/maI breIn hWrts/

As the title says, MY BRAIN HURTS…in fact, I’m convinced my language centers are melting and fusing back together in a bizarre lingual alloy. The reasons are myriad:

1. Barcelona is a world language center:
No one here speaks just one language, not even the natives. Between tourists and immigrants, multilingualism is a requirement. While most signs (bathroom, street, traffic, restaurant, metro) are only written in Catalan and on occasion in Castilian, commercial things are written in about 6 languages. Big businesses aim to accommodate the international population, but Barcelona isn’t as commercialized as Chicago and the majority of retail shops and restaurants are owned by mom and pops…or artists and Pakistanis. Thus, while the Fnac department store (that’s right, Fnac) has at least one sales representative who speaks a little of some other language, it is not uncommon to see examples of lingual breakdown like my friend Kelly walking into a mobile phone shop, pointing at her UK cell and repeating “SIM card, SIM card, SIM card” at the stone-faced desk clerk (we ultimately sorted Kelly out and you’ll be happy to know she got a BCN SIM card)...or more commonly, examples of small lingual breakthroughs such as when tourists successfully order a “café con leche” from Dunkin Donuts or a “Big Mac Menu” from McDonald’s after a defeating run-in with pig intestine sausage in the corner lunch spot.

On an individual level, I encounter at least 6 spoken languages a day: English, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and German (my new roommate Brigit has moved in), and I actively function in 2 of them. There’s definite cross-over action happening. Half the time I can't remember which language I had a conversation in, which is a testament to the fact that we don't remember individual words, but rather, just the gist of what was said. I catch myself “vale”ing my classmates rather than “okay”ing them or “oh my god”ing my roommates rather than “dios mio”ing them.

2. I hear bad English accents all day:
Anyone who’s been to a country where they don’t speak English can tell you, after repeated exposure, you start to speak your own language as if you were a foreigner. For example, hang out with Italians long enough, and you aren’t “goin’ to go to the store,” you’re “a-gonna go to da store.” Well, for several hours each day, I am surrounded by 15-17 people who speak English with the speech pattern, intonation, consonant and vowel sounds of Spanish. My classmates and I are becoming frightened as we find ourselves saying things to each other like “I like-ed that lesson,” or “Where eez the moobie playing?” Anyone who has read David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day should immediately recall the scene where all the French students of various backgrounds are huddled outside of the classroom speaking in broken half French like a pack of refugees. Add to this the fact that we are all making these slips and thereby reinforcing one another’s lingual deterioration and you can’t help but agree that we’re all screwed. How are we ever going to get jobs as English teachers if we can’t speak English?

3. Grammar is my life:
Part of the whole “do a masters-like certification in EFL in 4 weeks” bag is that you are immersed (gently) in the sewage that is English grammar. Mind you, there are Royal Academies of French and Spanish that annually reevaluate the languages and standardize their grammar. No such thing in the English-speaking world…so, are the rules in the Oxford grammar book correct, or those in the APA or MLA??? And should I teach my students to say: “Who will you give the octopus to?” or the grammatically-correct (by WHOSE standards?!) but infinitely nerdy “To whom will you give the octopus?” ??? And what’s more, I’ve begun to realize the grammatical mistakes that I make all of the time and my classmates and I have begun to judge one another and point out our offensive mistakes. We’ve adopted a hierarchy, not of racial, but of grammatical purity: “Hm, Dana’s good enough to eat at the same lunch counter as me, but she incorrectly uses adjectives in the place of adverbs. No way I’ll let my child date the offspring of that trash.” Dios mio.

4. English is not a /fenetIk/ language:
How do people ever learn to SPEAK English? Rough, ought, should all have “ou” but are said in 3 different ways. That’s crazy! Did you know that we have 20 different vowel sounds (as opposed to 5 or 6 in Spanish) and that more often than not we don’t even say them correctly, but rather, sluggishly morph all our vowel sounds into the one same sound over and over (the infamous schwa) - Leave it to Anglo-Saxons to have access to more than everyone else and then not even appreciate it - So in class, we have to teach these people how things ought to be said and then re-teach them the sloppy way to speak like a real human being.

While we’re teaching correct pronunciation, we’re also learning about it in our classes. If only you could see us in our phonetics classes trying to distinguish between /W-this should be an upside-down omega symbol, but blogspot can't handle the power of phonetics/ (“should”) and /u:/ (“shoe”): with our lips flapping between the /W/ and the /u:/, we’re like a bunch of preteens practicing before our first kiss.

In the meantime, we’ve also each been working on this big project that is due today (I've been up all night at Oliver's flat gorging myself on phonology, Pizza Hut, tea and crumpets....which are just English muffins!) We each chose one of our students and elicited a writing, speaking and reading comprehension sample from them. Then we analyzed it all, crafted a one-on-one lesson, did the lesson, and then planned a hypothetical 10 further hours of individual lessons. Part of the analysis was orthographically and phonetically transcribing a bit of what we recorded them say. A common conversation around the school has been, “Hey, come here and listen to this. Does that sound like an ‘ih’ or an ‘eh’? Forget it, I‘m just gonna write a schwa.”

Thus, more than studying in the lingual circus that is Barcelona, listening to bad English accents like they were my favorite band, or living under a grammatical caste system, there is nothing quite like staring at a page of phonetic transcription to make you feel like your own language is the enemy with which you have been sleeping since you uttered that first fateful /dædi:/.