Bravery

I need a digital signature to do things online. I have one but the certificate is computer specific and so I need a new one for a newer computer.

One of the agencies that provides the signatures is a collection agency called SUMA. They're the bunch that collect our rates, water and rubbish bills. Pinoso isn't big enough to have a permanent office but they have a session here on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings in the old Casa de Cultura.

There were several people in front of me and each enquiry tends to be quite lengthy. I waited patiently but as one person came out and the next person went in I did something very Spanish. I queue jumped.

All I wanted to know was whether it was worth waiting as I suspected that I couldn't get the signature except by going to a permanent office. It took seconds and the answer was negative so I saved myself a long and fruitless wait.

But I felt very proud of myself for being so daring. Speaking Spanish across a room full of people isn't something I like doing but I did it.

Sitting and walking

I half remember an early city walk that I did. It was around Oxford and the chap introduced himself as the obsequious Turnbull. He was about twelve years old, or so it seemed to me at the time, and he wore a threadbare suit complete with bow tie. He did a good tour though. I like walking tours around towns and cities. Trees and geology in Leeds, Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel, writers in Dublin or 1726 in Petrer - they're all worth a go. I don't even mind those leaflet based walks that do the drainage system in the Fens, Bomber Command in 1942 or Carmen Conde in Cartagena.

We've always tried to throw a few cultural things in amongst the alcohol and wild excesses of our lives (well that and the nightly cocoa) and even having to do it it in Spanish hasn't quite vanquished us. I've taken, purportedly, willing house guests to the theatre or to a film. We've done lots of music - festivals, flamenco, ballet, zaerzuela, contemporary, jazz, latin and opera. Folky and amateur stuff comes out of our ears and even word based activities, like poetry and comedy, haven't been out of bounds.

We've been a bit culturally bereft for the past few months though. Mediaeval and craft fairs, drinking and eating too much with pals and blessing donkeys, for all their fine attributes, don't really count as culture. So I was interested to see a bit of theatre advertised in nearby Novelda. The venue was the Casa Modernista, the Modernist House - a house we think of as being Art Nouveau - all intricate woodwork and stained glass. A theatre company is doing some sort of historical recreation there.

Almost at the same time Yecla advertised guided walks based on the books and life of the writer Azorín. They are commemorating the fifty years since his death. Azorín is getting a fair bit of attention locally because he was born in Monóvar and went to school in Yecla. Both places get mention in his books and so both have organised events. I didn't really see the Azorín link but we got to see a Billy Wilder film a little while ago as a result.

So I set about booking the Azorín tour around Yecla and the theatre in Novelda. A splendidly simple process for both. Google forms from Facebook in Novelda and a simple, reassuringly old fashioned email to Yecla.

Yecla came back quickly with an amusingly intricate form, so precise that it accepted my reservation at 8.03 Central European Time. The Google form didn't work so well. It took a couple of old technology emails to sort it out. The venue people emailed me in Spanish and later, for good measure, in perfectly acceptable English to say that there had been a bit of a blip but they had it in hand.

I was looking for a quote about Spring and the changes it rings to round off this post. Tolstoy's "Spring is a time of plans and projects" would have done nicely but Margaret Atwood made me laugh more "In the Spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

And may God have mercy upon your soul

The last time I was in France I was holidaying in Cataluña. It was the sign that said 20 kilometres to France or something that drew us there. Ah, the gay abandon of it all, the sweet adventure of crossing an international frontier just because we could. Free spirits and all that.

So last Friday I got a speeding ticket from France written in Spanish. Some French traffic camera seems to think I was there on Christmas Eve 2016. Actually I was in Villena and so was the Mini. I bought a bottle of Laphroaig for me and a bottle of wine for Maggie as a Christmas treat. I paid with a credit card. The credit card bill is now one of my few bits of evidence that I was in Spain.

At first I thought the ticket was a scam but a bit of asking around and a bit of checking some websites and it seemed real enough. A 68€ fine or 45€ with a discount for quick payment. I have 45 days from the issue of the ticket to appeal.

The paperwork was pretty good; details of what and how and why, methods to get a copy of the photo and various "modes" of appeal. The website was in several languages and both the paperwork and the website suggested that nearly everything could be done online. Paying the fine went from cash and credit cards to paying via a mobile phone app and a Google Pay account.

