It’s not what you say; it’s the way that you say it!

There is a vowel sound in English that the Spanish (and the French for that matter) have some difficulty with. The sound is the letter U, as in cup, bus, butter and however many more examples you choose to come up with it (also in words like done, front, wonder and so on). They wouldn’t have such difficulty if they decided to speak ordinary, acceptable North of England English but they will insist on something like what used to be called RP – received pronunciation.

I was reminded of this because I kept hearing its mispronunciation yesterday morning as we did our relaxation at the end of the yoga class in Fonte do Galo community centre. Next door to our class is an English lesson on a Tuesday morning. They are usually enthusiastic, often noisy and generally speak more Spanish than they do English during the lesson. I can usually blot them out: concentrate on breathing: observad como el aire entra y come el aire sale.

Yesterday morning it was hard work as I kept hearing a repeated wrong sound. The teacher was explaining the difference between “come in” and “go in”, “come out” and “go out”. The students didn’t know whether they were coming or going. I have every sympathy. I have had the same battle explaining it the other way around to English students of Spanish who demand to know why “entrar” can mean both “come in” and “go in”. Well, it depends on where you are standing. You get the same confusion in other situations. In English, in order to express the idea that you are on your way, we say “I’m coming”. In Spanish you say “Voy” which strictly means “I’m going”.

Be that as it may, as the linguistic explanation, quite clearly done, progressed I kept hearing about “cam and go”. If you are inside the room and open the door, the correct thing to say appears to be “cam in”. If you want to take a young lady for a walk in the moonlight, by that logic you should say, “cam outside”. (You might even tell her that there’s a “lavly” moon out there.) I heard it so many times that I wanted to “cam” out of my yoga class and perhaps go into the room and give them some pronunciation practice, the teacher as well as the students.

It’s not the first time I’ve come across this. I think the occasion I remember most fondly was when I was in Malaga more years ago than I care to remember with a group of students on an exchange visit. As a group of us sat talking, the conversation moved on to something they referred to as the “pav” or the “paf” or the “pab”. Light dawned and I said, “Oh, you mean the PUB”. All this is Spanish of course. We had a little discussion of how to say the word correctly (so that it could be understood by your average Englishman) and finally the teacher of English, a Spaniard, declared, “Esta no lo dice correctamente porque es del norte de Inglaterra” which means, roughly translated, “This one (that would be me) does not say it correctly because she is from the North of England”. Well, who told that Spaniard, that Andalusian Spaniard, from the area where they are famous for dropping sounds out of words, that he could say whether I, an Englishwoman, was pronouncing my own language correctly?

Of course, none of this is very serious and we all know that there are sounds people have difficulty with in foreign languages. The Spanish J sound is notorious. (Practise saying Jaen, Gijón and Gerona. But then, try getting a Spaniard to say, “I hope you have a happy holiday” with a good English H sound.) Equally difficult for the English, but not for the Scots, is the Spanish rolled R, for that matter. I have a friend who cannot for the life of him do a French R at the back of his throat. My Italian teacher says I pronounce T like an English person! Not surprising really. It’s very hard to lose your accent completely but you can at least do your best to speak the language in a comprehensible way.

Those children who have been attending bilingual schools should not have any of those problems. A recent evaluation of a project carried out by the Ministerio de la Educación in conjunction with the British Council shows that children who are taught in bilingual schools get better results in tests in Spanish language than those who are taught exclusively in Spanish. They have carried out a study over the last 15 years in 120 schools throughout Spain where children have lessons in both Spanish (castellano) and English.

Unlike some studies they did not just carryout the project in private schools or schools with an elitist intake but in public schools (= state schools) all over the place, including some in deprived area with children with a variety of problems. They found the same everywhere: learning languages stretches the brain and enhances powers of analysis. Children do better if they know more languages. The study seems to have looked at English-Spanish bilingual education but they also found that the children from the bilingual provinces of Spain did ever so slightly better than the children from monolingual provinces.

Now, that seems to me like a much better argument for maintaining a balance of gallego/castellano in schools than any that has been offered yet. All they need to do now is come to a final agreement on the subject-language split so that the publishers of school books know which language to print them in.