_{Swotting for the next Spanish holiday}

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The Spanish class

If you had three months to learn a language how far would you get?

Would you be able to discuss the finer points of the war in Iraq or would you
still be stuck at the stage where you can order a beer, say good morning and that’s about it?

Nights of progress

Our house is littered with tapes, videos, DVDs and books that all promise to teach you Spanish in a few weeks. And thanks to them we can now order two beers, or two red wines, or two coffees.

We can ask for a menu, the bill and the toilet. We can say buenos dias and adios, por favor and gracias, and, most usefully, no hablo Espanol (I do not speak Spanish).

After lots of long holidays in Spain and countless resolutions to learn the language there has been very little progress. But it’s hard to do it by yourself.

So eventually we decided to enroll for proper lessons at evening classes. It was still a bit like learning French at school years ago. Hardest of all was having to remember things.

We had to study the grammar, the irregular verbs, and the tenses. We had to cope with masculine and feminine, and learn to put words in a different order because that’s what they do in Spain.

Our teacher, who is from Chile (a reminder how widespread Spanish is), made us try to speak her language all the time. So we talked about ourselves because that was the easiest subject.

Now we know all about our fellow classmates, their jobs, cars, husbands, wives (or lack of them), kids, even their pets. We learned everyone’s ages which range from 25 to 70.

We battled to make our stilted English pronunciation sound a bit more relaxed. And it was easier to practise saying those guttural sounds in a group rather than self-consciously speaking them at home to a computer screen.

As we all kept making mistakes it didn’t seem to matter. Everyone laughed. And, because we were in a class, there was peer pressure to do our best (just like Weight Watchers).

So we dared not forget our homework, we tried hard to speak the language and we have certainly made some progress. Much more than we ever did listening to tapes at home.

Our bedside reading, our teacher told us was to be a book frighteningly titled '501 Spanish Verbs'. But even if we never quite find time for the book we hope that by our next holiday we might even be able to have a conversation in Spanish.

Written by Pat Wheare

This article was created: 23 August 2006.
This article was last edited: 13 November 2006.

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