"Oh good! I espeak English tooo!"

Hey people,

This is something that I’ve been thinking about pretty much the whole time that I’ve been out here, and it is- English in Spain. Does it really exist? How do Spaniards cope with English? As an English girl living in Spain, I have the advantage of not looking very English, and I am also very good at producing a Spanish accent, and so, at first glance, I probably don’t look out of place (apart from my mistakes, but that’s only if you listen properly). However, if I’m speaking English to my friend? Oh dear. The reaction is quite.....interesting/scary/very strange. During the day, people will turn around if they hear English, they will try to listen to your conversation, or they will watch you because, who on Earth are those people speaking English!?

During the night, it's worse. The nicer people will either shout something at you while you’re walking past, something along the lines of “Hello!!! HELLO! I espeak English toooooo!” Or, random words in English. The ones who are more in your face, will grab you, shout in your face, “You....are....English?? I espeak English! I have been in England too, where are you from? You must meet my friends!” All of this without actually pausing to let me answer. Sometimes they will try to bring a friend into the conversation, “translate this for me!” They get a bit annoyed with me when I tell them, thank you very much but I don’t need any translation, I can speak Spanish. “NO! We must speak English.” *Sigh*So, I do my best to speak English with them. But, to be honest, it is very grating hearing someone speaking one word every minute, and some of the terminology they use? Beyond me. I’m not exaggerating, this is worse than any English person in Spanish I have every heard. One guy dragged me into the club while I was waiting in line with my friends, and pushed me onto his mates. I’m not sure who was more embarrassed. They were very nice, and spoke to me for a while (mostly in Spanish, after they realised that I did indeed speak good Spanish) but then I felt bad so I excused myself and found my friends.

I find the mentality here towards very strange. I think, although I may be wrong about this, that most young people here get some sort of education in English (be it extremely basic or not) so when you talk to them and say, “I’m from England”, they will normally respond, “Oh English! My English is not very good.” But then something strange happens. Those that do profess to speak slightly better English, suddenly presume they know everything, from vocabulary, to pronunciation. Now, the pronunciation is the thing that kills me, and I have two very good examples of the Spanish mentality towards English.

The first; there are two very nice Spanish guys that I have met since being here (and bless them for providing me with this example, but as their English isn’t actually that good, luckily I doubt they will be able to read this), and after a night out, they walked me and my flatmate home as it is on the way to where they live. I live near a church, so for some reason we got onto the subject of priests. In Spanish, priest is “cura”. So as we were talking, they said to me,
“You know, cura, in English is pri-est.” What? I know what “cura” means, but I had not understood exactly what they were saying to me.
“Pri-est?” I said. “What’s that?”
“You know, pri-est! Cura!” Ahhhh.
“No, it’s priest, it’s spelt “pri-est”, but its pronounced priest.” Utter confusion ensued.
“NO! It isn’t priest, it’s pri-est! We studied English!!”
I can’t remember what I did, but I think I gave up. I just say, mate, I’ve been speaking English for 20 years now. And then I give up.

Another fabulous example happened in a nightclub. It’s hard at the best of times to hear in a nightclub, and my hearing isn’t amazing anyway, so when a guy I’d met earlier on in the night tried to talk to me in English, at first I just assumed that these were the reasons that he wasn't making any sense.
“What mayor are you doing?” This COMPLETELY stumped me. I kept asking him to repeat, and he kept saying the same thing.
“Mayor.” In my head, I was thinking, mayor? As in, mayor of London? Then I asked him to say it in Spanish, which he did begrudgingly “What do you study?”
AH. He wanted to know my “major”. Well, aside from the fact that that is something you do in America, and not in England, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Oh, you mean major?”
“No, I mean mayor. Mayor. MAYOR.” Like I was stupid. Right. I just said, “I study law” in English and walked off.

This is what bugs me about the Spanish. They are what is called “cabezón”, or pig-headed. They have absolutely NO qualms about pushing their pronunciation onto others when we get it wrong, which we inevitably do I understand. And when I pronounce something wrong, and I get corrected, I correct myself, so I know better for next time. A Spanish person in English? I have never heard them correct themselves. They insist their pronunciation is right, even though when I say the word it obviously sounds very different. Now, if you can’t even have a proper conversation with someone in a language, how can you profess to know it so intimately? It’s funny how people go from “my English is no good” to “no, I know how it is pronounced.”

Of course, it could be that I’ve just met those few people who are like this. But when one of the people I’ve met out here (evidently not Spanish) said to me that the Spanish attitude towards languages is even worse than the English attitude towards language, sadly, I couldn’t disagree. However, I’m hoping that soon I will meet that person that will prove me wrong.

:D