Don't speak to the students in that language!

For those of us who love languages, multilingualism is a great source of joy. That joy, though, is punctuated on occasion with moments set to test us, usually when we least expect it. The CELTA course I did last year produced one such memorable moment.

I was chatting to the students as they were arriving for their English class. I remembered that one of them, a friendly woman in her mid-fifties, had previously mentioned that she was also learning French and Spanish.

Intrigued by this, I prompted her to chat with me in Spanish. She clearly enjoyed being able to practice with me for a minute or two. Then it was time for me to teach my lesson, during which I was being assessed, with feedback given at the end of the day.

Imagine my surprise - if not to say consternation(!) - at being reprimanded in my written feedback for having exchanged a few bits of Spanish with a student before the official start of class. I realise that we (the trainee teachers) were meant to stick to English, and I had been doing my best (not always successfully, I must admit) to avoid using German with the students to maximise their language practice opportunities, but this reproach just struck me as downright petty. It had been about two people connecting, very briefly, over a common interest - an act conducive to building rapport, which tends to impact positively later on in class. There were no victims here. What, then, was this comment exactly if not a gratuitous put-down? Why sledgehammer rules onto a context where they run contrary to the spirit in which they had been drawn up?

Being told what language to speak, when and with whom, by an uninvolved bystander, is just plain patronising. I'm pretty certain that everyone who speaks more than one language has experienced an incident similar to this one. I was 19 the first time this happened to me. I was working as an au-pair in the Midlands (UK) and had made friends with a fellow German au-pair living just a few houses further down the same street. The family she was working for forbade us to speak German with each other because it would "confuse the toddler."

At The Precipice of Change

A quick update, since I'm in the middle of packing... and still pootling about in my PJs after midday. Scandalous! I'm off to Spain tomorrow for two weeks and a bit, catching up with my friends and having a social life again - HURRAAAAH! -  punctuated by boring things like closing my bank accounts and working.

I'll be staying with three different friends which, so I hope, will give my domestic Spanish a bit of a boost. Knowing a language well, I feel, is very much about competently navigating as many different registers as possible, and since I've never actually shared my day-to-day life and living space with any Spanish speakers, I still have some considerable gaps.

The other piece of news is that, a day and a half after I get back from Spain, I'll be starting my CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) course. After an involved application process, I was accepted onto the course, and for me it will be the start of a new era.

Frankly, I'm anxious about how I'm going to manage it all, keeping up with my work commitments (I've got a brand new corporate client to please on top of servicing the existing ones) AND taking two days out of every week to attend the course, write lesson plans, complete assignments, do the reading and other prep work. But there's no point fretting... I've made the decision and now I've got to follow through. And as daunting as it seems right now, I'm actually very excited about learning new things, meeting new people and expanding my skills base.

But as for now... that suitcase won't fill itself, I fear...!

My Spanish is far from flawless. Have I failed?

Six months ago, I left Spain without ever reaching the level of linguistic perfection that I set out to achieve when I moved there.

There are many reasons for this, which I will go into at some point. In this post, though, I want to sum up briefly what these six years in Spain have actually done for my Spanish.

I'd been studying Spanish on and off since I was a teenager, and despite a couple of flashy certificates, including several from the London Chamber of Commerce which I clinched sometime back in the nineties, I could never really hold any more than the most basic of conversations. I don't think we ever even touched on the subjunctive, which seems like a bad joke, considering that I was certified to dominate the language to an "Advanced Level."

