Listening to a BBC news reporter talking about “events that have shook the community” I find myself getting ridiculously annoyed about bad grammar. I try hard not to be a grammar snob but it’s not easy. I can accept that people make mistakes with past tenses in English and I try not to wince too obviously when I hear somebody say “I’ve ate it”,  but I really expect better of someone working for the ******BBC!

I am a self-confessed language fanatic, not to say language nerd. All my friends are aware of this. I mastered French and Spanish long ago. My Italian is pretty good. I can have a nice little conversation about my family in German. When I went to Romania with a college project many years ago I made sure I could at least greet people and thank them for help in the hotel. And before we went to Greece a few years ago I spent quite some time learning the Greek alphabet and listening to the Michel Thomas CDs in preparation. I’ve forgotten most of it now but that’s what happens when you don’t practise. If we return to Greece, I’ll revise it. 

Now, in November we are off to Portugal for about a week and a half. I can read Portuguese because it’s so similar to Spanish. I find Gallego, the regional language of Galicia and a mix of Spanish and Portuguese, easy to understand. When we went to live in Galicia for a while I found classes, hoping to learn the language properly, but they spent so much time arguing about the rules - as normas - that I gave up. And for years I have been sort of studying spoken Portuguese, which is much more difficult to understand - Gallego is more accessible because it’s like Portuguese with a Spanish accent. Every time I have enrolled in a class it has folded after three weeks for lack of numbers. My current intention is to refresh my limited knowledge of Portuguese before our visit by working with the Michel Thomas CDs. 

Phil discovered that some clever person has successfully put all episodes of the old BBC series Discovering Portuguese on youtube. Well, I say successfully but it might be a bit crackly. We intend to watch it. Every little helps. We’ve had the book and the audio cassette tapes for years. When Phil told me he had found it on Youtube and commented that the series predates the Euro, I remarked that the language might have changed slightly since then. “No”, he said, “I expect it  was just as incomprehensible back then”. So it goes. 

One of the delights about living in Manchester is the range of languages you hear on the streets. According to this article in 2021 there were around 6 million people with non-British nationality living in the UK. And this is in spite of Brexit and the anti-foreigner vibes. 35% of them live in London but a lot also live in Manchester. 20% of pupils in English schools speak English as an additional language. In London schools, more than 300 different languages are spoken. 

English students are still managing to go and study abroad, but apparently the Erasmus replacement scheme doesn’t work as well as the original. The daughter of a young friend of ours has just headed off to spend a year studying Law in Bologna, Italy. I hope she appreciates how privileged she is to be studying in such an old and venerable institution. On maybe the second day after arriving she contacted me because she was having problems filling in a residency form, a complication she may not have had, or not to the same extent, before Brexit. She was having problems sending me a copy of the documents (aren’t young people supposed to be good at technology!?) but fortunately she found someone over there to help her out as well. She’s a very lucky 21 year-old!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!