French kisses

One day the teacher asked for volunteers to establish postal relationship with French classmates. Probably, during that time some kind of agreement between Spanish and French secondary schools was done in order to put students of both countries in contact, and, overall, to demonstrate to each other that French (and Spanish) speaking people REALLY exist. English speakers were evident, just by hearing the radio everybody could realise about their existence, but the case was different with French speakers. Soon I could check that they are not an invention of crazy doctors nor educational managers, because a mysterious letter arrived at my home from France. The envelope was yellow and my name and address were written on it in black ink. Inside there was a short letter written in French by a young girl. I could read that she was my age. She studied the same school course I was doing. She was living in a rural area, like me (but in France).

Both of us had a lot of things in common. But I could not believe what I was reading: She talked about what she liked and what she hated, and said that the things she liked overall were listening to rock and roll music, to smoke Camels and to have collective sex in the disco. I stood, astonished with the paper in my hand for a long time. For some days I looked at the letter with a kind of apprehention and fear. One night when I could not sleep, I took the letter and, after reading it again, I hid it in the deepest part of a drawer. At this time I had had never smoked. And I had never practiced collective sex in a disco (yet?). Nor even out of a disco. Well, for some evolutionary reason girls develop their mind and body earlier than boys, and we were at the age where the difference is wide and clear. She was a woman and I was just beginning my adolescence. I felt that our relationship was impossible, and decided to pretend that the letter never arrived. In order to justify this distant attitude to myself, I started to pretend that I was not interested in foreign languages.

Perhaps Latin would be the only language I attended with some interest, but only during one year, the next course I changed to biology (in fact I chose geology, but there were the silly restrictions I explained in a previous post). In any case, between the French girl and me there was still some common things: both of us were exposed to an English speaking environment through a high amount of radio songs, movies, tv series, etc. Even more: both of us had rock and roll. From then on I started to hear rock thinking about French girls and French kisses. But this feeling is just connected with English rock and roll. I do not know exactly why.

French groundhog

The second year at high school foreign classes went better than in the previous year. A new teacher without any kind of apparent mental disorder was contracted and we all, finally, began to study in a systematic and formal way. She was expert in Latin, but the school’s principal believed that she could teach foreign language classes, which means French classes. However her relationship with the language of our famous neighbours living on the other side of the Pyrenees mountains was vey weak. Maybe for this reason the content of the classes was exactly the same stuff that we had studied three or four years ago in the primary school. That seemed the groundhog day, the Bill Murray continuous returning to the past. At this point I began to suspect that we would be beginners for the rest of our lives. There were few possibilities for breaking this spiral tendency ad infinitum.

French suicides

I could not believe it. In the first course in the secondary school, one day the teacher of French was on his knees imploring a student not to jump out of a window. After some weeks I realised that it was the usual method to blackmail the teacher in order to increase the exam marks. Why study French if one can pass the course with high marks just by simulating suicide? The teacher had little idea of French, in fact he had (really) a kind of mental disorder, or was a bit mentally deficient (seriously), and had obtained his job through some strong family influences (the typical Spanish nepotism). And the French classes soon became a merry-go-round, every time more and more violent.

The problem was that defining that kind of situation as “normal” the whole school context became superfluous. At the end of that year not only did the French course seem something extravagant, but the Maths course seemed a set of ridiculous hieroglyphs, Literature did seem like the bored job of a notary, Physical education seemed like the crazy invention of some nazi doctor, and Philosophy seemed like a dirty collection of irrational jokes. At this point most of the students were convinced that French did not exist at all, and the rest of the courses were only inventions designed to create trouble for us. The next year maybe half of the students went out of the educational system. Perhaps it was a strategy designed to clean the school of most of the working class students. What would the French ambassador had said? Well, someone developed a new hypothesis: Was it a strategy to discredit French and increase the prestige of English? Who would say that English globalisation is naive?

French neighbourhood

France is only 150 km away from our small village lost in the hills. It means that Frenchmen were our neighbours. French women too. In fact I studied French at primary and secondary school because some Frenchman could arrive at our village some day, who knows when, how and why, and we all needed to be prepared to face that exciting situation. It was a pity that I never met any of them in my village, nor even in the whole county. The only French speaker I met there (some years later) was Tufet, a guy from Algeria that arrived to work (hard) on a pig farm, but it was long time after my secondary school days, during the bloody Algerian war of the 90′s (as I will explain later). In fact Tufet spoke Spanish with a French accent. Definitively the only way for us to speak French was by going to France, but we had the highest mountains of the Pyrenees in between, so it was not easy. Previously you needed to learn to climb. After that, climbing a lot you will meet some French speakers.

The secondary school was more terrific

At the secondary school things were’nt any better. At the beginning of every school year all the students were forced to fill out a form and choose some of the (few) optional courses we would like to attend. In fact there were only three possibilities: We could choose between Geology and Biology, between Technical design and Housekeeping, and between English and French. Each of the four years of the secondary school I chose English, mainly because at fourteen I felt as if I already belonged to an English speaking consumerist and capitalist world. But this option never existed in practice. The school never had an English teacher, so French was the only real option. Sometimes I asked for the suposed English courses, but the Principal told me that we didn’t need it because our neighbours are French.

