Foreign Perspectives

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It used to be pretty handy living here and learning Spanish. After all, we’re just 30 miles or so from Spain and we get a lot of guests from Barcelona so it’s obviously easy to get a lot of practice in, isn’t it?

Well, no actually, it isn’t. Up until about 18 months ago it certainly used to be but the Catalans have become a whole lot more militant about their language since then. The immediately obvious impact of that was that since around then brochures in shops are only available in Catalan instead of being in Spanish too as they were previously. Similarly all signs are only in Catalan these days.

In the last 12 months we’ve found that the Catalans quite simply refuse to serve us in shops if we speak Spanish. I think that’s because we come across as residents of the area and therefore they expect us to speak Catalan. However, that’s not possible for us because even though we live in French Catalonia the French have all but stamped out that language.

Recently we even had a Catalan guest who insisted on speaking in very bad English rather than Spanish so we expect that it will get worse in the coming years.

It’s getting quite difficult for us because although we get a lot of guests from Barcelona, not all of them are Catalan and neither do all of them speak or read English yet all of them speak and read Spanish (or Castillian as the Catalans call it). Therefore we acknowledge reservations from Spain in Spanish.

Will they eventually become as militant as the Basques? Who knows, but it certainly seems to be heading that way.

Popularity: 6% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

It’s still hard for me to believe but somehow or other I find myself on the final course of the Open University Spanish course and even harder to believe that one course after that should give me a BA (Hons) Modern Language degree.

My original plan was that I’d do enough French to be able to live here but once we’d reached that point I figured that I might as well carry on and pick up the diploma so two years ago I added Dip French after my name. With that completed and us receiving growing numbers of Spanish guests, the logical step was to do the first of the Spanish courses but once you start these things it seems hard to stop so here I am doing the final year.

Coming here just after the final year of the French segment started worked out very well. It wasn’t easy as we were very busy that year but the daily practice in spoken and written French helped the final mark no end I’m sure. With the Spanish it’s a completely different story. The two languages are similar enough that in the past I always had to “forget” my French when learning Spanish but, of course, that isn’t really an option this time around which makes it quite an uphill struggle at times. Still, the next coiurse should be easy as it’s in English, shouldn’t it? Unfortunately, it turns out that the last course I need to do to get that modern languages degree is supposedly the hardest one in the university so I’m half-thinking of doing a humanities course prior to it to get into the subject a little better.

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Whew. I thought that I’d checked most of the reservations whilst we were in Turkey but there were over 20 new ones sitting for me to go through today.

This year the mix of reservations has changed considerably from previous years with most coming via our own website rather than via reservation systems. We make more money that way (no commission to pay to the systems) but they’re a lot more work.

We’re still pretty exhausted from the trip so haven’t really gotten into the swing of things yet. I made a small start on the assignment for the Spanish course but will have to really get into it tomorrow as it’s due for Wednesday.

Popularity: 16% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!