Spanish language stuff part 2: Learning Spanish

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 Shakespearean quotes. If it really were true that you could speak Spanish with just 1000 words, and you took just five minutes to memorise each word, you'd still need 83 hours of parrot fashion learning before you got to the variations and the combinations. What it comes down to is that language learning is, principally, a huge memory task and there is no way around that.

How much you try to remember is a matter of personal choice and willingness. Richard Vaughan, quite a famous teacher of English here in Spain, always stresses that learning common words pays dividends over learning less common ones. The example I've heard him use more than once is between the verbs to sleep and to be. To sleep isn't exactly an obscure verb but in comparison to the verb to be it is. The trouble with that theory is that certain words are common under certain circumstances. You hardly ever know when the circumstances will arise when you will need more words. The verb to fry and the nouns egg and chip aren't particularly common words (In the Richard Vaughan sense) but in a greasy spoon, when you want fried egg and chips, they are. 

Use and repetition is important too. Once upon a time I used Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. I was never good with them but I knew the basics. I haven't used them for years now and I wouldn't have the faintest idea where to begin with designing a simple database. You may think that living in Spain I would use the language all the time, and I do, but most of my conversations are very simple transactions. In the supermarket, in the bar, where a couple of stock phrases will suffice. I often greet people in the street and exchange a few words about their family or the weather but it's very seldom that the conversation strays to the movement of refugees or US Foreign Policy or even a bit of gossip about some event in the area. In this sort of case Richard Vaughan's common phrases and words theory works well. It's like the Spanish waiter or waitress on the coast. They speak to their British customers in English but most of those waiters and waitresses don't really speak English, they speak the menu. 

All this said my Spanish isn't too bad nowadays. I can nearly always get what I want though there may be a lot of fumbling and stumbling along the way. I can read a newspaper, listen to the radio, watch the TV and even read the car handbook. With the online conversation I can even practise real conversations. But my Spanish is still far from good. If I'm watching a film at the cinema I can lose the thread completely. Understanding the lyrics of songs is usually beyond me unless I see them written down and even in something as commonplace as watching the TV news my understanding lets me down from time to time. While I can overhear, and understand, something said in English through all sorts of extraneous sounds and in all sorts of unfavourable circumstances I need a following wind to not lose the thread in Spanish. 

After all this time and all the effort it is frustrating beyond belief.

Fleeting success

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 construction right but it's unlikely that Vicente noticed. If you're a native English speaker you might notice the mistake in "is a nice day" but you wouldn't notice the correctness of  "it's a nice day".

You, one, becomes much more aware of language when you're not comfortable with it. I often find myself repeating a Spanish phrase after hearing it on a news broadcast or in a song. Often it's not the intricate stuff that seems to be the hardest. For instance Spaniards find it really hard, when they are speaking English, to remember to use pronouns, the little words that go before a verb. They are not needed in Spanish so they get forgotten in English. It's common to hear was a teacher instead of he was a teacher and she is late often becomes is late. It's no big deal. It hardly matters. Even those people who speak spectacularly good English, think Eurovision Song Contest hosts, don't quite sound right if you start analysing what they say. Even if their grammar is good, the vocabulary right and the phrasing OK you, one, will still notice that their inflexion, their pacing and their tonality is just slightly off when compared to a native speaker.

Obviously it's the same the other way. There's a programme on Spanish radio hosted by a bloke called Nicholas Jackson who's from Manchester. I wish my Spanish were as good as his but he sounds like a Briton speaking Spanish. Even someone like the writer Ian Gibson, who has been here for years, still has an Irish twang behind his very colloquial Spanish. 

Young Britons brought up in Spain offer a strange case. At home, with carers or parents, their principal language is usually English. In the street, with friends, at work, at school their key language is Spanish. In effect English becomes, very much, their secondary language and lots of young British people grow to make the same mistakes in English as their Spanish peers - referring to their parents as their fathers for instance. They also, often, have a, relatively, limited English vocabulary and lots of trouble with English spellings.

My style of speaking Spanish is still very much an exercise in join the dots. I provide a list of vocabulary and I hope that the Spaniard I'm speaking to will be able to piece together what I'm trying to say. I've never liked performing - I don't dance, I don't do pass the cucumber, I don't even ask for street directions. Recently though, a couple of times, I've been quite pleased with myself because I've been less reluctant to speak. I put it down to speaking two hours Spanish each week through the online classes. Outside of the online sessions I don't really have Spanish conversations. Ten minutes with the neighbour, a sentence or two in a shop, a short exchange of phrases in a bar or restaurant. Mind you it's not all wine and roses. I still, sometimes, go to see a film in Spanish and, when it's done, if it weren't for the pictures, I'd have no idea what it was about even.