Little did I know then that it would take another 20 years for my skills to actually warrant this kind of certification. My time in Spain has made all the difference. In a nutshell:

• I am now fluent in Spanish and can hold my own on any topic, even in a group in a noisy bar. I can listen, read and speak without having to translate in my head.
• I'm able to read books at normal speed. Novels, biographies, anything. I wont lie - the first five nearly gave me a brain haemorrhage, but after that, things shifted to that very enjoyable place where you get sucked right into the story, rather than labouring over the lines and having to look up every fifth word. I've got tons of Spanish books on my Kindle and I read in Spanish every day. 
• Besides books, I watch series for escapism, and there's tons of them freely accessible on RTVE (Radio Television Española). Best of all, they come with subtitles and transcripts! I don't need those to follow the plot, but I like having them turned on so that I can pick out the odd word or useful expression that's not yet part of my repertoire. Every time I watch an episode, I learn one or two things. But watching series is definitely a recreational activity and not "studying." 
• Spanish is now firmly part of my hard drive. I will never forget it like some language learnt at school or in an evening class. Nobody can take it away from me - it's always available and ready to use for enjoyable activities. 

And I've just realised another thing: there are even advantages to my Spanish not being perfect: It could serve as a tool to expand my social circle, which can be hard to do when you suddenly find yourself being part of "the older generation." So, I've been looking at evening classes for next semester, and I found a couple that might make fertile ground for getting to know new people. They are both advanced level Spanish (C1), centred around conversation and discussing current affairs. Taking an English class to make new friends would be just plain silly, and as for signing up for classes in other languages, I've come to the conclusion that having to focus intently on the various in-class exercises sucks up all of my energy - I have none left for putting on a be-my-friend face. I get so frustrated wrestling with the language that I shut down instead of engaging openly with my classmates. I feel that in a Spanish class, I'd be much more relaxed. Well, that's the theory... I shall report on how it's working (or not) in practice. 

Socialising Dilemmas: Which Language?!

Multilingual life can throw up some curious problems in social situations. Even if the people who get together have several languages in common, things can still get unexpectedly awkward.

A few months ago, my Portuguese teacher's son, Jaime, invited me and his mother for lunch in Madrid. Jaime lives and works in Switzerland, and since his German is a bit on the wobbly side, I'd been helping him with his CVs, interview preparation, emails, etc. for the past year and a half. He was briefly in Spain for a wedding, and this would be the first time we'd meet face-to-face.

Teresa was already there when I got to the restaurant, and we chatted in Portuguese while waiting for her son to turn up. When Jaime arrived, we first had to settle on which language to speak. (I usually speak Spanish with him, and some German.) In theory, we share three languages in common: Spanish, Portuguese and English. We decided on Spanish, based on the rationale that my Spanish is significantly better than my Portuguese and that this way, nobody would be left struggling with the conversation. Or so we thought.

After ordering our food, Jaime and I launched right into catching up, since we'd not spoken to each other in a few weeks. At some point, I turned to Teresa to ask her something. She looked at me blankly. Then she said, "Sorry, I'm not actually listening to the conversation... in my head, I'm correcting everything you're saying into Portuguese!"

Ooops.

You see, Teresa and I never speak in Spanish to each other. Except for when I can't think of how to say something in Portuguese, then she helps me out. I also tend to mess up my Portuguese by mixing in Spanish words and expressions (this drives her mad), and in her capacity as my teacher, it's always been her job to correct me relentlessly. It's a deeply ingrained protocol which has served me (and my Portuguese) very well, but in this lunch situation, not so much...

Is Russian Worth Another Go?

I'm rekindling an old romance. I don't think it's serious... I'm just toying with him... but you never know. His name is Russian. We parted thirty years ago, after going steady for two whole years. I left him for English. Who was a lot less complicated.

Russian was so not my idea. We ended up together because of a school friend of mine. Actually, it was her mother's fault. She was a beautiful woman, my friends's mother, whose manfriends changed at regular intervals. My friend was forever competing for her attention, and the latest beau spoke Russian. So, as soon as she got wind that the neighbouring school was putting on extracurricular Russian classes and was looking for more students to make up numbers, my friend had to go for it. But not alone.

So, you want us to walk all the way across town to learn... Russian?! 

Yeah, it's gonna be such fun! 

