorts. People working together to solve common problems. Obviously we're now on exactly the opposite track. United Nations, World Trade Association, European Union. Forget it. We'll do better on our own.

On the most parochial of levels, with something very tiny, I don't like what's happening in Pinoso. I have some mobile phone application that collects news articles. Amongst others it takes the news from the local Town Hall. It's news that isn't news really but it helps me to keep up with what's going on locally. Since we got back from our holidays though I wonder if there has been a change of policy, if the news has been Marine Le Pen-ised; Pinoso for the Pinoseros? This was the crop of news headlines yesterday:

Música, jocs i màgia per celebrar el dia de la Comunitat Valenciana

Handbol: inici de lliga amb derrota

Bàsquet: inici de la competició

Futbol sala: resultats del cap de setmana

“Meldo” visita la escuela infantil municipal

Futbol: resultats del cap de setmana

You may notice that they are all in Valencian, the local language rather than in the worldwide version of Spanish or in both. I'm not that interested in the games and magic to celebrate Valencia day, the handball, what happened with the basketball or five a side teams or even about Meldo visiting the nursery but what if the news were about local taxes or changes in administrative procedures that had a direct effect on me? 

The last time I saw a full list of the nationalities living in Pinoso it read like this, ranked in number of people from each country: Spaniards, Britons, Ecuadorians, Ukrainians, Moroccans, Colombians, Bulgarians, Argentinians, Uruguayans, French, Paraguayans, Cubans, Brazilians, Romanians, Germans, Bolivians, Swedes, Algerians, Pakistanis, Italians, Norwegians, Dominicans, Georgians, Lithuanians, Belgians, Portuguese, Czechs, Russians, Venezuelans, Thais, Belarusians, Slovakians and someone from the United States.

It's likely that only a percentage of one of those groups speaks Valenciano. So am I to presume that the rest of us can go take a running jump?

And you all feel so superior and expert

One of my little jokes is that I like paying Spanish taxes. I say it gives me the right to complain about Spanish politicians. Now I'm going to argue that after eleven years here I have a right to express an opinion about Spain.

I wrote a little essay for a Spanish class I do and I posted it on this blog. It was no more than a writing exercise for the teacher but when it was done I thought it was a whimsical look at things I noticed in Spain - good coffee, bad tea, uninformative notices - little inconsequential things. Perfect for the blog.

Nobody much comments on my blog but I got one about that article. At first the chap (I think it's a man) was just putting me right. I said there was no good British style tea to be had in Spanish cafés and he told me about the varieties, methods and what not of making a range of teas all of which were available in Spain. Fair enough, not the same point but fair enough. As his reply lengthened though it changed tone. He doesn't seem to be too keen on we Britons. Again, fair enough, if his experience of us is bad then that's his experience. He didn't seem to care for me much either or at least what I write.

He also made a comment on an article I wrote about swearing. My basic premise was that Spaniards swear less forcibly but more frequently than Britons. As you may imagine my post was full of explanations, qualifications and exceptions. Now here we had a different mode of attack. He simply told me that I was wrong. I don't think so. I may have a different experience to him or a different interpretation but I am not wrong. I can see swearing on the television, hear it on the streets and in the bars and I have been unpleasantly surprised by the frequency of swearing amongst my sub teen pupils. It may be true that I notice the use of strong English language swearing by Spaniards more than the home population. After all I know what it means and how forceful its meaning is because I am English but I would not notice it if it were not said.

This chap though did make me wonder about the generalisations that I make in a lot of the posts. We all gather information from around us and extrapolate - all Swedes are blonde, all Ecuadorians are short, all Andalucians are full of the joys of life. All obviuosly untrue but all good healthy stereotypes. So when does extrapolation become stereotyping and when does stereotyping become offensive? When a Spaniard tells me that all the English wear socks with sandals I smile. Everybody knows that's what we Britons do. When I get told we are all drunkards I think of the news stories showing all those Britons in Magaluf paddling and crawling in pools of beer and puke and I smile again. If I were feeling combative I may rise in defence of all the sober Brits, dismiss the sock myth or even argue the merits of socks to avoid scarred feet and stinking sandals.

I was about to start this paragraph with "I like Spain, I like Spaniards" but then I realised that's not absolutely true. There are plenty of things about the behaviour of some Spaniards, things that are common enough for me to rashly declare that "all Spaniards do this or that" that I definitely do not like. I don't like all of Spain either. Some of it, is in my opinion, a blighted wasteland. There are things I think are actively stupid here - penalising private solar electricity generation and the relatively recent "gagging law" spring to mind. Then again I found plenty to complain about in the UK before I left and I could, Peter Green style, keep you amused for hours complaining about the behaviour of some of my compatriots living here. There are lots of bad similarities between the two counties too - the overbearing pride that "we" did this or that in things like history or sport, the rewriting of history and the jingoistic and chauvanistic in general.

In fact, my general view is that the UK and Spain are, nowadays, pretty similar places. It's not a popular view. I voiced it on a forum about what culture shock people could experience coming to live in Spain. I said there were lots of differences, some of them quite wide differences, but that none of them were of the big kind - no general prohibitions on personal freedom, no threats to basic safety or democratic organisation, not even different clothes. Just another European country. I was thinking about big things like education, healthcare, and the visible economic indicators. The flood of posts after mine listed everything from cruelty to animals and much more visible corruption through to slow Internet connections and poor bank services as evidence that Spain would dish out plenty of culture shock. I stick to my opinion.

And what's the point of this rambling? Well it's to say that I have spent something like 18% of my life in Spain and I'm reasonably clued up about the country. I've visited all but one of the provincial capitals, In a Munro sense I'm missing just one of the Balearic Islands and one of the autonomous cities. I may have been a tourist in most of those cities but I'm not a tourist in Spain. I watch Spanish telly, read Spanish press, wear Spanish clothes, drive a Spanish car, work in Spain, eat Spanish food, buy in Spanish shops. I know what's going on. Anyway it's my blog, my experiences of some of the things, the little things, that happen to me and around me. That's what the blog description says. A personal view, a personally biased view, but not an uninformed view.

I did suggest to the commentator, who wrote in a mix of Spanish and English, that if he were still trying to improve his English we could continue the discussion over a couple of pints of whisky or some tepid tea. He turned me down. He said he'd been considering it until he saw my posts.

Now maybe if I'd promised to wear my Union flag shorts!

The title is taken fom one of the comments. It refers to Brits in Spain and probably more specifically to me.