Reflections of us - by Theo

It's often one of the first things people do upon meeting our daughter - decide which of us (Kate and I) she most resembles. Thankfully, most people agree that there is more of Kate reflected in Rosie than me. A relief I think you'll all agree, but here's some baby photos so you can decide for yourself.

Theo:

Kate (with her little sister Becky) :
Rosie:
As you can see, there is definitely more of Kate in Rosie than me.

It's not just in looks that Rosie reflects her mother; in language too. Naturally enough, as Rosie spends more time with Kate than she does with me, her emerging speech patterns reflect her mother's more than they do mine. Hence in recent days the phrases "Come on then" ("cumonden") and "Shall we?" ("shallee") have regularly rung out around the house, while the previously contracted "stad!" has finally lengthened out to the full "it's Dad!" These aren't full sentences, or at least Rosie doesn't conceive them as such; it's too early in her linguistic development for that. Rather they are simply phrases and collocations that Kate regularly uses and sound to Rosie like polysyllabic words. So, just as she reflects her mother in looks, so she echoes her in speech.

Sadly this has meant that common Spanish phrases - vamos, venga, muy bien, que quieres?, donde estas? - have yet to be uttered, as it's mostly me that uses them. However recently Rosie has been using toma ("take") and gracias ("thank you") more or less correctly. Mas o menos.

Learning the lingo By Kate

The other day Theo chided me gently on not making enough effort to improve my Spanish. With complete justification. I'm making virtually no effort at all. Oh yes, I half-listen to Spanish talk radio when I'm in the kitchen and I chat with our Hispanic friends and neighbours, but my understanding of the language is intermittent at best and my speech is akin to a toddler-age child.

My reply was that I was busy learning another new language and Spanish had been squeezed out by my beleaguered brain - or at least, severely relegated. That other new language is called Motherhood.

Then I thought about it some more. Yes, as a metaphor it's not bad, but it doesn't go far enough. I'm not just learning a new language. I'm learning to find my way through a new foreign country.

It's challenging, stimulating, constantly changing, exhausting, stressful, hilarious and highly rewarding. I get lost and take wrong turnings all the time. I try and consult a map, only to find I'm holding it upside down. New vocabulary like "sleep regression" and "snotsucker" have to be learned and I spend many hours scouring text-books for clues to the grammatical rules. Only to find there aren't any.

Suddenly, the myriad Spanish verb endings seem like a walk in the park.

Fluency Schmuency - by Theo

Coming from a country with one of the lowest rates of knowledge of a second language in Europe, if not the world, it's hardly surprising that we should misunderstand what it is to truly master a foreign language. In England we talk about being "fluent" in a language, usually equating this with having complete control over said tongue.

Not so. Fluent, from fluid, simply means to be able to talk without hesitations or significant pauses in a smooth stream of words. Your pronunciation may be atrocious, you might put the emphasis in totally the wrong places, your prose could be littered with errors and you might be completely incapable of understanding the response you elicit. Doesn't matter; you're fluent, and as far as most English people are concerned, that's enough. Forget the fact that native speakers might be completely confused by your gnomic (yet, fluent) utterances, we feel we've done our bit by blurting out our foreign phrases in one, smooth go.

Before moving to Spain I was just as guilty of this, equating fluency with being able to 'speak' a language (also a bad term - after all it's not much good being able to 'speak' a language if you can't understand the response). In fact, upon taking one of my first classes for Spanish learners of English and finding all my students to be incredibly fluent and generally faultless in English, I was astounded to discover that they were studying for the Cambridge First Certificate in English. The First Certificate. There are two more, higher level exams after that, Advanced and Proficiency. As a rookie teacher I struggled to imagine what more these almost word-perfect teenagers had to learn about the English language. I mean they were fluent, what more did we want?

