Spanish language stuff part 1: Things not to do

The other day I rang someone who I've been friends with for nearly 50 years. We talked about trees, we talked about fish dying in the Mar Menor and we talked about when organic veg aren't really organic veg. We also talked about language learning. It was that conversation which prompted me to write this two part blog. My pal, who has been learning German for years, recommended a YouTube series called Easy - Easy German in her case and Easy Spanish in mine. I watched the video and thought crikey, if that's easy my Spanish is worse than I thought. Here's the link if you're interested. 

The particular episode talked about things not to do in Spain. Here's the list.

1 Never turn up on time - the example they use in the video is a party. Spaniards do turn up on time for lots of things but the basic notion is good.

2 Never go to the shops between 2 and 5 in the afternoon. Again lots of town centre shops and supermarkets open in the afternoon but the basic premise is good

3 Don't start the "two kisses" (the cheek to cheek lip smacking greeting) from the wrong side. You need to start by moving your head to the left to brush right cheeks; otherwise expect a head butt or a full on the mouth kiss.

4 Don't try to eat in a restaurant outside the "traditional" times. That's probably between say 2 and 4 for lunch and after 8.30 (even that's a bit early) until some unspecified later time for dinner. You can get tapas, sandwiches etc. outside these times but these are the hours when the kitchen will be open. Actually I changed the times a bit because I think they used Catalan times (see point 8).

5 Never clear off as soon as you've finished eating with someone. If you're really in a hurry you can start apologising that you have to go as you drink the after meal coffee. Normally though the after meal chatting is an essential part of the meal

6 Don't read anything into the way you are greeted in a shop or bar. If you are called guapo or guapa for instance (handsome or beautiful) it's simply the same as someone in Liverpool calling you luv or someone in Nottingham thinking you're a duck.

7 Never pronounce an English word as though it were an English word. Every English language word has to be hispanised. This is absolutely true but the rules are incredibly complex about how the word should be tortured.

8 Don't generalise about Spain by which they mean that people from Andalucia have different ways to the people of Cataluña or Galicia. Whilst it's true I often wonder how we'd ever say anything if we weren't able to generalise.

Finally, point 9, don't shoot me. If you don't agree go to the video and make your comments there. I'm just repeating (more or less) what the young women in the video said.

Do you know the one about the Australian who thought that Loughborough was pronounced Loogaboogara?

The English letter O sounds exactly like you just read it. Oh? Oh! The Spanish letter O sounds completely different - a bit more like the O in otter. It's a simple Spanish sound that we Britons often forget. I live in Pinoso. Now read Pinoso again but this time change the O sound to the one from otter. The coronavirus and Covid both have the letter O in them. I tend to use Covid. Think otter again as you say Covid

This word, Covid, is one I learned in Spain. It sounds like the Roman writer Ovid but that only helps if you say Cicero instead of Cicero, or it could be the other way around. Covid is a word I hear on the radio and the TV all the time. So, I'm Skyping to some people in the UK. I say something like "Covid is wreaking havoc with some businesses". The Skypee couple look blank. It was only later that I realised that my pronunciation had, fleetingly, caused confusion.

I was aghast. Someone, somewhere on a forum, on Facebook, in Twitter, (but obviously not on TikTok where I never venture) asked what a TIE was. There has been so much babble about these things in places I look that I thought everyone knew about them. I don't think they thought it was the longish piece of cloth, worn for decorative purposes around the neck, resting under the shirt collar and knotted at the throat. They may well, though, have thought it was pronounced that way, as in "Tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree". TIE, for Brits, is one of those with initials, like "The UN", rather than as a word "NATO". Spanish letter sounds are not the same as English letter sounds and in TIE Spaniards roll the letters together. TIE by the way is the foreigner's identity card. It's quite possible that the person asking the question has heard these cards talked about but not recognised the subject because of variations in pronunciation. Say Pinoso with that British O and Spaniards might not recognise the word.

Sometimes it isn't the pronunciation it's the equivalence of ideas embodied in a word. IVA and VAT have different letters but the same meaning, ITV and MOT (the car test) are similar enough to be interchangeable. Sometime the words and ideas are not though. The Spanish Tax system doesn't really have a tax allowance in the same way as the UK does. In practice there are similarities, and it's around 5,500€, but the concept of tax free money isn't the same. There has been a lot of Internet chatter recently about whether another lockdown was likely locally. The word itself embodies an idea which is not really applicable here; the use of a word drawn from one context and applied to another can cause real confusion.  

These language differences aren't the ones that you associate with learning the language. It's why I decided not to ask for the British bacon sandwich the other day in the fast food sandwich shop. I know how to say British bacon perfectly but I'm not confident about how a Spaniard would say it. The easiest thing was to go for the roast chicken with Brie, pollo asado con brie, because I know how to pronounce that.

Roll your own

My dancing is terrible. In fact I don't dance. I can't clap in time, I can't keep rhythm, I can't sing. At junior school they wrested the triangle from my grip enraged with my inability to strike it at the appropriate moment. At Grammar School I was beaten for singing badly. It was presumed that I was singing so tunelessly to be rebellious.

I can't roll Rs either. This is essential for speaking Spanish reasonably well. The R at the beginning of a word has to be rolled and the double RR has to be rolled. To Spaniards I sound like a Benny Hill Chinese person.

There are dozens of YouTube videos with tricks, methods, advice and examples of how to roll Rs. They all start by saying that everyone can roll Rs. Just the same way as my music teacher, Philip Tordoff, told me that everyone could sing just a few moments before he set about me with a ruler.

Apparently the trick, for Rs, not for singing, is to put the tip of the tongue on the alveolar ridge and expel enough air so that the tip of the tongue vibrates. The tongue, to produce a Spanish R, has to be somewhere near where it would be if a British person were to say de. I can do that. I can make my tongue vibrate but there is some coordination necessary with my vocal cords and that just escapes me.

It is, as Mr Jones my Latin teacher used to say, a bugger.