Life in Culebrón

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...

Our neighbours have been putting up a new fence over the past couple of weeks. Facing each other across the footings for what would be the new fence Vicente, for that's the name of our neighbour, was complaining about the builders. I sympathised - one has to with builders. Even builders complain about, other, builders. Taking advantage of his sunny disposition towards me I asked him if he could spare a couple of the concrete blocks that were piled up in his yard. The question I asked was something, in translation, like "Are two of the concrete blocks in excess for you?" I got them and I went away well pleased with myself not only because I had the blocks, but also because I'd used a phrase that a Spaniard would use without having rehearsed it beforehand.  I mentioned this phrase to my online Spanish teacher. I was bemoaning the fact that this, and other, fleeting victories over Spanish are wasted on the audience. I may be pleased with myself for having got the constru...

I shouldn't have chosen 7.30 in the morning. It seemed like a good idea. I thought that an hour at the start of the day wouldn't interfere with any other plans. Anyway with aching bones and a weak bladder I'm nearly always up at 7.30. Besides the session was online so I only had to look dressed from the neck up - no problem with wearing loose fitting shorts and yesterday's odorous t-shirt. Skype doesn't yet transmit body odours. The reason it wasn't such a good idea was that I woke up around 5am and didn't really get back to sleep for worry that I'd miss the appointed hour! It was the first time that I'd ever done a Spanish class online. Somebody told me about an app that they had been told was easy to use to arrange online lessons. The one I used is called italki though I'm sure there are tens if not hundreds of others. I looked through the tutors first. The tutors are from all over the world so you have to think about accents - for Spanish ...

On the after lunch news Rajoy was chatting to Theresa May. I don't think our President speaks English and I'm pretty sure that May doesn't speak Spanish. Just behind them was a chap with grey curly hair and one of those "access all area" passes. I presume he was their interpreter. On the Wordreference.com forum pages I sometimes have a go at helping people to translate things. I tend to go the Spanish English way rather than write in Spanish as I am very aware of the manifold slips that I make when writing in Spanish. Wordreference is a wonderful dictionary cum language resource if you don't know it. For quite a while now I've listened to the Spanish podcasts by Alex occasionally assisted by Vanesa on the cunningly named Spanishpodcast.net . A while ago they started to push their YouTube channel as well but it took me a while to getting around to having a look. On the videos Alex didn't look at all like I expected from having heard his voice ...

When I was at university, a lifetime ago, I was asked how much say I thought students should have in the learning programme. My answer, then, was almost none. Nobody had yet persuaded me that participation was the way to go. Nobody had then persuaded me that it was the learning that was important. It used to be that language teaching, English language teaching, in Spain was pretty straightforward. The teacher started with page one, went on to page two and so on. There was a lot of writing and copying and not much talking or listening. I'm sure it's no longer like that. Having been brought up in another country it never struck me to teach in that traditional Spanish way. Even when we have a course book I tend to drift off the straight and narrow. I try to talk them through grammar. I don't think that a grammatical rule with one line of explanation followed by a page of exceptions is going to be very helpful to someone who has to juggle with vocabulary, structures, id...