language

Okay, I’ve been here for a couple of years and a few months now, people expect me to be fluent in Spanish, but what does that mean?

Well I can understand pretty much everything on a day to day basis, I can follow the news (apart from when they start going on about individual politicians, I still get lost over who is in which party in what community and has done which crime). I can function alright on the telephone, I can argue with plumbers, I can go to the ironmongers and talk about hinges (bisagras) for the kitchen cupboards… so yes, in that sense I’m functionally fluent albeit with a vocabulary of an eleven year old who skipped a lot of school.

¿You want your mexican slang, güey? You got it...

But put me in a bar with loud music with a group of six or seven Spanish speakers (as I was on Saturday thanks to a very kind invitation from some of my students) and I struggle. I can understand the majority of what is said, except for the jokes, the cultural references and the slang. Which, when you think about it, would be the majority of a conversation I’d have in English with English mates. I should have a sign made up “En inglés estoy inteligente y ingenioso” to hang around my neck as I listen. I’m not complaining (I really did enjoy myself)… more just mentioning that it’s frustrating… I know that it will take many many years to reach a level of wittiness in Spanish, it’s just something I occasionally miss.

Then of course there’s the times when you put on a film and it’s Argentine (although I don’t have such a problem there) or Mexican. I watched Rudo y Cursi last night and after the first five minutes I had to go and download the Spanish subtitles. Mexican Spanish is full of slang (at least the Spanish in this film is. It’s probably analagous to watching Trainspotting). They kept saying “güey” as in “¿Que haces güey?” which I figured out was probably like mate (only a little less polite) and one of the characters was argentine so he kept saying “boludo”, add to that the “pendejo” and “chingar” (rude, just a bit) and the pronunciation “‘apa” for “papa” and the like meant that the subtitles were essential.

Damn fine film though.

So to practice, and improve… entonces para practicar y mejorar… otra vez pero en español.

Bueno, estoy aquí dos años y pocos meses, hay una expectación que lo domine yo el español, pero ¿Qué significa eso?

Pues, entiendo bastante bien casi todo día en día. Puedo entender las noticias (aparte de cuando hablen de políticos, me confunde quién es quién en cual partido, en cual comunidad y quién ha hecho cual crimen). Me desempeño bien en el teléfono, discuto  con los fontaneros, puedo ir a la ferretería y hablar sobre bisagras para los muebles de la cocina… entonces sí, en este sentido la domino la lengua aun que tenga el vocabulario de un niño que no iba mucho al colegio.

Pero si estoy en un pub con la música alta y un grupo de seis o siete españoles (como estuve el sábado pasado gracias a una invitación muy amable de unas alumnas) me quede difícil . Entiendo la mayoría de lo que hablan, menos los chistes, los referencias a la cultura y el argot que, si lo piensas, sería la mayoría de una conversación que lo tendría con mis amigos ingleses. Debería pedir para un cartel que dice “In English I’m clever and witty” para poner en mi cuello mientras escucho. No quejo (me pasó bien) mas digo que es un poco frustrante. Ya lo sé que llevará muchos años para conseguir el nivel para ser ingenioso en español, solo es algo que echo de menos de vez en cuando.

Hay tiempos cuando se pone una película argentina (aun que no tenga tan problemas con ellas) o mexicana, por supuesto. La vi Rudo y Cursi anoche y con cinco minutitos tuve que bajar los subtítulos españoles. El español del Mexico esta lleno del argot (al menos esta así en la película esta, probable es equivalente ver “Trainspotting” en inglés). Decían “güey” como “¿Que haces güey?” que pensaba que significaba “tío”, pero menos educado, y uno de ellos era argentino entonces decía “boludo”, con eso y el “pendejo” y “chingar” (palabras vulgares) y como pronunciaban “papa” como “apa” y tal resultó que  necesitaba los subtítulos.

Pero muy buena la película.

Pretty near the hospital

“How’s are you?” I asked, sitting down and getting my books out of my bag as the doctors put their white coats on and stuffed their pockets with scraps of paper, reference books and stethoscopes.

“It’s not a good day.” They said, “How do you say despedida in English?”

“Depends what you mean, can you explain a little more?”

“Yesterday some doctors were despedida’d and sent home.”

“Fired or made redundant?”

