On May 21st, we celebrated five years since landing in Barcelona to embark on our European adventure.
We arrived with one suitcase and a carry-on each, and Bubba of course, who turned out to be a stellar traveler; despite a six-hour delay from our flight out of San Francisco, he emerged after a full 24 hours in his doggy crate completely unruffled.
My husband was born in Rome and his first language was Italian, one of the closer of the Romance languages to Spanish. Even back in 2017 when we visited to see if we wanted to move here, he was already having a semblance of conversations with locals. He’s been blessed with some freakish language gene, probably due to growing up bilingual, and can get along with speakers of English, Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Romanian. It helps that he genuinely likes talking with people. (Monster.)
My own journey with languages has been decidedly more fraught.
Living in Saudi Arabia, from the ages of seven to twelve I was required to take an Arabic class geared toward children who were freshly arriving and departing in two-year stints with their parents.
We were one of the long-stay families, seven years in total, and so I got the same lessons every year from 2nd to 6th grades, a combination of basic phrases, numbers, and hummus recipes. To this day I can count to ten in Arabic, and say “hello,” “how are you,” and “I’m fine thanks, praise be to God.” Also, “no brains” which is the furthest our teacher would go to appease elementary school children’s demands for curse words.
In 7th grade, Alhamdulillah, we finally got the option to study French if we wanted, and I jumped at the chance. Not that I didn’t love Nuha, our Arabic teacher, but five years of her special fondness for the blondest of the boys, crushing us to her voluptuous bosoms in an effusion of delight, was beginning to wear.
I remember nothing of that first year of French, other than that our teacher was the mother of a girl who at lunch one day inhaled a pea and had to be rushed to the emergency room to the amazement of all of us. Their family bugged out back to the States that year, so there was no French 2 in 8th grade, and there definitely was no going back to Nuha’s fervent embraces.
Sensible baby gay that I was, I decided to start over with French 1 in 9th grade when we moved to Washington state. Academically, it was not a challenging move—I’m pretty sure I never cracked a book outside of class and somehow got straight A’s. Due to this untaxing turn, the decision was made to send me to a college-prep boarding school my sophomore year when we moved back to L.A. for my dad’s job.
I was on the verge of tears the first day in French 2, when the teacher was babbling away in, of all things, French, and the students were replying, bafflingly, also in French.
Unlike Olympic View Junior High School, and Asir Academy before that, English was banned from the classroom, and this diabolical method was used from the first day in French 1 when freshmen arrived. As a new sophomore, I was hopelessly behind and asked to be put back again—French 1 for the third time, in case anyone is keeping score.
There was also a new junior in French 1, a red-headed girl, and so I wouldn’t have felt so bad about my remediation except that this same girl later insisted that my accent sounded like a French porn star. (But how would she—? Nevermind.)
I could have, but did not, wonder aloud why she only put makeup on one side of her face—in retrospect I realize it was not that she forgot to attend bilaterally, but that, inexplicably, she only had freckles on one side, poor thing. Though her remark cut me to the quick, I did manage to complete French 3 by the end of high school.
You may think that was the end of French 1 for me, but you’d be wrong: I took it again junior year in college, imagining an easy “A” to bolster my dismal grade point average, but the 8 a.m. Monday through Friday class time proved too much, and I withdrew at the last possible moment to avoid the “F” I would have received due to absences.
To recap: That’s five and a half years of French—and five years of Arabic—with barely a “shkran” or “merci beaucoup” to show for it. This was how things stood upon our arrival to Barcelona in 2019.
The plan was for me to get a certificate in teaching English straightaway when we arrived, and I did go to the Oxford House CELTA program and completed it in January 2020, and then, on to Spanish. I signed up at the same school where my husband had been taking classes, and was quite eager for a fresh start with a new language in a real class with other mainly English-speaking adults. Fun! I wore my best hat.
How did I get off on the wrong foot with Angel, the inaptly named teacher?
He didn’t want to write down “gofre” on the whiteboard in our very first exercise— “Call out all the Spanish words you already know!” he said—and the word for waffle was one of mine. What’s wrong with that? Waffles are important.
I suppose it is a bit like saying spaghetti or lasagna to an Italian, except that none of the other students knew what a gofre was, and so we had our moment where Angel resisted, and I insisted, and maybe that was when he first marked me as an agitator. Also I was the oldest student in class, so there could have been some daddy issues at play, who knows.
In any event, many more of these moments between us culminated one evening with Angel snapping his fingers at me while I was explaining something to the guy next to me. He wanted me to stop talking and pay attention, but I had had enough and told him he was being rude and that I most definitely would not be taking the next class in the Spanish series with him since he’d seen fit to single me out for this condescending treatment, and that was that.
The next month, Covid hit, we were locked down tight, I started writing a novel and decided that learning Spanish could wait until I really needed it. And here we are.
About 30% of the population of Sitges is non-Spanish—Dutch, French, American, English, and Canadian mostly, lots of retirees—and the economy here depends on the hordes of tourists arriving for the festivals1 and beaches. For most of these people, the common language is English, not Spanish, and so every Spanish person at every store or restaurant in town speaks at least a little. Auxiliary trades, like postal workers for example, are a bit dicier, but it’s actually far easier to adapt your habits than to learn a language—switching to electronic everything AND no junk mail seems like a win-win, frankly.
Five years on, there still is no great need for me to learn. Yes, I use my husband’s mad language skills as a crutch, but he uses me for my perfect fried eggs on toast, so we’re pretty much even.
And it’s not like I’ve learned nothing mooning around in my little English bubble. I can order a coffee and a croissant, even if I still mix up For Here and To Go. And if I know how to say “No sugar, thanks” because I don’t know how to say “Do you have Splenda or some other artificial sweetener?” then what really have I lost? Nada.
When our elderly neighbors insist on speaking to me and the dog, I am completely comfortable with their believing we are happy idiots smiling and nodding along without understanding a word. I can usually tell what they’re talking about even if I don’t know what they’re saying. If they say “escalera” while we’re going up, I feel no need to reply “Yes indeed, it is a very nice elevator”—they know it is, they just said so, or something very like it.
Likewise, when the little girl on the street says “cerrado de boca” I know that she is referring to Bubba’s muzzle (pitbull breeds are required to wear them here) and I leave it to her parents to explain the ins and outs of perros potencialmente peligrosos, which is a ridiculous number of syllables for an even more ridiculous law.
Actually, I think children would be better teachers of languages generally: they tend to speak more slowly, and overenunciate. They also usually have more interesting things to say than “Go back to where you came from” or “You should learn Catalan if you want to live in our country.”
Off the top of my head: Carnival, Patchwork Festival, Classic Car Festival, Sant Jordi, Bear Retreat, Corpus Christi, Pride, Sant Joan, Fiesta Major, Bear Week, Santa Tecla, Int’l Fantastic Film Festival.
Troy, you waffle agitator, you 😂 And Bubba!! 💛 Il est tellement beau, vous devez être très fier :)
This was lovely, Troy. All that self-effacing humour; I knew you were British, despite the French porn star accent. 😊
This rings so true for me, the way those of us from the monolingual anglophone world struggle with languages. And I sympathise with your experience with that teacher. As a former teacher myself, I realised too late that I'm better off learning on my own.