When I got into the detail of the paperwork the website and documentation began to look less good. Basically unless I had certain pieces of paper I would have to make a deposit of 68€ to contest the ticket. I rang the service centre in France and spoke to someone in English. She said it was easy. Go to the police, report that my number plates had been usurped (A bit like Richard III and Henry VII) and then send them the scanned report via the website and Robert est ton oncle. I went to the Guardia Civil. "We can't give you any paperwork because how do we know the plates have been usurped?" "You need to get a copy of the photo - it'll either be a mistake or if it is real then we can give you paperwork". "Anyway, it's easy without us," said the Guardia officer, "just fill in the form bim, bam, tell them you weren't there and Robert será tu tio". I rang the French service centre again. "If I just pay the fine do I get points on my licence?" The man, it was a man this time, said he would advise against paying up because if someone had copied my plates I could expect fine after fine after fine. I see the logic but I don't know how that will work practically - how will paying stop the speed cameras generating tickets? He did tell me though that my defence was Mode 1 on the form. He said I didn't need to send money to make the appeal. He was wrong. For a Mode 1 appeal I needed the paperwork from the Guardia. Without paperwork it's a Mode 3 appeal. Actually it didn't matter anyway. After hours of preparing documents, scanning other documents and reducing them in size so they would fit onto the French website I finally pressed the send button. "Erreur" said the site. It was one of those websites where after each failed attempt you need to go back to the very first step. I tried with different browsers, different document sizes, different labels on the documents. I gave up.

I asked my insurance company - insurance companies in Spain often "deal with" speeding tickets - if they could help and I sent them all the scanned paperwork. They, rang me back. They only deal with stuff in Spain so they couldn't help but the legal department pointed out that my paperwork probably proved that I was in Spain but it didn't prove the car was. They thought the chances were that the speeding ticket would hold up in court and I would be found guilty.

I turned my attention to getting a copy of the photo. If it wasn't my registration number, if it wasn't the car or it wasn't me I might not have to prove the nearly impossible that neither the car nor I were in France. That had to be done by ordinary post. It needed lots of copied documentation of course. I went to the post office to post it before work but, after waiting in the queue for thirty minutes, I gave up, stuck all the stamps I had on the envelope and hurled it into the post box. 

I've spent this weekend occasionally trying to get the documentation to load to the website but, eventually, I gave up and collected it all together in an envelope. I paid the 68€ to lodge an appeal online. I notice that there are three possible decisions on appeal: I may end up paying the original fine because I didn't prove my case, I may end up with the fine increased by 10% for wasting the court's time or they may exonerate me. In the last case I have to write to ask for my deposit to be refunded - the refund is not automatic. And the cost of posting the bundle of documents by registered post was another 13.25€.

My guess? They decide I was in France and it costs me 68€.

The photo by the way is of the last time I was in France.

Driving along in my automobile

I went to see some old pals in Valencia the other day. They are Britons here in Spain for just a few days. It's Fallas time in Valencia when lots and lots of communities and neighbourhoods construct papier maché type figures (I have no idea what material they actually use) up to maybe 20 metres high (a guess) and then set fire to them.

Valencia is the third largest city in Spain and yesterday it was chockablock with people in town for the fiesta. It's quite likely that a lot of the regular inhabitants of Valencia have fled to avoid the disruption that Fallas causes but lots more were dressed up in "traditional" dress. As an aside have you ever wondered why traditional clothes are fixed at some point in the past? Who decided that the quintessential traditional costume in an area was worn in 1876 or 1923? Why not 1976 or 1723? And what if we chose 2016 as the perfect year for a new version of traditional costume? What and how would you choose? Why fix a style anyway?

I travelled to Valencia on the train. It seemed sensible when the train fare is 9.50€ for the 140kms especially as the railway station is right in the heart of the city. Like the country bumpkin that I am nowadays I marvelled at the throng of people on the pavements, the size of the crowd to watch, or rather hear, the bang bang bang of the mascletá outside the Town Hall and the general coming and going of people either involved, in some way, in the Fallas or not.

It was pretty manic getting on to the train to leave Valencia. There were so many people heading for the automatic ticket gates that security people were having to control the flow of ticket waving humanity. When I got back to my parked car at the Elda/Petrer railway station (free parking in the forecourt) the difference in pace was obvious. The side by side towns of Elda and Petrer have a combined population of around 90,000, which is a town sized town, but, even then, there was nothing much going on around the station.

As I drove the 25kms home I used main beam on the car more often than dipped. There was no traffic. There very seldom is. I can't remember when I was last in a traffic jam worthy of the name. Sometimes there is a brief interruption to the traffic flow but not very often. I drive 60kms to work and it takes me between 44 and 47 minutes without fail. Of course, we live in the back of beyond. In any of the bigger Spanish cities and towns, and down along the coast, the traffic is just traffic and there are jams and bumps and traffic lights and speed traps and nobody can find a parking place and all the rest.

Here though it's just like one of those adverts on the telly where the happy driver thrills to the luxury of his or her gleaming vehicle on the open road.

After all these years I still think it's one of the brilliant things about living in rural Spain.