So it turns out that yesterday, with no warning fifty-some doctors were made redundant. This was a bit of a shock. Many had more than ten years service in the hospital. So now they face having to move to another part of Spain to find work, because all over Asturias the lack of tax revenue due to the economic downturn, la crisis means that public sector workers are facing a difficult future.

One of the problems is that to get a job in the public sector you have to do exams called oposiciones or opos. That’s for pretty much any public sector job. You want to be a rheumatologist, there’s an exam; a teacher, exam;  a council worker, exam; police, prison guard, you name it, there’s an exam.

Except when there isn’t.

In the hospital, in that department, there haven’t been any opos for fifteen years because there are no available places. If you get the top marks in an opo, you get the job you want and it’s for life. Which is why so many Spanish folk are preparing for them (I know half a dozen people who are in the process of doing opo preparation, there’s a whole industry of academies and tutors out there). If there are no opos you may still have a job but it’s an interina, a temporary job and you can be tossed out like these doctors were (with no more than one month’s pay).

Oposiciones were instituted, I’ve been told, in response to the old way of doing things, which was to know the right people, and to have the right politics (and it was right being the Franco era) in order to get a job. The exams were supposed to bring about a certain egalitarianism in candidate selection. Which it did. But then it went a bit far according to some Spanish friends, and the whole job-for-life at the end of it seems to encourage a certain lethargy  in those who have achieved that holy grail.

So to be a doctor, first you need to get the degree, then do an exam called the MIR in order to get onto a speciality (if you do well you can pick your speciality, if you don’t then you’re headed for wherever they tell you, you didn’t want to be  a GP? Tough.). then you have to complete the residency requirements and then to progress from temporary contracts to permanent, the oposición. Up until that point you have no more job security than anyone else, and, in these times of crisis, it seems, less.

It was a learning experience for everyone. Pompeyo had raised the issue at the AGM (and a few times before, sounding people out). What about those members of the group who had never in their lives put a pair of skis on? Why not use the knowledge of the group to give them a taster of skiing so they could decide whether or not they liked it.

They don't know what they've let themselves in for

It seemed like a reasonable idea, a few people agreed. So that’s what we did.

The ‘knowledgeable’ folk were: Pompeyo, Carmen, Me and Liz.

So we were teaching (coaching, pulling up from the floor, encouraging, trying not to wince) some absolute novices. Let’s be clear, we were not trying to teach them to ski, only teach them enough to stop (turn if at all possible) and to use the lift, and of course, let them have a go at putting on boots, getting up after a fall, that kind of thing. It didn’t  hurt that the plan included a discount on gear hire (€10) and the option of a big lunch (€12).

We went to Fuentes de Invierno (I took my camera but the visibility was so bad that it never left my pocket). Spring snow (i.e. wet). We had a quick recap of necessary vocab (ski tips: espatulas, the back of the ski: talon, edges: los cantos, bindings: sujetadores, brake!: frena, snowplough: cuña) in the car and off we went.

Chaos, absolute chaos... like herding cats

We marched up the bottom of a long flat green piste and set to work.

There’s nothing like watching absolute novices to show you how much you have learned (and to demonstrate some appropriate cursing, meca is the Asturian equivalent of “bugger”, because it is basically the short form of me cago en el mar (poo in the sea!) although you can soften it even more by using “me caches el el mar“). As expected there was much falling, flailing, yelping and laughing. What seemed to us painfully slow was for them frighteningly speedy, but they all seemed to enjoy it. I’ll be interested to hear from Noel what he thinks about teaching real beginners. Fuentes de Invierno has a ski school, but there seemed to be a huge number autodidacts today (that would be, all over the place).

After a few goes down this little slope, Sabi, one of my charges told me to say los giros not las giras (ie masculine not femenine) for the turns, as the femenine means a tour. This was a long way from being my only mistake in Spainsh today (I paid special attention to the ski instructors I passed later in the day for good phrases: no te tiras! (don’t lean back) was one of the most used).

After lunch Liz and I went up to tootle around (in the zero visibility) and the others (those still standing/willing) paid for a single go on a lift. There were only a couple of injuries, despite the ma

ny falls, nothing too serious (fingers crossed). I think it was a success, half of them will be back, I’m sure.

I was chatting to a student today about a movie, the English title was:

some chap looking at a goat

The men who stare at goats.

We had both noticed that the Spanish poster was a little different.

Los hombres que miraban fijamente a las cabras.

