Learning to speak Catalán…hopefully

After arriving in Begur in 2018, I joined a class to learn Catalán. It was a twice-a-week class that was free and pretty casual and unstructured. The other students were from France, Germany, several Latin American countries, Morocco, and Spain. Over the course of the year, I was out of town a lot with visitors from the States, so I attended as I could. I met some other expats in the class and made a few friends. The teacher was kind and funny and we all loved her. But in the class…I only learned basic vocabulary. Well, you have to start somewhere, but after eight months of classes, I still could not construct a sentence. No verbs were involved and verbs are essential!

Last year, classes were not offered during the pandemic, but when I got back to Galveston, I found a Catalán teacher online and I began taking classes two days a week for an hour each day. My teacher is warm and charming and a very good teacher. I can now make sentences in Catalán!! I know verbs!

This week, my teacher arranged a conversation over coffee (well, they had coffee — it was morning in America, but happy hour for me) with another of her Catalán students. This young man is hoping to attend the University of Barcelona next fall. He’s very intelligent and especially gifted in languages. He is also studying Russian and Thai at the same time as he’s studying Catalán!! My teacher only has one other student of Catalán, but that student was not invited to the coffee klatsch because my teacher said that student was not on my “level.” Not on my level??? What a joke. The young man did know some things I did not in Catalán, but at the same time, I knew some things he did not! It was such fun.

Language to me is everything. Connection with others is what it’s all about. And I love having those connections with people from another culture. It’s my favorite thing. The first time I made a joke in Spanish and a Spaniard laughed, I felt like I had won an Academy Award!

I’m still hoping to brush up on my French a little. I may spend a few days there over Christmas, and again next summer. But Catalán is the priority right now. It’s important to me to pay respect to the people who live here to try to speak to them in their native language, the language that represents this place. It happens everywhere, of course…immigrants come to a country for whatever reason, but never assimilate, never learn the language or the customs. I don’t understand that. I’m going to try…

PS Cassie has always been my “bad” dog – eating things she shouldn’t, but last night I found a dead bird on my bed! Cam must have carried it in inside of his mouth undetected. Nothing to see here! Yuck.

PSS Happy Halloween!! Couldn’t help but share my adorable grandchild.