Consolidación del este — Consolidation: the East

What Block C was for, and what the north is for

This is a consolidation lesson, so it is worth saying plainly what the last thirteen lessons were doing. Block C moved east and then offshore: Catalonia and the language question, Valencia and the argument about paella, the Fallas, a hire car, Mallorca and overtourism, a ferry, the Canaries and their missing vosotros, and a village with twelve residents. The grammar underneath it was the grammar of precision — conditions and the subjunctive, no es que … sino que, the se of accidents, double object pronouns, and relative clauses whose mood depends on whether the thing exists. The pattern in the content was deliberate and it is nearly the whole argument of this year. Every place Alex visited contradicted something he believed about Spain when he left Madrid: that Spanish is one language, that paella is a national dish, that tourism is straightforwardly good for the places that live on it, that vosotros is simply what you say, that the countryside is peaceful rather than depopulated. None of those beliefs was stupid. They were what a course taught in Madrid produces, and the only way to correct them is to go somewhere else and be corrected by somebody who lives there. On your own Spanish at this point: you have the full tense system, both moods, the pronoun system including the awkward pairs, and enough vocabulary to hold a real conversation about something you care about. What you are probably still short of is speed and stamina — following three people talking at once, and keeping going for an hour rather than five minutes. Block D is built for that. It handles vosotros properly at last, then spoken reductions, meals, festivals, football, the difficult parts of the twentieth century, the news, arguing, sayings, and writing. One practical suggestion before the north. Go back to lesson 79 and read the Catalan dialogue out loud, then read lesson 53. The gap between them is the clearest measure you will get of what a year has done, and it is a more honest one than any exercise score.