My first Spanish lesson for a long time was conducted on a one-to-one basis in the director’s room in a local school of languages in Castelldefels.
I suppose it was quite an intensive experience but I must admit that I did not know that I was capable of carrying on a (fairly stilted) conversation in Spanish for an hour. As one might have expected I did not let the poor woman teaching me get much of a look-in and I rabbited on quite happily from her fairly basic stimulus questions.
The adrenaline flow from the experience also allowed me to dredge out more words of Spanish than I would normally have been able to use in normal circumstances and I even managed to surprise myself my some of my more daring linguistic excavations. I also had a few happy guesses at Spanish words that I assumed must have a Latin base in the English word that I knew and so used them with a suitable accent and ending!
In my initial conversation (in Spanish) with a teacher in the centre I was noted down as a False Beginner to Low Intermediate. The ‘False Beginner’ makes me sound like a member of an early Christian sect with heretical ideas about the book of Genesis, while ‘Low Intermediate’ put me in mind of some modest section of Cromwell’s New Model Army.
I am sure that this designation comes down to my marked reluctance to use Spanish verbs. They are notoriously difficult to master so I treat them as I would an enraged bull in Pamplona and stay on the higher levels in the surrounding houses speaking through the medium of nouns and watching other more valiant linguists than I battle with rarefied grammar.
My homework, however, while concentrating on the acquisition of vocabulary also leads me gently into the murky paths of gender assignation via definite and indefinite articles arriving at the incomprehensibility of the Spanish approach to the verb to be. Much like New York, the Spanish liked the verb so much they named it twice. There are two verb forms to express which is perfectly well contained by our single verb ‘to be.’
It gives hours of honest delight to the Spanish as they watch foreigners struggle with the concept and hours of unrelieved miser to the foreigners as they attempt to use the verbs without copious weeping.
I think that my brain is in a better place to accept the hard graft involved in learning another language and my school, more than anything, shows the necessity of being in command of a second language.
I was reading the newspaper that the school takes (well, mostly looking at the pictures) when I attempted to read an account of the Madrid game that was on the box last night.
Madrid were playing a team from Zurich whose game was woefully low but Madrid, with their multimillion pound players seemed incapable of wrapping the game up with the finality that should have been on display. It is very much to the credit of Catalonia that they do not have newspapers of the ‘Sun’, ‘Star’ and ‘Daily Mail’ type, but it makes it damn sight more difficult for me when I have to read a very literate account of a football match in the prose equivalent of the Daily Telegraph. Words like flagstone, snowed under, anguished and labyrinth all occur in the first dozen lines of the report; so it takes me a little time to work out that the writing is saying that Madrid were crap!
I am going to have to take a much more measured and systematic approach to my acquisition of language and make lists (remembering to add the sentences in which the words occur) to help speed the process whereby I can read a match report with some degree of fluency!
Although I was told that today was going to be the day when the season finally managed to impose itself on the absurdly good weather we are having at the moment, I have to report that I had my cup of tea on the wide expanse of the balcony outside the staff room in Building 4 and sat lazily in the sunshine and gazed at the sun with shut eyes (if that is possible) hoping that the melanin in my skin would get working and transform me from the pasty individual that I have become now to the bronzed individual that needs to impress the people back home with the wealth of sunshine that we regularly enjoy.
Even I am getting a little jumpy with the continued refulgence of the sun and continue to wait for the pay-back time!
I suppose it was quite an intensive experience but I must admit that I did not know that I was capable of carrying on a (fairly stilted) conversation in Spanish for an hour. As one might have expected I did not let the poor woman teaching me get much of a look-in and I rabbited on quite happily from her fairly basic stimulus questions.
The adrenaline flow from the experience also allowed me to dredge out more words of Spanish than I would normally have been able to use in normal circumstances and I even managed to surprise myself my some of my more daring linguistic excavations. I also had a few happy guesses at Spanish words that I assumed must have a Latin base in the English word that I knew and so used them with a suitable accent and ending!
In my initial conversation (in Spanish) with a teacher in the centre I was noted down as a False Beginner to Low Intermediate. The ‘False Beginner’ makes me sound like a member of an early Christian sect with heretical ideas about the book of Genesis, while ‘Low Intermediate’ put me in mind of some modest section of Cromwell’s New Model Army.
I am sure that this designation comes down to my marked reluctance to use Spanish verbs. They are notoriously difficult to master so I treat them as I would an enraged bull in Pamplona and stay on the higher levels in the surrounding houses speaking through the medium of nouns and watching other more valiant linguists than I battle with rarefied grammar.
My homework, however, while concentrating on the acquisition of vocabulary also leads me gently into the murky paths of gender assignation via definite and indefinite articles arriving at the incomprehensibility of the Spanish approach to the verb to be. Much like New York, the Spanish liked the verb so much they named it twice. There are two verb forms to express which is perfectly well contained by our single verb ‘to be.’
It gives hours of honest delight to the Spanish as they watch foreigners struggle with the concept and hours of unrelieved miser to the foreigners as they attempt to use the verbs without copious weeping.
I think that my brain is in a better place to accept the hard graft involved in learning another language and my school, more than anything, shows the necessity of being in command of a second language.
I was reading the newspaper that the school takes (well, mostly looking at the pictures) when I attempted to read an account of the Madrid game that was on the box last night.
Madrid were playing a team from Zurich whose game was woefully low but Madrid, with their multimillion pound players seemed incapable of wrapping the game up with the finality that should have been on display. It is very much to the credit of Catalonia that they do not have newspapers of the ‘Sun’, ‘Star’ and ‘Daily Mail’ type, but it makes it damn sight more difficult for me when I have to read a very literate account of a football match in the prose equivalent of the Daily Telegraph. Words like flagstone, snowed under, anguished and labyrinth all occur in the first dozen lines of the report; so it takes me a little time to work out that the writing is saying that Madrid were crap!
I am going to have to take a much more measured and systematic approach to my acquisition of language and make lists (remembering to add the sentences in which the words occur) to help speed the process whereby I can read a match report with some degree of fluency!
Although I was told that today was going to be the day when the season finally managed to impose itself on the absurdly good weather we are having at the moment, I have to report that I had my cup of tea on the wide expanse of the balcony outside the staff room in Building 4 and sat lazily in the sunshine and gazed at the sun with shut eyes (if that is possible) hoping that the melanin in my skin would get working and transform me from the pasty individual that I have become now to the bronzed individual that needs to impress the people back home with the wealth of sunshine that we regularly enjoy.
Even I am getting a little jumpy with the continued refulgence of the sun and continue to wait for the pay-back time!
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