English in the primary school

If we agree with the idea that English is the language of the future (and the present), then schools should incorporate it in their programs and courses in order to prepare students for this damned future (and wasted present). Like so many people, this was not the case in my primary and secondary schools, where the only foreign language was French. In the primary school French was the only foreign language allowed, and we put up with it for one or two hours every week with teachers that had never speaken French in a proper way, had not even read a French book. Anyway the pedagogical approach of my primary school was based on the power of physical violence, and the content of the courses we attended didn’t matter at all because the attainement of obedient attitudes through the building of an oppresive environment were the main goals to achieve. In fact I spent three years learning French with this peculiar methodology and the result became almost perfect: My mind was kept far away from French grammar, ortography and pragmatics.

Far from the Uzbekish virginity

Lets see the consequences of English social normality to beginner students of English: If you want to learn, for instance, Swedish, you will need to imagine by yourself the Swedish social and cultural environment without any reference, and this will require a great energy cost and an active disposition that will become a useful stimulus to the learning process. But if you want to learn English, you will already be familiar with the society and culture where it is spoken. Definitively, I think that all of us belong partially to this culture, and maybe it is this point that hurts me. In my personal case, at least half of my cultural myths come from American and British culture, arriving to me directly through multiple audiovisual ways. Hollywood and CBS are the guiltiest. And, more recently, Microsoft and Google too. I would like to hate myself by allowing this colonisation of my mind, but I can’t fight against a part of myself. Maybe I am too lazy. The worrying thing is that I feel good about my laziness. But some times I would prefer to be Uzbekistani. Long life to the unmentionable language!

The English “normality” is following you

All those years watching all those American and British TV series have definitively corrupted our collective mind in order to develop an English sense of what should be a “normal society”. This is, no doubt, a giant step backwards in human evolution. For instance, all of us have thousands upon thousands of everyday images of teenagers with large cars driving to their high school, neighbours going to the corner pub and drinking like a sponge, self-made business men going to their office with a hot dog in their teeth, cowboys asking for a whisky or a glass of milk in a noisy saloon, families eating duck around a table full of colourful stuff and red cheeks, policemen driving through wet streets looking at the sidewalk dealers, children starting their holidays in the countryside with strawberry cakes for breakfast, and, specially, those Indian or Pakistani shops open day and night. Could this kind of “normality” be (or not) a tragedy for the life on the planet Earth?

If English is always around, why do we avoid learning it so perfectly?

It is not understandable at all. Like most of my contemporaries since my early childhood I have been hearing a continuous noise emitted by the radio and TV almost full of English sounds. Really I feel my memory is filled with a large quantity of songs expressed in the unmentionable language. My oldest memories inside my brain contain some of those Beatles’ naive songs (except the Yellow Submarine that I remember only in the Spanish silly version, as silly as the original I presume), as well as an indeterminate amount of Eurovision hits (from Congratulations to Waterloo). When, in my secondary school, I started to hear music in a conscious way I spent most of my money and time listening to British and American records (from Led Zeppelin to The Clash passing through AC/DC or Patty Smith). I must recognize that I can sing a lot of English songs without having any idea about their lyrics. I can repeat (approximately) the sounds of these songs, even in a loud voice, but I am unable to know what I am saying. And the amusing thing is that this is seen as normal (in my house, in my neighbourhood, in my city, in my country, etc.). Unbelievable. I feel the perfect portrait of a tropical parrot. Or maybe the puppet of an Orwellian and ubiquitous ventriloquist. In any case I am waterproof to the English tide.

How to finish with the Unmentionable language?

Welcome to this useless blog about a long and tiring fight against the learning process of English as foreign language. This blog has only a futile and sterile goal: to protest against the increasing need of English in the contemporary world and to illustrate some of the difficulties in coping with it.

I would like to clarify that I am not an enemy of any language, because all the languages, even English, have their reason to exist and the right to be promoted and used by everyone. Besides, each language helps to build a point of view about the world and to set up a complete communication system. But the globalizate times we are living in have a language, and its name is English. It has became a kind of survival tool in the contemporary global society.

Like most of the non-native English people living on the planet Earth, I have long time ago been forced by the socio-political environment to learn English. And, like the majority of these people, I have experienced a large variety of teachers, courses, methods and promises, with the result of a wide range of feelings moving from ridiculous to dispair passing through several degrees of shame, anger or loss of self-steem. Humiliation could be perhaps the common denominator feeling.

I am now taking English classes for the umpteenth time. I must say that I feel quite comfortable with the method my teacher is applying, consisting of a weekly phone class (30’) and a monthly face to face class (1:30h). I must also write some exercises every week, but during the last few months I have developed a persuasive set of excuses in order to avoid them. I do not know why but there are always better things to do. It means I have not make these exercises since a couple of months ago.

Since then my teacher has become progressively angry and every time more furious with me. At this point, and in order to save my physical health during the face to face classes, I have decided to change my attitude. In this sense, this blog is a measure adressed to calm my furious teacher. I have promised him that during this summer I will write some lines at least three times every week. My aim is to write about the difficult relationship between English and me. I know this is not too original, but I have a duty to do, a mission to fulfil.

Whatever the case, I must acknowledge that this blog can be understanded just as the exhibition of a round defeat. Here I am trying to write in “the unmentionable set of unpronounceable sounds”, as from now on and forward English language will be named here. I hope my furious teacher will understand me and will help me in correcting these paragraphs before publishing them in the blog. This is my sentence, as usual I feel damned to deal with “the unmentionable language” forever and ever. Welcome to all the damned around.