On a Friday afternoon? You think I've nothing better to do?!?

And so, off to Russian we went. There were only seven of us. One of them was the teacher's long-suffering son, another one had long blue hair. As for the rest, I do not remember. We were taught by a flame-haired Hungarian woman who was all but four feet tall, but made up for it by sheer force of energy, killer heels and lashings of green eye shadow.

Every week, she made us take turns reading aloud from the textbook and I was terrified before each lesson because of that. I hate reading aloud. In any language. To this day. But I loved writing, and so I started writing my teenage diaries in Cyrillic script. I still have them, and I'm glad I do, because I can remind myself of how to write cursive Cyrillic. (Just in case it gets serious again.) It seems I was quite creative back then, using half a Cyrillic "х" (as in the word хорошо) to represent the letter "h", which doesn't exist in Russian. My invented cursive version looks like a back-to-front Roman "c".

My sweaty-browed weekly stammerings culminated in a glorious reward: five days in Moscow, during a time when the iron curtain was still firmly drawn shut. We ate blinchiki topped with sour cream and red caviar for breakfast every morning. My friend managed seven in one sitting. I was in awe. She was severely bulimic, which I didn't know at the time. It did, however, get her mother's attention.

We queued up in a bakery for half an hour and came out with two carrier bags full of mini-bagel shaped things that tasted of nothing and had the texture of recycled cardboard.

You asked for 2000g instead of 200g, didn't you? 

Next time, YOU do the talking!

Russian and I are on cautious terms. So far, our dates have been limited to a daily ten-minute frisson on Duolingo - four days and counting.

I have a confession to make: I ditched Italian for Russian. Poor Italian didn't see it coming. We had a two-day fling back in early October. Yes, you could say I led him on. But it's just not gonna work out for us right now. I've already got plenty on my plate with his rambunctious brothers, Spanish, Portuguese and French. There's waaaay to much Romance in my life! It's their verbs that get to me the most: there's fifty different versions for each and every one of them; different tenses, different moods - I cannot cope with another helping of this nonsense, I just can't.

Russian, on the other hand, bypasses superfluous verbiage altogether. "She my mother." "Where Park?" "Your father here." "This not bus. This taxi". Nothing could be more attractive to me right now. Darn it, Russian is roping me right in with his seductive straight talk!

Hoping For Fast Progress With Slow French

Last night, very late last night, I decided to startle my credit card by shelling out $159. Now, I'm usually quite stingy when it comes to throwing cash at language resources, especially since there's so much free stuff out there - and ESPECIALLY in major languages like French. Ah, but there is a caveat: although the interwebs are awash with free material, it usually caters for two groups: bare beginners and the very advanced, i.e. those who can watch films or listen to the radio without weeping in frustration. If you're an intermediate learner, though, it's a completely different ball game. You need input that challenges you, while, at the same time, being somewhat intelligible. And at that level, at least in my experience, it's a desert out there. Unless you're prepared to pay.

My hard-earned money went to newsinslowfrench.com. There's a new episode every week providing a selection of news & analysis (spoken slowly or at normal speed, you get to choose), plus a new French expression, a grammar lesson and quizzes for testing yourself. I paid for the premium version that includes everything, but there are a number of more economical options. If you just want the audio of the news section for listening practice, for example, it's something like fifty bucks a year. The back catalogue is so enormous that I won't get through it even if I managed to "process" an episode every day. Not such a bad deal for 13 bucks a month, methinks.

I didn't buy the cat in the bag, you understand. I am, in fact, a repeat customer. I subscribed to the Spanish version (newsinslowspanish.com) years ago, which created a little problem for me when I first moved to Spain. I knew so many Spanish sayings and expressions that people assumed I had a much higher level of conversational Spanish than I actually did.

I should probably also mention that I took out a six-month subscription to the French version a year ago, but it turned out to be too early - I was still very much a beginner back then and deciphering just a single news item was too much of a chore.

