Tense about language, easier about life

Ah, Valencia. Charming city. Full of surprises – the convent that has become a bar and restaurant where you can eat Asian street food and drink a glass of wine under the stars and the palm trees, for instance, or the park that’s kept so clean that it can be hard to find a stick to throw for the dogs.

Valencia gets Spring going

It’s not all magic, of course. There are downsides. One is that Spain works at a higher volume than Britain. People don’t simply meet and have a discreet chat in subdued tones. They seem to feel that they haven’t fully demonstrated their joy at being with friends unless they talk loudly enough to be heard three blocks away. That can be a little tedious in the street during the day, but at 2:00 in the morning in the flat next door to ours, it can be a real bane.

But the benefits vastly outweigh these minor inconveniences. If nothing else, it was sheer joy to be enjoying Spring there, a point driven home to me here in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire), where I’m looking out on a cold winter’s day under grey, rain-laden skies.

Danielle and I both feel that, to fit into our new life, we need to master the language. As it happens, I already speak a little Spanish, so my new tutor’s first action was to assess my level (far from high). She came up with some curious conclusions.

One was that I sometimes drift into an Italian accent. Not altogether surprising, since I was born in Italy. But, to be honest, I have no idea what an Italian accent sounds like in Spanish. To my tin ear, both accents sound Mediterranean. Which is perhaps a measure of just how much I have to learn.

What’s more, it’s a little exasperating. To sound Italian when I speak Spanish might be more acceptable if I didn’t sound so English when I spoke Italian. Why can’t I have an Italian accent in Italian?

But my tutor’s major concern was over my mastery – or rather lack of mastery – of the past tenses. I keep using the wrong one, she tells me, in rather a random way. It’s not as though I always use the imperfect when the simple past would be more appropriate, say, which would be a far more comprehensible error, and far more easily corrected.

The truth is that I can never remember how the verbs work in the past, so I just use whichever form comes to mind first. I make an approximate stab at the tense, in the hope that the person I’m talking to will translate it to what I actually mean, understand me, and make allowances. 

For an Englishman who sometimes sounds Italian.

Since my command of the future tense in Spanish isn’t a great deal better, that leaves me comfortable only with the present.

This is ironic since a character flaw of mine is always trying to get ahead of events, planning what I’m going to do and what steps I have to take to make it happen. This sort of hankering for the future is what the French call fuite en avant and the Germans Flucht nach vorn, both of which mean a flight – in the sense of escape – forwards. It’s odd that there’s no real term for it in English, since Anglo-Saxon nations are no more immune to this sad disorder than anyone else.

Equally, I have a tendency to live too much in the past, for instance spending too much time concerned with a period, within my own lifetime, when the Brits were rather more open to others and generous in their tolerance than they’re proving right now. So forwards or backwards I go, to the serious detriment of the here and now.

The Rubáiyát of Ommar Khayyám
Lots of good advice, not always easy to follow

“Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet?” asks Edward Fitzgerald’s version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Excellent advice, but I’m not good at following it.

Except, it seems, in Spanish. Apparently that’s a language in which I truly live for the moment. Poor mastery of the future, none at all of the past.

It’s almost enough to make me wonder whether I really should pursue my studies of the language. If my current limited skill allows me to tackle a deeprooted character flaw, is that perhaps a price worth paying? Maybe I should just learn to live with being a foreigner who sounds English and occasionally Italian, and can’t account coherently for what he was doing yesterday. And stop constantly planning for a future that may never happen, or regretting a past that’s gone for good anyway.

Curious what language learning can tell you about yourself.