A theory what I have

I was asked if I'd ever written a post about learning Spanish. To be honest I wasn't sure. Normally my blogs complain about my inability to construct an error free phrase, which Spanish people understand, rather than anything on the methodology. I had a quick search through the blog and I couldn't find anything specific. So, here it is but, before launching into it, I should say that there are tomes and tomes on the theory of learning languages. People who know how brains work have theories about how to learn languages or language acquisition in general. They know much more than me. They are right and I am wrong. This attempt is going to be, relatively, short. It will contain lots of generalisations and it's a personal and not a researched view. And, of course, you need to bear in mind that my Spanish is rubbish.

Learning a language is easy. The vast majority of children do it. The method is also pretty obvious. The children listen to the words and phrases. They grasp that there is an idea behind the word or phrase. Maybe it explains something, maybe it is to give a command or order or maybe it is to transmit information. They learn the words or phrases and then build on those to express their own questions and views on the world. Later they learn how to read and write.

So, one of my first beliefs about learning a language is that it is just one big memory task. Unless you know some words then you won't be able to speak, read, write or listen. You have to learn lots of words and lots of phrases. This is especially true of idiomatic expressions. I use an example with my English language learners. OK, let's get the lead out, let's get cracking and put this baby to bed. It makes sense to me but it would be a bugger to understand if I were Spanish. The Spaniards do the same. Simple combinations of ordinary words that have completely different meanings to the sense of any of the individual words that they are made up of. They are easy to overcome though, you just have to learn them. You'll know a method that works for you for learning things. It is not a fast process. Learning a language for most people takes thousands of hours.

It's not just knowing the words and phrases - it's saying them adequately enough so that they are understood. It doesn't take much to make a word incomprehensible. For instance a Spaniard, speaking English, once asked me for some un-irons. There was no context to help - the word was onions. We English have plenty of trouble with lots of sounds that are easy for Spaniards. I'm not talking about the ones we know are difficult like the double rr or the y that sounds like a throaty j. Take the letter o and the way that you just voiced it to yourself - like oh. So for our town, Pinoso, we tend to say pin-oh-so when the sound is more like pin-oss-oh. What seem like quite small mistakes to us make words incomprehensible to Spaniards who have been brought up with a language that ties the sound of the letters to the sound of the words. Spaniards have a systematic and almost unbreakable set of rules for speaking Spanish. That's why they have so much difficulty saying would, friends or soap. So that section in your Spanish books that gives you examples of how to say the letters and vowel combinations is really, really important.

There's another little aside to speaking a language that is the rhythm that a language has. Think of the way that Italians sing as they speak or how Australians stress the end of a sentence, the way Swedes sound like the chef from Sesame Street. We have a cadence to English that is confusing for Spaniards. English speakers need to try to mimic the Spanish rhythms and tones. Without doing that you're going to have a lot of trouble, for instance, asking a question. ¿Estás de acuerdo?

I'm not a big fan of grammar. The rules for most languages, other than Esperanto, came after the language existed. Google tells me that the first English dictionary was published in 1604, the year that the Hampton Court conference laid down the rules for the King James Bible. That means the language was pretty well established by then. The first decent English dictionary was Samuel Johnson's in 1755. That's the one that Baldrick mentions in Blackadder, the one without sausages in it. The grammar that gets reproduced in grammar books is a description of the way the language is used rather than the rules from which a language is constructed. A bit like the difference between Common Law, based on societal customs recognised and reinforced by the judicial system, and modern laws which are drafted in intricate detail. I can't deny that grammar is useful. I teach grammatical rules in English and you have to learn the basic rules of Spanish grammar if you are going to speak Spanish. You need to know how verb tenses work how genders agree and hundreds of other things but there is a point when the exceptions to grammar rules, in my opinion, make them almost useless. So, again in my opinion, there is good grammar, useful grammar, and almost useless grammar. In an English context think about Tesco and Sainsbury's who speak good English. Nonetheless, they used, in the past, to have ten items or less tills (countable nouns should use fewer) and McDonald's who also speak good English, say I'm loving it despite knowing that stative verbs aren't generally used in the continuous form. On the other hand the difference between the use of you're (you are) and your (belonging to you) is big grammar. Big grammar is something that Tesco or McDonalds can't play with. 

