The F-Word Part 5: Spanish & Skyrim

Lots of you have asked me - how is my Spanish coming along? The truth is, besides being busy with the move, I’ve been putting off learning Spanish in any kind of constructive way since we got here over 5 weeks ago, only learning the odd new word here and there to add to my Spanish vocabulario.

For the record, it's not my first encounter with the language. My long-lost parents began their marriage as JW missionaries in Northern Spain and only left after my mum got pregnant with me (perhaps they should have paid as much attention to contraception as travel and language!) Nevertheless I brought an early termination to their adventure, but they never lost their love of the Spanish culture and language. Around the age of 10 they decided that regular school was too much of a bad influence on their religious ambitions for a nice, spiritual girl and withdrew from public education and decided to teach me themselves at home. As a language was part of the school curiculum they opted to teach me Spanish, which largely consisted of giving me a large black book full of pictures of elephants and the word 'grande' beneath or a mouse, with 'pequeno' underneath. From this and some conversational Spanish with my parents during lessons, I learned most of the Spanish I have now, which is surprisingly well remembered and has been really helpful as a framework and having at least a limited understanding of what people are trying to communicate to me.

Even with this background Spanish I have been a little fearful of trying again 25 years on, thinking perhaps I am too old to retain it or even learn a new language and have procrastinated even though I know to make a success of this move, I cannot leave Dominick to be my mouthpiece in public forevermore. Whilst nursing my latest crop of mosquito/gnat bites I thought about what am I really good at and enjoy doing? Anyone who knows me well would know that I love video games. From the very earliest console tennis on atari to complicated, absorbing RPG's for xbox like Skyrim ( from where our house name, Breezehome originated). This led me to thinking if I can remember obscure potion ingredients for several dozen potions - that charred skeever tail, blisterwort, blue dartwing and daedra heart are the four components for a restore health potion in Skyrim which will potentially save my character’s life in mortal combat against a Serpentine Dragon, then surely, I reasoned, I can remember the four key components to concoct a simple sentence. The noun, the verb, the conjugation and the adjective. This thought spurred me on - after all I can remember and use endless combinations of minerals to smith virtual weapons because I use them. I learn what they do and therefore I remember them - they are part of my knowledge.

Hence today after making mushroom omlette and beans for breakfast I knuckled down to a morning of Spanish lessons, using Michel Thomas cds recommended to me by a lady I met at a restaurant we visited in January, who like us fell in love with the island and moved here permanently from the UK.

   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas.) Michel Thomas was a Pole who survived a number of internments in Nazi concentration camps and went on to arrest the Hangman of Dachau at the end of the second world war in 1945. He had become an expert on languages and worked with the French Resistance and also US Army Counter Intelligence. In a way his assimilation of language skills ensured his survival and became his future career as a language teacher, with his own school in Beverley Hills. His students included many famous Hollywood actors of the time such as Grace Kelly whose marriage to the Prince of Monaco necessitated the learning of French.

  His calm reassuring voice begins by telling the listener that "any form of anxiety or tension inhibits true and effective learning" and goes on to say there is no homework and no need to memorise, just listen and repeat as the lessons proceed. "Let it be absorbed as knowledge and what you know, you will not forgot". Fears of inadequacy and ineptitude put aside I spent the morning developing my language skills. I haven’t really gotten onto adjectives just yet, but I have learned how to formulate a few basic sentences and phrases and learned that the stress always goes on the penultimate vowel-syllable in a word. Most importantly I learned that inflection alone changes a statement to a question  without the need for the word ‘do’, which does not exist and has been hindering me from conversation as I couldn’t think how to phrases things like 'Do you have...?'.

My question of the day is: Lo siento, pero por que no lo tiene para mi ahora, porque lo necessito ahora?

Rougly translated as 'I'm sorry, but why don't you have it for me now, because I need it now'.

This could have been very helpful when trying to discover why we still hadn't got cable, phones and internet a couple of weeks ago.

Ahora tengo corazon - now I have heart! So here is to Fus-Ro-Dah and my new Spanish Dragon Shouts!

PS If anyone knows how to get the inverted question mark symbol on an English keyboard in Word - please let me know.