Early this year, I agreed to become a guinea pig in an interesting experiment: 2001 had been designated the European Year Of Languages, and language awareness was being promoted throughout Europe. The Council of Europe and the European Commission wanted to encourage people to learn more languages, with the ideal that everyone should be able to speak at least two languages other than their mother tongue. This would obviously enable people to communicate more easily in a multicultural Europe while also emphasising the cultural diversity of each country's heritage. To publicise this campaign in Ireland, a Language Challenge was launched to see if it would be possible to learn a language within a year, and I was one of those invited.
The challengers were drawn from a variety of backgrounds, and each of us had different reasons for participating, but we were all agreed on the importance of the project. The slogan for the year proclaimed "Languages open doors", offering possibilities on every horizon, from job prospects to the ability to order a drink in a foreign bar.
I became involved because of the role languages play in my work as a writer. I was working on a novel set partly in 18th-century France, which required a lot of research en franτais in the libraries of Paris, and I realised that the more languages I spoke, the wider my scope in choice of future material. I had also found knowledge of other grammatical systems improved my writing style: my generation wasn't taught English grammar at school, and so it was French and Irish classes that taught me the structure of language.
But would it be possible to learn Spanish in a year? I could not speak a word of it, though I was certainly an experienced student, having learned my Irish in a gaelscoil, and my French as part of a BA in UCD. I had been attracted to Spanish by my love of Latin American literature, and I wanted to read it in the original because I felt it lost something in translation. Spanish seemed such a beautiful language, I wanted to experience the nuance and texture of the original prose. With this in mind, project officer Marie Heraughty devised a learning programme for me. Because I was an absolute beginner, I initially had private tuition, designed to give me an accelerated start. My teacher, Bea De Los Arcos, came to my house twice a week until I had mastered the basics of how to describe myself, count and use the present tense. I then spent every Tuesday night of the summer in a class at the Instituto Cervantes on Northumberland Road in Dublin. There was never a dull moment: the activities were so varied, we would find ourselves playing Snakes and Ladders with the irregular verbs as soon as the homework had been corrected. But my greatest challenge was yet to come.
Rosa L≤pez-Boull≤n of the Spanish Embassy in Dublin arranged for me to go on a three-week intensive course in the University of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, in north-west Spain. It was confidently predicted that solid immersion in a Spanish environment would do wonders for my Spanish. I soon found this to be the case when on arrival, I had to explain to staff of Iberia airline in Spanish that my bag hadn't come on the flight!
Famous for its pilgrimage and the magnificent cathedral at the heart of the old city, Santiago's gallego music sounded uncannily like Irish traditional music, with its bagpipes and Celtic flavour. But when I arrived, there was not a drop of Celtic rain falling from the perfectly blue sky. It was the hottest, sunniest September in years, and we students couldn't believe our luck.
I was placed in the Intermediate Class, with a large group from the University of Leicester, and three women from the University of Ulster. They had been sent to Santiago to prepare for Second Year University Spanish, and all of them knew considerably more of the language than I did. Many times during the first week, I found myself putting up my hand in a slight panic: "No conozco los pasados . . . no entiendo!" (I don't know the past \ . . . I don't understand.) But I soon caught up, despite the frenetic pace of the classes.
Spanish is quite an easy language to learn, particularly for those with a working knowledge of French, because a lot of the vocabulary is similar: the French for "library" is bibliothΦque; the Spanish equivalent is biblioteca. But in Spain, I found that my French often led me to mispronounce words, to the amusement of the others. En is a deceptively simple word, meaning "in" in both languages, but it sounds very different in Spanish, and it was a huge effort to train myself out of the habit of pronouncing a French en. I also found it hard to roll my Rs, though the Spanish "j" was easier, as it is similar in sound to the Irish "ch". But I think the main difficulty with Spanish is that there are two verbs meaning "to be" - ser and estar - and the distinctions between them can be confusing.
Every morning, from 9.15 a.m. to 1.45 p.m., we covered a new topic. The imperative was one day's work, followed the next day by the subjunctive because, as our teacher Teresa Garcia explained, we would not be able to use the negative imperative without first knowing the subjunctive! It was the most extraordinary learning experience, and I found myself assimilating more than I had ever thought possible.
But it was not all grind. Teresa varied her methodology, and one morning started teaching us the tango. It was such a success that we stacked away the desks and danced every morning from then on. Girl danced with girl in a class with 11 females to three males, often tired from late nights in Santiago's Rock Bar.
Afternoons were taken up with workshops, cultural activities, and tours of the old city. One day I found an Irish college, just beside an Internet cafΘ on the Rua Nova. A plaque stated it had been founded in 1603, to arrest the spread of the Anglican religion throughout Ireland, and Irish students had gone there until 1769. It looked as if it had a varied history since, with a bargain shoe shop in one wing, and a jewellery and souvenir shop in another.
By the end of the course, my Spanish had improved so dramatically that I got full marks in the exam. Back in the Instituto Cervantes in Dublin, I was amazed to find that I had jumped five levels, from Initial 2 to Intermedio 4! I'm still attending classes once a week, and most importantly, I've also started reading O Lapis do Carpinteiro (The Carpenter's Pencil) by Manuel Rivas. It's set in Santiago de Compostela in 1936, and I aim to have it finished by Christmas.
Further information: www.eyl@leargas.ie