Talk to the screen

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 I chose someone from Spain rather than someone with a Venezuelan or Mexican accent. All of the tutors seemed to have different prices though the majority seemed to be in the 7€ to 8€ range. I think one person was 23€ an hour. They must either be very good or as misguided as that bloke who once tried to sell me a very expensive Land Rover. I bought a discounted 10 lesson pack, 10 hours of classes, for $70, or about 65€ with one specific tutor. In general though I think that you buy credit with the organisation which you can then spend with any of their tutors. I'm still a bit novice with the system but it appears that the app puts you in contact with the tutor, arranges the session times and takes your money. The lesson with the tutor happens on Skype or Facetime or whatever the Google equivalent is called this week.

I can see lots of advantages to doing languages online and very few disadvantages. The application gives you a brief bio of all the tutors, which languages they speak, where they are based, how much they cost etc. All the teachers have a little introductory video so you can hear them speak. You can buy individual lessons or packages and most of the tutors offer a free or reduced price test session. So, for very little money you can give it a go. If you don't like the tutor, if you don't like their style, if you have technical problems or if you just think better of it you can simply say goodbye at the end of the session with none of the trauma of abandoning a more traditional class. I suppose too you could also book lots of sessions in a very short period to get an intensive course or you could take lessons from several different tutors for variety and, as long as you can get a decent connection you can take the class from wherever you happen to be.

The bloke I spoke to was very good; nice and easy to talk to. I've booked up for a second session but this time I'm not starting quite so early.

Translating and interpreting

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 on the podcasts. The videos though are really simple and they look very professional to me. Alex speaks in Spanish and, one day, the video ran automatically with Spanish subtitles. Trying to turn them off I found that there is a tool on the site for adding in subtitles to videos in other languages. I've made a couple of donations to the Spanishpodcast.net site in the past but, generally, I've got most of the stuff for free so I thought it might be a nice gesture to add the subs in English.

I understand the dialogues 100% or maybe 99% some weeks. Nonetheless putting in the subtitles proved to be more challenging than I expected. The way that it's done on YouTube is that there are the subs in Spanish and a box to type in your attempt in whatever language underneath. The little boxes in Spanish finish on a particular word and I try to end on the same word in English but it's not always possible simply because of differences in word order. Then there are the expressions that make sense in Spanish but aren't good English. I have been very undecided whether to go for a good English style just taking the sense from the Spanish, whether to go for the most literal translation that maintains a semblance of sense or to mix a bit of both. I have not been happy with any of the translations so far but, eventually, I'm sure I'll settle on an appropriate style.

In the meantime hats off to that translator bloke making it possible for Rajoy and May to maintain a conversation at a normal speed.

Colloquial contractions, prepositions and phrasal verbs

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, idioms, grammar, rhythm and pronunciation as they try to get something to eat in a café.

The other night I was having a bit of a discussion in a bar with someone who is doing an English course at the Official School of Languages. She had been told that unless she demonstrated her ability to use certain constructions, we talked about inversions, things like, "Not until I heard my name did I believe I had won the race" or "Hardly had I begun to speak when I was interrupted" would she be able to demonstrate that she had achieved a B2 level. What the B2 descriptor, of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, actually says is that someone at this level can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialisation, can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers possible without strain for either party and can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

Not much mention there of inversion. Obviously the text books have to try to build more complicated language into their various levels but the truth is that the CEFR is all about communication and not about grammar - the grammar is there to describe how the communication works. I saw a direct parallel between trudging through a text book as a way to teach English and a modern day student being told that the level of effectiveness in speaking English is in the complexity of the language.

At one of the places I work my boss said that a student had complained that we spent all the time talking and listening and reading stuff and suchlike in class and that what we should be doing was doing more exam papers, more filling in the gaps in grammar exercises. The complainer thought I should, certainly, be setting more homework rather than urging people to check those things they found difficult, to read things in English to help with structure and form and to consult grammar books to help them work out how to say the things they wanted to say or write.

Page one it is then.