So, the plan is this: I want to get from upper beginner's to upper intermediate level within the next eighteen months or so. When I wrote a post last week about how much I was enjoying my Portuguese, I suddenly felt the urge to go there with my French. I shall let you know how it goes...

Want To Get Better At A Language? Just Ditch It For A While!

I've been back in Spain now for two weeks. And I've noticed a difference. A difference I'd read about. A difference other people had told me about. A difference I'd never really been conscious of myself before.

I suddenly feel a lot more at home in Spanish. The gap between what I want to express and what I can express has noticeably shrunk. The right turns of phrase come to me much more readily when I need them. I'm still not 100% there, but getting closer. It's only taken me... uhm... half a decade.

Most surprisingly of all, my French has also improved. Before my summer break in Germany, and after battling with the language for a year already, I was still virtually mute. I'm pathetic like that. I hate getting things wrong. I want to speak in well-constructed sentences. Or not at all.

So, on Wednesday, after having abandoned my French for the past two months, I dragged myself to my weekly French conversation group. I didn't want to go. I went only because I had promised Cristina, our formidable chieftain that I would be there, bright eyed and bushy tailed.

My performance was, as expected, as disastrous as ever. This prompted me, while the rest of the group were chatting away, to message Miranda, my French teacher, to fix an appointment for the next day.

It was in this 1-2-1 session, where we both noticed an improvement, Miranda and I. I seemed to catch much more of what she said, and I actually TALKED. Poorly, for sure, French people would have pelted me with mouldy madeleines for what I was doing to their language, but there was a conversation happening, and this was a bit of a break-through for me. For some reason, I felt less inhibited, more gung-ho about it all.

A friend of mine had once remarked to me how his Chinese took a leap forward every time he returned to China after a period of absence. I remember this comment because I thought it odd at the time. Surely, you'd be nothing but terribly rusty?! Never mind having missed out on weeks' or even several months' worth of exposure and learning experiences! How can a break from immersion possibly be beneficial...? It makes no sense. The brain works in mysterious ways...

Why Terrible Books Can Be Terribly Useful

I’m 14% into Doce años y un instante by Anna Casanovas. It's awful. A romance novel of the sickliest kind. It's so predictable it hurts. The characters are plastic. A special kind of plastic that drips marshmallow juice. The male protagonist conforms to a long list of clichés - troubled boy breaks girl's heart, joins army, becomes "a real man", returns to put things right. In the meantime, his rejected love interest straps herself into a girdle to keep her feelings in. Because women suffer and men do stuff, right? Like I said, I'm only at 14% and I can already tell that it can only get worse. A whole lot worse.

The cover should have warned me - I swear,
I did't see it at the time when I bought this!
...and ... uhm ... "Casanovas"...?

I blame Amazon. It runs a daily special offer called “Kindle Flash”, which is rather a mixed bag. Sometimes I get lucky and fish out an excellent read, but this one's very much at the soppy bottom mingling with the sticky wrappers of half-liquefied cough drops. All I can say in my defence is that the summary sounded so much less painful than the reality. 

The author is quite enamoured with her creation. She has gone the extra mile to put the reader "in the mood": Every chapter starts with lyrics lifted from a famous love song. She has collated them all on a Spotify list, asking her readers in the preface to listen to these while reading.

But Simone, I hear you ask, why the hell are you reading this drivel in the first place, and why oh why are you whining on to us about it!?

A valid question. And you already know the answer to that one, don't you? The reason I'm persisting with this cheese fest is the language. And, in particular, the dialogue.

You see, when trying to internalise a language, I believe it is important to read widely and not limit oneself to the usual genres. I may really enjoy biographies of 19^th and 20^th-century scientists, historical novels and the occasional self-help book on how to improve my time management skills (my chances of turning myself into a 19th-century scientist are marginally better), but these don't do much for improving my witty chatting capabilities. 

