Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘French & Spanish’ Category

The Open University tutorials are always on Saturdays so you sort-of get into the way of assuming that all their activities are on Saturdays. Well, they usually are but the exams aren’t and it certainly throws me for one.

This year was particularly confusing in that the exam was in Dublin for the first time rather than in Belfast so the local Dublin hotels did rather well out of that. How come we didn’t get paid £70 each because the exam was in Dublin though? After all, they’d have charged us £70 each if it was us that asked for it to be in Dublin (ie abroad).

Hmmm, wonder if they’d pay up if we all asked?

It sounded like a good idea at the time that I booked it but flying over to Belfast on Friday (an all day affair due to the connecting flight), then needing to drive down to Dublin on Sunday for my Spanish exam on Monday, back to Belast on the Monday night only to go back to Dublin on the Tuesday for the flight to Girona wasn’t quite such a good move in practice.

The trip worked out fine though it’s pretty much knocked me out today and I’m only starting to recover now!

This is the first of the posts on the new computer which I’ve been setting up today. Just had a pleasant surprise when I checked the mail: for some reason it’s been a very popular time for people to pay me money. I’ve several new premium listings on the directory, a whole raft of paid post money from last month and to top it all, a paid entry for the listings sites.

Perhaps I should go away more often!

As I near the end of the Spanish course, one thing after another is getting finished off.

Yesterday, it was the end of the books that I reached. It seems like only yesterday when I was starting the first one yet it was right at the start of January!

Tonight, was the final get-together of our little online Spanish group. We’ve been getting together off and on for the last three years and ’twas the final meeting this evening so the headset has had its final use…. unless I take the head staggers and sign up for the German or perhaps the Italian course, of course…

Next week sees the exam so there’ll be something of a gap in the posts from me from later this week ’til at least Wednesday of next week.

That’s what we have to do for the oral part of the exam in, worryingly, about two weeks time. In fact, it’ll all be over this time two weeks from now which is even more worrying!

It’s far from easy coming to something like that even in English but we’ve to do it in Spanish which you’d think would make it even harder to do. In some ways, it does, of course. We obviously don’t have the range of grammar or vocabulary in Spanish that we do in English naturally. However, it’s the sort of thing that we’ve been doing off and on throughout the language courses and from that perspective it makes it that little bit easier.

Not easy, though!

We’ll be given a photo of the painting in the exam and then have 10 minutes to prepare a 3 minute presentation on it and how it fits into the context of the society of the time. As with most things on the Spanish course, it’s designed to make sure that you can’t prepare the whole presentation in advance so that 10 minutes will really need to be used. Any old presentation won’t do either as it needs to be reasonably well structured.

Try doing that in English sometime to see how difficult it can be!

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.