Friday! Friday!

I love Fridays for so many reasons. It is the start of the weekend… my time to do my things at my pace. It is the day (ever other week) that my paycheck gets posted to my bank. (So I have pub money.) It is also the day that I take French class at the office.

Yes, I am taking French classes. It is interesting to see the linguistic connection as the romance languages spread out from Rome across Europe. Linguistically, I am seeing the connection between French and Spanish, which I learned to speak whilst growing-up in Miami.

Many of the words are the same or very similar. You would think that this would give me a slight advantage. But it really puts me at a disadvantage. Far from the one letter – one sound idea that Spanish has, French is composed of a number of rules for pronouncing a letter or not and how to pronounce it. it's all so confusing. I'm always getting it wrong and pronouncing the words as if they were Spanish.

The Italian-Spanish connection is much closer. Not too long ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop, waiting for a friend I was going sightseeing with, when I overheard from the next table a strange conversation. It caught my attention because it was in a language that was not one I am used to hearing over here. It wasn't English or French.

One side of the conversation I had no problem following at all, the other, was giving me trouble because the accent was odd as were the idioms. After listening a while – it wasn't a particularly interesting conversation, how's the family? Was the train ride good? How long are you staying? That kind of thing. I finally sussed-out why I was having problems following one of the speakers. One of the speakers was not speaking Spanish.

Speaker 1 was speaking to the friend who had just come in on the EuroStar in Spanish but Speaker 2 was responding to him in Italian. My suspicion was confirmed when speaker 2 made a statement switched to Spanish and said "Your Italian can't be worse than my Spanish."

I am not bad at translating from French to English, but has got to be slow and clear… and my vocabulary really needs building!

Wherever you are today, I hope you're enjoying your Friday!

Don Bergquist – 07 September 2007 – Thames Ditton, Surrey. UK