Desearía que Andrew y yo habláramos Español con fluidez
Given that we are still somewhat incarcerated at the hands of Covid-19, we both feel that it is vital that we keep up to speed with our Spanish. As we have been unable to mix with our neighbours as much as we would like, the opportunities to practice our language skills have been few and far between.
There have been one or two occasions to try out our past tenses and our subjunctives, but not enough, and we both realised that we needed to keep learning, so with renewed enthusiasm we signed up for online lessons back in January. This is less daunting than it sounds as our fabulous teacher is also a lovely friend, and we have known Maria since we first moved to Spain. Indeed, Maria was one of our first teachers when we enrolled in intensive language courses in Granada as soon as we arrived.
Learning Spanish can be extremely stimulating, exciting, involving and motivating. However, it can also be very challenging, frustrating, infuriating and dismaying. We remember only too well the first days of our time at school, when Andrew and I used to walk up Calle San Anton in Granada, in the drizzly October and November weather, heads dropped and in silence as we contemplated the mind-scrambling hours ahead. There were days when we were both almost driven to tears as we failed to understand the intricacies of Spanish grammar, and the different verb tenses.
Before we moved to Spain, we attended night classes at City Lit in London. Learning Spanish for one and a half hours a week is not ideal, but it was a start. In a year, we managed to get a tenuous grip on the present tense! We both remember with great fondness our first classes with Maria Monje during which she repeatedly thumped her chest saying Me Jammo (me llamo) Maria, and Me Appejido (me appellido) Monje, and we all sniggered, not having a clue what she was talking about. The traumas of Spanish evening classes were somewhat alleviated by the immediate detour into the nearest bar as soon as classes came to an end.
When we enrolled in Escuela Delengua in Granada, we had no idea what was about to hit us. We started with 5 weeks of classes every day, rather like going into the office but not understanding a word that was being spoken by anyone (probably no bad thing in many an office). The teachers did not speak in any other language but Spanish, so it was totally immersive. However, this method of teaching is the fast track to understanding the grammar and getting invaluable practice in speaking and listening. We would strongly recommend that anyone coming to live in Spain enrols in intensive classes at the earliest opportunity.
Due to these early classes, we developed basic tools that gave us the confidence to go into bars and restaurants and chat to the owners. To this day, some of our great friends in Granada are the owners of our favourite bars and we met many of these people in the first year of our stay in Spain. Due to our daily visits to school, and the time we spent in Granada, we very quickly found our way around the city, the best places to visit, the best bars to frequent and the hidden corners that were waiting to be discovered. The teachers became friends, and we occasionally met up with some of them to just chat - the teachers wanted to improve their English and we our Spanish, so Intercambio in a cafe or bar helped us all considerably.
Some of the people who attended the same school as us became fluent in Spanish in a very short space of time. These people did nothing but speak Spanish. They stayed with Spanish hosts, made Spanish friends, came to school and left their native tongue behind for a while. This is by far the best way to learn the language as you are forced to use it, listen to other people, try out phrases and correct mistakes. For Andrew and I, this didn’t work. Learning the language is exhausting and after classes and excursions in Spanish, the brain would get to a stage where it waffled about like a blancmange being wobbled in a wave-tossed coracle; our tongues felt about ten sizes too big and we could only emit garbled noises until we had downed our first gin. Then we resorted to English until our next class.
Here we are in the fifth year of our life in Spain, and our Spanish is not bad. We are certainly not fluent, but we can chat about most things.
Once Christmas was out of the way, and the lockdown prevailed, we felt that it was high time to increase our knowledge, so lessons have recommenced. We are also helped by a weekly chat in Spanish with one of our neighbours, Paqui. I teach Paqui English once a week (her capacity for learning is incredible, and puts us utterly to shame!). On Thursday afternoon, Paqui will come round for an hour’s chat in Spanish about anything, and we get to practice our tenses and moods. Just having to think in Spanish, and get used to using the correct forms is great for our language skills, and our brains. We have both got to the stage where we are keen to expand our vocabulary, our use of set expressions, phrases and colloquialisms and start to put these into practice.
Our Saturday morning classes with Maria concentrate on advancing our understanding of grammar, and we do these separately. I am working on the past and present subjunctive, a mood that is used a lot in Spanish as a way of expressing opinions, desires and wishes, recommendations and emotions. When I started learning the present subjunctive, I thought to myself “ooh, I get this; it’s easy! Just change the verb ending to get the subjunctive form and there you have it”. Hmm…now we are working on the perfecto subjuntivo and the imperfecto de subjuntivo. Not only are we talking about wishes and desires in the present subjunctive, but we are talking about things that might be impossible wishes or slightly probable wishes and things that might happen in the future.
Last Saturday, both of us in our separate classes hit brick walls. We had, in fairness, been skiing the day before and we were both fairly tired, but as we worked through our latest language themes I think we both wanted to cry. The present subjunctive that I had so smugly considered to be “easy” was, I now realise, the tip of the most enormous iceberg. In my last class, I felt that I had been nudged from the security of my little dinghy into the vastness of an ocean that buffeted me in all directions in a rather unfriendly manner. Poor Maria kept apologising as I felt my brain going into some sort of spasm of horror as I tried to understand “Condicional + imperfecto de subjuntivo (deseos imposibles en presentes o poco probables en el futuro)”. I reached the stage where I wanted to put fingers in both ears and sing “La, la, la” over and over again before lying on my back and having gin poured into my open mouth.
We are not, however, deterred! We have found that the SpanishDict website has some very, very useful online lessons that help to remind us how and when to use Spanish Grammar. The structure of these online classes provides access to new vocabulary, conversation examples, expressions and the opportunity to just listen to the language we are learning. Obviously, we are going to be challenged; learning a language is not easy. Our face-to-face classes with Maria are essential; our chats with Paqui are invaluable and dipping in and out of the SpanishDict classes just help to set our new skills in context.
Ojalá no me doliera la cabeza ahora (pero me duele. Deseo imposible en el presente). In other words, my head hurts; I wish it would stop right now but that’s an impossible wish!