For furthering conversational repertoire, you just can't beat novels set in the here and now, laced with everyday conversations centred around people's emotional debris and, dare I say it, a dash of hum-drum domesticity thrown in. Romance novels, as much as I abhor them as a genre, are great for this. 

Despite having lived in Spain for nearly half a decade and having had thousands of conversations, I still have so many aha! moments seeing written dialogue. Just today, for example, I learnt that "tres [meses] a lo sumo" means "three [months] at the most". How could something so basic have escaped me until now?! 

Foreigner Beware Of Crinkly Forehead

A few weeks ago, I went to the doctor's. It was a big event for me. I'd never been in need of medical attention before. Not in Spain, anyway. I'm of robust design, you see. I don't pander to fancy foods that can't be eaten with a spoon and I don't get illnesses that can't be cured by an aspirin. However, a rebellious mole on my back was starting to morph into an octopus and it needed to be stopped by a professional.

Health centres are confusing places. I glanced around in a daze for ages until spotting a desk with a person who wasn't either bellowing into a phone or being harangued by a patient-staff scrum. I approached the woman stationed there and told her that I had an appointment at 11:30. Turns out that this was the desk where you make appointments and not the desk where you go when you already have an appointment. Once this was clarified, I asked her where I needed to go next. Up to the third floor, she said.

I followed her directions and arrived in a big central waiting room surrounded by four walls with lots of doors with names on them. Only then did it occur to me that I was missing a vital piece of information.

I returned to the desk lady for help. "Sorry," I said, "I don't actually know which doctor I'm supposed to be seeing. Could you tell me their name, please?"

And there it was.

The dreaded Crinkly Forehead.

I repeated my query, only to be met with yet more crinkles towering over a blank stare. I asked again. The crinkles assumed attack formation. I tried once more, in really simple Spanish, words spaced at one second intervals (I've had some practice at this, as you can tell). I repeated my question three more times. Still nothing. In an act of desperation, I grabbed a pen and paper from the desk and wrote it down. Finally, the name of my physician was divulged.

The most flabbergasting aspect of Crinkly Forehead is that it can spring into action BEFORE verbal communication even has a chance to commence. This happened to me in my local phone shop. As I handed my phone to the girl and drew breath to ask if she could please top it up with twenty bucks, I found myself confronted with a quizzically cocked head disfigured by crinkle over crinkle over fucking crinkle! They were humping each other, I swear! Then they called for re-inforcements and a bundle of veins as thick as anacondas after a meal of jungle elephants joined the wrestling match and... Christ, I did not know that the rosy baby bottom face of a twentynothing could even do that!

I'm guessing her inner thought process must have gone something like this: She looks like a foreigner, so whatever she is going to say will be incomprehensible. But I will try to help, because I'm a good person. But... what if she tries to make me speak in English?!?! Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God! I've only studied it for ten years at school, I can't say a word!!! What am I going to do, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!?! At this point, she reaches the conclusion that it's safest just not to understand anything.

The Crinkly Forehead is the nemesis of every language learner, tourist, or foreigner in general. It is the iron curtain, the NATO missile defence shield and the wall Trump is gonna build all rolled into one.

Once the contortions commence, once you spot the merest ripple, the slightest tell-tale twitch in the face that may have been smiling benevolently at you just a heartbeat ago, dear language learner, you are doomed. It is the manifestation of Blue Screen of Death in a real live person. A re-boot can only be effected once the obstruction has been removed, and the obstruction, my hapless foreign friend, is YOU.

Attempting to engage with Crinkly Forehead is not like flogging a dead horse. It's like flogging all the sausages, lasagnes, burgers and chicken nuggets that its macerated remains found their way into, expecting the clapped-out old mare to re-assemble and run the Grand National. It ain't gonna happen. No chance. Go home. Talk to Siri.

I, my dear people, will be talking to my mole. At least it is forthcoming, if only with tentacles.