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30/05/2008Spanglish or Spanish?

Spanglish or Spanish? Learning Spanish for the first time was easy peasy, but re-learning the language now is harder than Expatica blogger Jeanne Quigley had thought.

I’VE been trying to re-learn my Spanish over the past months. In theory, there’s no reason at all why this should be difficult.

After all, this is a Spanish community. Most of my neighbours are Spanish. The girls in the Impescasa are Spanish. Abuelo Jacinto and his family who run the local bar/café speak only a few words of English – and those they’re picking up from all the English-speaking residents. The cinema shows Spanish films.

But it’s just too easy to get by without knowing very much of the language. Anything you need to do, you can do in English. Bank transactions? No problem. Order food or drink? All the waiters want to practice their English on you. Buy a car? No problema. Sort out your taxes? Someone in the office speaks English.

So far, the only time I’ve come a cropper was a few months ago when I arrived back to my casa after a quick visit to Ireland to find that the water had been turned off.

I found out from one of my amigos where the office is and off I went. I showed la chica my (paid) current bill, told her I had no agua and could she tell me why. Did she speak a word of English? No, not a syllable. I could just about understand her but I ended up getting a friend to phone her so the situation could be explained properly.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think for a minute that the girl in the water office should be expected to speak English. After all, I’m in her country. But it was the only time I felt very inadequate. Though I was able to explain to her what the problem was.

My first visit ever to the Canary Islands was a long time ago, in the seventies when I took a job in a restaurant in what was then a remote village called Mogan on Gran Canaria. My boss was Irish but the staff were from the village. I was thrown in at the deep end but managed very quickly to pick up the language. Well, no one spoke English so it was a case of having too. And of course, with a Canarian boyfriend soon in tow, I learned all the finer points!

But trying to pick it up second time around is definitely more difficult, particularly when it’s not absolutely vital. And the locals speak so fast, sometimes it’s just impossible to understand. I earwig on the bus – called a guagua here - all the time.

There’s always someone who wants to sit up at the front close to the driver and have a chat. If you get on the bus in the middle of the conversation, you’ve no hope of finding out what they’re talking about. But if something happens like some other driver doing something stupid, then it’s great. The driver has his opinion, the passenger another and so have the rest of us, but we keep them to ourselves.

My television is only tuned to the Spanish stations so when – if – I turn it on, that’s all I hear. I have various CDs and books but you need to be well motivated to do it yourself.

I did a little survey recently to see what’s available for expats who want to pick up the basics, just enough to get by.
 
The local Centro Cultural is a good place to get information on any public classes taking place. Like evening classes anywhere, these start in the autumn and run until June.

There’s usually a Spanish native doing the teaching so you’ll pick up a bit of an accent. I suppose the only problem here is that the classes are only once a week so you need to be dedicated and to practice on the other days. They’re also a lot cheaper than private classes, another way of learning. Though you can get one-to-one private classes so you’ll learn a lot more in the couple of hours.

It may be possible to do a ‘language exchange’. You find someone who wants to learn English, you meet for a certain length of time with half that time spent speaking English and the other half speaking Spanish. You can advertise in the classifieds ads of magazines and newspapers or local bulletin boards. This is my route, I think, in the autumn.

Two of my family are coming out for the summer, both of whom speak some Spanish. So I have decided that we will be a ‘Spanish-only’ household.

I’ll keep you posted!

Jeanne Quigley is Expatica Spain's blogger from Fuerte. Her fortnightly blogs will be published on alternate Fridays.

photos by Flickr contributors houseoftext, clurr, blmurch and el_monstrito


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