Fair enough, stare is mirar fijamente (look fixedly)… but what caught my eye, and led my student to ask about it, was the tag line.

Sin cabras no hay gloria.

No goats no glory, which, as she said, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever until you explain the whole guts/goats thing.

Weston Master II Originally uploaded by RV Bob.

It just slipped out. I wasn’t even thinking about it. We were in the photography school and I was calibrating my camera (well attempting to calibrate it). I had bought a weston III light meter (which is forty years old) but during the calibration I kept having trouble with it. After half an hour’s use it stopped responding. “Hostia!” I said. Then I realised I’d sworn in Spanish rather than English (hostia is literally ‘host’ and could be translated as ‘bloody hell’). There was a new student there as well, Monica, and she was pretty impressed, seeing as my normal Spanish conversational level usually makes it pretty clear that I’m a foreigner.

Ricardo, the photographer said that the selenium in the light meter was probably exhausted. Damn, I mean, hostia!

Leave it, it’s autumn Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

In a lot of the language academies there are posters advertising TOEFL (rather than tofu), this is one of the more popular English exams for foreigners, in as far as an exam can be called popular. It’s the standard American requirement for non native speakers of English to get into college.

And it’s just a bit tricky.

The reason for that is that you don’t pass or fail, you just get a score. And if you want to do a masters in the US, the college you want to go to can set any requirement they like. A perfect TOEFL score is 120, one of my students needed a 105 to get on his course. That was because he was applying to do pilot training and you don’t want to spend your time learning English when you’re supposed to be learning to fly.

If you get a good score you can be sure that you’ll understand the majority of lectures and college situatuins. This means that the exam proceeds at a fierce pace. Full speed lectures to listen to and answer questions on, difficult, technical texts to read and understand. A speaking section that native speakers would struggle to score perfectly on (for example, read a 200 word passage in 45 seconds, then listen to a part of a lecture on, say, the folk tradition and the song ‘The Briar and the Rose’, then talk about it, answering a specific question (in this case it was: What defines a folk song and what elements of The Briar and The Rose place it within this tradition).

The difficulties of the exam are compounded by some students’ lateness in preparing for the exam, such as: I need a score of 85 and I have the exam in three weeks. It does mean that the lessons sort of plan themselves, and you just do a lot of practice questions, but sometimes you just know that a student is not at the right level and it’s distressing to see them realise it, to see them understand that the masters they wanted to do will have to wait.

All done without mirrors Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

I’ve been good. I’ve been limiting the amount of English I use in a day (with the exception of work). That means not too much Radio 4 and, not much in the way of English books (even though I’ve got a few hundred on my Palm) and I’ve restricted my TV piracy to Dr Who and nothing else (Arrrrr, pieces of eight and all that). I love to read though, which is a great impetus to keep working at the Spanish. At the moment I’m reading a crime thriller called La Reina sin espejo (literally the queen without mirror, although I suspect it means something slightly different). I’ll read a page or two, and underline any words or phrases I don’t get, then go back and reread it and try and work it out from the context. Sometimes that works, other times it doesn’t which is when I use the dictionary. All the words I’ve had to work out I make a note of in a little notebook and every day I review that list and test myself (okay, I say every day but I’m not puritanical about it, I have days off). The only problem is that the book opens with an autopsy scene and I’m not sure I’m going to need to say sierra circular (circular saw), lóbrego (gloomy) and lúgubre (dismal) or la puñalada (the stab wound) too much, but in every page there have been at least a dozen new words, or new meanings for old words. My favourite so far is profano as an adjective meaning layperson or ignorant.

The other attraction of this approach is that any form of Spanish is fair game, radio 5 (all news), Los Simpsons, Futurama, trash TV and chat shows. I quite like buying translations of comics (The Authority is a current favourite, it was created by a British writer called Warren Ellis and the last ones I read were the adventures of Kev, an ex paratrooper who swears a lot and takes on some very neatly written superheroes (including a different version of Batman and Superman who are a gay couple, which, well, was unexpected to say the least)).

I still have some way to go, because I was watching a gameshow called pasapalabra (pass the word) in which the host speaks with the pace of a racing commentator on the final furlong and I couldn’t follow him at all. It sounded like blablabienblablablablablapreparadoblablablabla. Understanding that is my goal, then I can move on to understanding Andalucians, who apparently have an accent as impenetrable as Glaswegians.