Marcel started Spanish this year (S3, i.e., the third out of the six high-school years), and he asked me to give him a few extra lessons, given that I speak Spanish and he isn’t too impressed with what he’s learnt at school so far.

His class don’t seem to be using a course book – they’re just using photocopies and the like – so I couldn’t just ask him what he’d learnt already. (As a parent, it would really be much easier if kids were given one book in every subject! Not only is it much harder to help them with homework if you don’t know what they’ve learnt, but it also makes it impossible for them to catch up if they’re off sick, and revision becomes dependent on good note taking in a way it didn’t use to be.)

I therefore decided to ask him some really easy questions, and I started by asking him to tell me the present indicative of the verb ser “to be”. I had expected him to quickly say “soy, eres, es, somos, sois, son”, after which I would have proceeded to some harder verbs or tenses.

However, he really didn’t know the answer. It wasn’t a problem with the terminology – I tried to ask him how he’d say “I am”, etc., but he didn’t know the answer. He claimed the teacher had shown them the forms once, but that he hadn’t had the time to copy them into his jotter.

I asked him what they were doing instead, and he said they were just learning words.

If it’s true, it’s absolutely ludicrous! Language learning is primarily about learning structure – the words are easy to add on later.

However, this episode suddenly made me understand an article I read six months ago and that I had dismissed at the time. It was an article in the Guardian about learning Mandarin in two days (hat-tip: Sabine Citron), and I thought it was just telling me things I knew already. The advice in that article is absolutely right for language teaching in Scottish schools, though: ‘The narrow set of nouns and verbs is an integral part of Noble’s technique. “One of the worst things you can do with language teaching is teach someone a massive number of words. It’s back-to-front – teach them to speak and then add to their knowledge. You have to become very fluent in a very small amount of the language.” Many students, he says, are led astray by learning numbers, colours or days of the week before they’ve learned any kind of framework with which to use them. “The nouns are almost irrelevant. That’s stuff you can learn yourself.”’

I don’t agree with everything in the article (amongst other things, I don’t think grammatical terminology is a hindrance so long as it’s used to convey structure rather than a goal in its own right), but the bit I quoted here I could almost have said myself.

If language teaching in Scotland has become a case of learning words but no grammar, they really need to go back to square one and start all over again. Their current approach just does not work.

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Som en del af la Journée européenne des langues, today is the Day of Multilingual Blogging.

Para la mayoría de los bloggers no es difícil, потому что они пишут только на одном языке обычно, och alla läsare förstår genast att det inte er vanligt, kiam ili skribas en nekutima lingvo.

Men hvis jeg havde blogget på spansk eller tysk, hätten alle wohl gedacht che sia completamente normale.

だから, co jsem mohl dělat? მე მქონდა იდეა: !איך קען שרייַבן איין פּאָסטינג אין פילע שפראכן

Problem solved!

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(El hombre en la foto es su padre, mi tatarabuelo, Søren Sørensen Smidt.)

Se casó el 8 de febrero de 1900 con Ane (o Anna) Mikkelsen (n. el 13 de marzo de 1879 en Agri, Mols, Randers).

Parece que emigraron los dos después a Argentina, pero no sabemos si se quedaron allí.

Tampoco sabemos si tuvieron hijos.

He tratado de trovarlos en el web, pero sin suerte.

La mayoría de los daneses que emigraron a Argentina vivían en Tandil, en el campo entre Tres Arroyos y Coronel Dorrego, o en Necochea, pero no hay registros disponibles en el web.

Además es un problema que es posible que cambiaran sus nombres. Quizás Niels y Ane se convirtieran en Nicolás y Ana. ¿Y el apellido? ¿Sorensen? ¿Schmidt? ¿Sorensen-Smit?

Si sabes algo sobre mi tío bisabuelo, ¡por favor escríbeme!

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The truth is, of course, that we had never heard about the singer before, but she’s readily available on YouTube and Amazon:

It’s funny – she seems to have studied chemistry at Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, which is where I learnt Basque, and she’s from the town Irun, which was also where my teacher (Nekane) lived. It’s a small world.

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Le gusta mucho a León jugar con su rana verde en el baño.

Hace una semana rompió el brazo, y este terminó en el desaguadero.

Pensaba que el brazo parezca otra rana pegada bajo el desaguadero, y tomé este foto.

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Uno de mis platos preferidos es tortilla de patatas. Especialmente me gusta un buen bocadillo con tortilla de patatas para llevar come se lo puede comprar en muchos bares en España.

Por casualidad descubrí que también le gusta mucho a Phyllis. Por eso, ayer preparé una grande (de dos quilos de patatas, dos cebollas y diez huevos). ¡Deliciosa!

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