One of the areas of Spanish grammar that confounds most English speakers is the subjunctive. Old people, like me, still use the subjunctive in English from time to time - it is important that he learn the rules or I wish it were sunny - but the form is definitely on the way out. On the other hand it is very much alive and well in Spanish. The rule says something like the subjunctive is used when the meaning of the main clause makes the events described in the subordinate clause "unreal" i.e. not known to be a reality at the time of the sentence. So, for instance if you see a T shirt with a picture of Kurt Cobain on it in a shop window and go into the shop and say that you want the T shirt with the picture of Kurt on it you use the indicative but if you're not sure that the shop has a T shirt with said picture then you have to use the subjunctive - busco la camiseta que lleva una foto de Kurt (you're sure such a shirt exists, indicative) and busco una camiseta que lleve una foto de Kurt (the shirt may or may not exist so you use the subjunctive). Now you tell me that any ordinary person learning Spanish is going to be able to work that out from first principles in the heat of the confusion of trying to construct a sentence and buy a shirt and I'll be happy to call you a liar. On the other hand most subjunctives come after little set phrases - es posible que - for instance, is followed by a subjunctive as are hundreds of others. If you're willing to slog it out and learn all those little introductory phrases then you will get the subjunctive right as often as most Spaniards. We're back to memorising the language.

So, my advice on grammar is to learn the stuff that you use in nearly every sentence you would ever use. Learn how to use articles, adjectives, adverbs, how to decline verbs and, indeed, learn as much grammar as you like and as you possibly can but, as soon as it seems to be becoming too esoteric, fall back on how children learn language and learn some phrases as the basis for other similar phrases.

Something else I would recommend is that you read things in Spanish and listen to things in Spanish. Spaniards and Britons do not use the same language to express the same idea. What the language learner is after is how to express what they want to say. Most Britons can say "good morning" in Spanish but if they were to overthink it then they're actually saying goods days - "buenos días". I sometimes despair when a fellow Briton is complaining about a Spanish waiter asking "¿Qué te pongo?" because, the Briton says, that the phrase means "What I put you?" Alright, the first definition of poner in the Spanish-English dictionary may be put but it's not the only one and, for heaven's sake, the question is obvious enough. Consider that the idea is "what do you want?" or "what can I get you?" even though there aren't a lot of directly translatable words in the phrase.

Just to finish off here are some disconnected jottings in no particular order and mainly for people living in Spain. I like classes because, once you've signed up, you feel you have to go. The people who employ me in Pinoso at Academia 10 would be very happy to sell you a class. Text books, learn Spanish type text books, vary in quality but most of the modern ones I've seen are pretty good. In Pinoso there is an intercambio session - half an hour of Spanish in return for half an hour of English every Monday evening from 8.30 at the Coliseum in Constitución. Talking to yourself is good because you realise the words you can't pronounce and you can often hear yourself making mistakes. Describing things as you walk around might help. Reading things like signs and number plates as you do the shopping is simple and easy. Five words or phrases at a time rather than the first two pages of your new vocabulary book. Start by watching TV ads rather than feature films. If you like reading Mills and Boone better the Spanish equivalent than starting with Episodios nacionales. Maybe set your phone or Tom Tom to Spanish rather than English. And a long etcetera.

History evenings

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 (wineries) but, in his answer, he mentioned almazaras, oil mills, places to press olives. The translator, missing the cultural confusion of what was being processed, didn't mention the oil mill reference at first. It was all sorted out in the end of course. The big flat stone was for crushing olives - oil not wine. Back in Elland we Britons didn't process a lot of wine or oil either.

Someone else asked about the history of some cave houses. They asked if it were true that the houses had originally been dug in Roman times so that people with leprosy had somewhere to live away from the village. As we'd just been told that basically there wasn't a village of la Romana until the turn of the 20th century and that no Roman artefacts had been found in the area the answer was going to be disappointing for the questioners. I could imagine the number of times that story had been told to visitors.

I don't know about you but I don't really have any trouble with American English. If someone talks about fawcets and car trunks I am not confused.  And if neither pronounced one way and neither pronounced the other are American and British English then I have no idea which is which. Although I may be dissimulating I think I remember being taken to see South Pacific and, if I do, I would have been four at the time. So I have been watching Hollywood movies (films) for a long time. I would suppose the true is same for almost any English speaker worldwide.

So, last night, there is a second question about cave houses in nearby Algueña. There is some initial confusion about which cave houses and where. There is a secondary question, in English, in the air, from an audience member, about whether these may be the cave houses behind the petrol station. The translator picks up this question and relays it to the speaker. The Spanish word gasolinera for petrol station, service station, comes back in the translator's American English. "Are these the caves behind ther gas station? The original question asker says she doesn't know anything about a gas station in Algueña and the whole question just sort of evaporates. I don't know Algueña well but the petrol station on the main road through the village is obvious. I'm sure the original questioner knows it too. So this time I think we have a linguistic problem related to gas, as in cookers, as against gas, as in gasoline.

The group that made me aware of this event - Spanish International Alicante - says that its aim is to promote friendship, integration and interchange of languages through social evenings, events and cultural activities. That was certainly going on last night.

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.