I recently read a book in Portuguese. There is always a great sense of achievement in finishing a book in a foreign tongue and even more so when it the first one you have read in the language.

Studying foreign languages has been one of my favourite pursuits for some years now so I suppose I’ve learned from experience what kind of material is best read by a relative novice. By that I mean someone who has spent a year or two getting to grips with the basics and can get the gist of newspaper articles and so on. Here are a couple of observations:

Read things of interest. That’s why I read about history, politics, current affairs, sport and travel rather than IT or car maintenance. I just read 150 pages of sparse text in Portuguese outlining the Renaissance. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea but I am already familiar with the subject, its typical terminology and can anticipate key events, names and places that are likely to appear. In that way, I already know the main outline of the “story” and am not jumping into totally unknown territory.

Don’t start with anything too complicated. I could have added literature or poetry to the above list but it can be difficult enough to read and understand in my own language at times. I’m not at the stage where I feel able to cope with the subtleties of metaphors, symbolism and humour in Portuguese. If you are brave enough to give literature a go then make sure the plot is not complex or the writing too sophisticated. In other words, I didn’t start with Saramago in Portuguese in the same way that my first English reader wasn’t the works of Shakespeare.

It was the Spanish national holiday on Friday and there was no shortage of talking points. Mariano Rajoy, the opposition leader from the Partido Popular had urged citizens to get their Spanish flags out and to “respect the symbols”. The latter was a reference to the recent burning of images of the monarchs, which has been happening of late, mainly in Catalonia. Carod Rovira from the ERC (a left wing Catalan party) compared Rajoy’s speech to old propaganda newsreels of the Franco dictatorship. Felip Puig from CiU (a centre-right Catalan party) urged Catalans to turn up for work on the holiday. He also said Rajoy's speech was on a par with a recent Juventudes Socialistas (Young Socialists) video because both are going to lead the country back to the bipolarisation of the “Two Spains”, which damaged the harmony (of the transitional post-Franco era).

The divisions in Spanish society between right and left, monarchists and republicans as well as those between pro-centralist and various nationalist factions seem as deep as ever. This makes the recent campaign, backed by the PP, to add lyrics to Spain’s wordless national anthem look pretty trivial. Maybe they just have a weird sense of humour. Government minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos said he would support the idea “if a wide-ranging consensus could be reached”. Probably not going to happen any time soon then. Perhaps finding a solution to other internal matters such as the Kale borroka (civil disturbances linked to Basque nationalism), which led to flaming battles between nationalists and police in the centre of San Sebastian on Friday are a bit more pressing.

Ghosts of Spain

"When I speak I would prefer that what I said be true to some coherent reality." - Earl Stevick in Success with Foreign Languages

In a Catalan oral exam I took part in a role-play situation where a garage owner was speaking to a motorist who had broken down. I didn't feel I played the part of the garage owner very well for several reasons.

Firstly, I do not run my own business and am not used to gathering info by telephone so I even forgot to ask the "motorist" for her name. In addition to that I don't even drive hence I felt alienated from the task no matter which role I was required to play. In theory, motorists and mechanics or their receptionists, provided they also have a decent grasp of the language, should do best in this type of activity.

This brings me to Stevick's point. He does not like "artificial language" which would have us repeating sentences like "My tailor is rich" when we do not even have a tailor. He prefers to say things that have real meaning - basic truths that are relevant to him.

This challenges the type of artifical role-play situation I mentioned above. Is the student likely to end up in such a scenario? But this does not mean we should limit language to that used in the workplace as not all language is vocational. I have heard people say in restaurants that the waiter speaks perfect English when he knows the appropriate functional language required for his job. However, it may be that he would have great difficulty in having a conversation in English about anything other than the food he serves.