My own learning experience of Spanish and my continual struggles with French have enlightened me somewhat. I am now 'fluent' in Spanish, though I'm still a long way off being word-perfect, or understanding the majority of things said to me in Spanish. Hopefully though, after 10 months of intermittent self-study, I'll be getting back to Spanish lessons and striving to improve. Or rather I'll be bringing Spanish lessons to me, having persuaded many of my teaching colleagues to band together for an in-house teacher. Meanwhile, having been allotted 4 classes of Proficiency level students in this academic year's timetable, I'll be finding out exactly what more there is to learn about English beyond fluency.

problemas con idiomas

One big problem with gaining some degree of competency in Spanish, we have discovered, is it has an adverse affect on our ability to speak French.

We had a very multi-cultural weekend, hanging out with our visiting friends Ayesha (a Londoner whose family hail from Gujurat) and Obaro (originally from Nigeria) and collecting Spanish, Valencian, Swiss, French, German and Canadian friends along the way. At various points I enthusiastically leapt into conversations in French, thinking that having studied it for 14 years I would find it easier than speaking Spanish, only to find, much to my dismay, that I kept slipping back into Spanish. Ironic really, as whenever I can't think of a word in Spanish I tend to try a French one.

It appears to be the case with language that you use it or lose it. Eventually, by the end of the weekend, my French had just about resurrected itself but it definitely needs more practice - I feel a regular intercambio with our non-English speaking Senegalese friends Ibrahima and Abobacar is called for, without delay.

The Customer Is Never Right

After hearing of our experience in the Movistar shop trying to recharge our phone, our friend Cesar said, "One thing you will learn in Spain - when it comes to shopping, the customer is never right."

I wouldn't describe Spanish retail assistants as rude exactly - indeed, compared with, say, Russian retail assistants, they're sweetness and light. But you do get the distinct impression with most that their attitude towards customers is at best, tolerant and at worst, disinterested.

The sales assistant Jorge flagged down when I was trying to buy my A-Z was a case in point. She made no attempt to disguise the fact that she had much better things to do than serve us and could scarcely contain her disgust when she realised the sale that required so much effort on her part only came to six Euros. Jorge and I both saw the funny side.

Theo, however, is more easily traumatised by unhelpful shop assistants and baffling retail systems. Shopping is a necessary evil, as far as he's concerned and large department stores can give him noticeable allergic reactions. This morning we had all the fun of returning a faulty item to just such a store - and boy, does it add to the fun when you can't speak or understand the language!

In my experience of large stores in the UK (M&S, Ikea, TK Maxx) if you want to return something, you take it up to their customer services counter, queue for a bit then have the exchange or refund dealt with then and there.

Part one of that process is the same at Hipercor in Madrid - Theo explained that the new computer speakers we'd bought the day before weren't working and the assistant dutifully fillled out a piece of paper and gave it to him.

At that point it all got rather hazy. Now what? If the assistant had indeed explained to Theo what he had to do next, he hadn't understood and when I found him (I'd gone to a different department to buy some contact lens solution) he was wandering around, gingerly holding the piece of paper between finger and thumb and looking bemused.

The paper itself contained no obvious clues, so we went down to another customer services desk and brandished it at the woman there, wearing pleading expressions. As it happened, we had found one of those rare creatures in Spanish retail, a kind assistant and when it was clear that her patient explanations had left us none the wiser, she actually smiled and told us to follow her.

Our customer services lady took us back up the ramp to the electronics department, all the time telling us reassuringly how difficult it was for people without much Spanish to understand the way things worked (ironically, both Theo and I understood perfectly what she was saying at that point). She then led us to another sales assistant, explained our situation and making sure we had finally got the hang of things, bid us farewell and left us to it. The rest was a breeze. The money was refunded to our credit card and we were free to go and find a replacement set of speakers.

As we walked back to the flat, Theo confessed that he felt rather dispirited by the whole episode. "But at least we managed it in the end!" I said, encouragingly.

I know what he means though. The frustration of not even having the simplest language at your fingertips to deal with a largely straightforward situation does make you realise what a long way there is to go with your linguistic prowess. But let's be realistic, we've only actually been here for four days. Meanwhile, we are more motivated than ever to learn the language and more thankful than ever that we moved to Spain and not Japan. At least we've got an alphabet in common.