It all began like this

An early start to the day to queue up for a place in one of the free Catalan classes that are organised by the Generalitat. I cycled over for 7.00am and found one person already waiting. Luckily for me she was someone I knew so we spent the next 3 hours chatting before the doors officially opened.

After a short and very tricky language test we were both allocated to Basic 1, the bottom level!
I had been listening to and reading Catalan for months but didn’t have even a soft grip on the grammar.

For 6 months I went twice a week to the school. My class was made up of three or four main groups. The majority were women from Morocco. Next was the group of castellano speakers from Latin America or Spain. Then a tiny group of two African women but they rarely came on the same day so could hardly be called a group. And lastly my German friend and myself – the Anglo Saxons.

• I arrive breathless dead on 2pm
• The Castellano group is already there studying
• We start the class with perhaps 7 students
• Slowly the room fills up over the next half hour. When the Moroccon women arrive they stride across the room to their normal seats, sit down and rustle in their bags for a while, talking all the time to each other in Arabic
• Our teacher is a nice man – he wants to take the pace slowly so that everyone has a good grip of the basics. Unfortunately this means very slow indeed as more than half of the group only put in an appearance every now and then.
• We work our way through the Passos book, asking ‘Com et dius?’ and ‘Quants anys tens?’ and ‘On vius?’ for several weeks
• I practise learning the names of the other students. It is interesting how my brain takes in the familiar and resists the unfamiliar.  Every week I write down who is here and where they are sitting but I always have to look up my aides memoires. I am so much slower to remember that Nadia is the young woman in pink, that Najad has blond hair and is very smiley, that Latifa is the one who giggles all the time.  So many new names in the last year – Montse, Jaume, Ximena, Xavi, Esteve….all Catalan names that have also taken me longer than usual to remember.
• I practice loving acceptance of my ‘bete noire’ – a large woman who always arrives late, chats loudly throughout the class, chews gum, has no books, never does the homework and sits with her eyebrows raised all the time as if to convey that the whole thing is a waste of her precious time. When we did the exercise on ‘Quants anys tens?’ I was amazed when she said 36.  I had assumed she was much older than me.  One week she arrived so late she couldn’t sit in her preferred seat and ended up amongst the Castellano group. I was happy that she wouldn’t be able to chat all the time to her friends – but I was wrong – she just did it across the room.
• About 15 minutes before the end of class most of the Morrocon women start to rustle again and one by one they get up and leave, with loud farewells to all.
• I did learn a lot of Catalan in this class but it was painfully slow and now at the end of the first level I have been upgraded to Basic 3 – missing out Basic 2 altogether. I hope I won’t swing to the opposite extreme and go from bored to overwhelmed.
• I also enjoyed being with this very friendly group of people who in my normal everyday life I would not meet.  It helped me let go of my over-studious approach to lessons and to just take in whatever new thing was on offer.  Next week I will have to join a new group and will probably not have time to do anything else except try to keep up.

After class some refreshment is always needed in one of Granollers lovely cafes