This week my colleagues and I have been conducting B1 certification oral exams for our august educational establishment's degree students. Thanks to the EU's Pisa Hgher Education treaty (GB quite sensibly did not sign up to this particularly demented bit), European students need a B1 level in a foreign language in order to get their degree.
Now, as an English teacher, I must admit to serious misgivings over my power to deny a degree in Aeronautical Engineering, or whatever, to a truly academically gifted student because s/he cannot give me grammatically correct advice on how to stop my imaginary daughter from spending all of her money on shoes, how I can lose weight, or remove a spider from my bath, however welcome that advice may be.
I also find it worrying that there is a growing number of unemployed 40+ year-old students with families etc. who are back at uni. trying to get a degree in order to have the slimmest of slim chances of finding employment. It's also rumoured that there are unicorns in the local park - they should try hunting them instead. It's depressing enough to see all the young ones with hopes of a bright future when the only brightness thay will get to experience is that of the TV as they kill zombies on the Play Station because IN SPAIN THERE ARE NO JOBS - unless you have friends in the right places.
A possible - but just as brutal - solution might be an adaptation of Swift's Modest Proposal. Swift ironically suggested that as the 18th-century Catholic Irish were such prolific breeders and so grindingly poor, they should breed babies for the tables of the English nobility and mercantile classes. Spare the babies, I say! What Spain needs is another Civil War. It might plunge the country into poverty, starvation and mass murder, but it would sure as hell reduce unemployment. Indeed, it would provide huge opportunities for the unemployed young men and women as soldiers, doctors, nurses, black marketeers, NGO leeches &c. &c. &c. And, of course, post-war there would be a lot of reconstruction and fewer workers.
The above is obviously an ironic comment on the state of the country, yet all of the ingredients for a civil war are there - a disgruntled populace, tired of the corruption, and unemployment that devastates the country while highly gruntled politicians, bankers and union executives live off the fat of the land, tax the people and bleed the country white. And now we are witnessing the rise of Podemos (aka Pokemon), a demogogical political party for the disaffected - i.e. almost the whole Spanish populace - which seems to have borrowed from Castro, Chaves, Morales, &c.
The cafés and bars in Plaza del Cabildo, the main square in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, are witness to a constant procession of beggars, asking clients for food, a coffee or money. Some are addicts. Most are unemployed people whose benefit has run out and who have no other means of support. And all credit to the good people of Sanlúcar de Barrameda; they are very charitable and willing to help when they can. Who knows? It might be them next.
A blackly bleak picture, indeed, and not one I can say anything useful about except, perhaps, to note that in London, in cafes, pubs and restaurants, many of the the waiters and bar staff these days are Spanish. This seems to suggest that your B1 language training has not gone amiss in all cases.
ReplyDeleteThough speaking English to a commendable standard, the Spaniards are usually recognizable from one small linguistic defect. Almost universally now, when you are served food and/or drink, the person serving you trots out the word "Enjoy". Spaniards have trouble with the fricative 'j' and almost always pronounce the word as "en-yoy". Italians, coming from the land of Caravaggio, have no trouble with the pronunciation.
Incidentally, a while back, you asked me if a certain type of coffee drink was available here. If I remember correctly, this was an espresso with hot milk added. At the time I said I had not seen this. Well, it now exists here. Our favourite coffee chain serves up what it calls a cortado, which is precisely as described above. Again, Spanish servers are immediately recognizable from the way they pronounce "cortado"!
Spanish English speakers do indeed have a number of instantly recognisable linguistic quirks, which to my mind are as inexplicable as the German-speakers' where - vere and very - wery mispronunciations. The fricative "j" sound exists in Spanish, as the Spanish y and ll. Another common mistake is the pronunciation of the English "w" as a hard g - i.e. "Good (Would) you like a coffee?" I find this a complete mystery as the "w" sound exists in the name of at least two Spanish cities Huelva and Huesca (pron welva and wesca, respectively). It may be due to hispanicisation of the word whisky to güsiqui" (pron gwiski) which in its day might have influenced the pronunciation of all w- words.
ReplyDeleteAs for the cortado, Hooray!!! That's what such coffees are called here (pron:cortao). Herein lies another interesting difference between Spanish and English pronunciation. In English we tend to omit the vowels from words, whereas in Spanish they omit certain consonants, the letter d being the most common.