This is not about chocolate or cakes.
But on my current theme of language.
I was watching a video of Manel on youtube which a kind friend sent to cheer me up and in the comments below someone wrote that they enjoyed the music but why couldn’t they just sing in castellano so more people could understand?
This made me think about resistance to learning Catalan and where better to start than with my own experience?

I came to Barcelona to learn Spanish. That is what I was already studying and that is what I wanted to practise. What a nuisance that all my new friends were talking Catalan – it was a constant frustration for me as I knew they spoke Castellano as well but they insisted on having conversations in Catalan which I couldn’t understand!
“Why don’t you learn Catalan if you are going to live here?”
NO! I can’t do two languages. I want a language that I can use when I go to Argentina to dance tango. Perhaps one day, but not now.
So far so typical, I think.
Then of course I met someone and fell in love and came to live outside of Barcelona in a town that is more Catalan speaking and I needed to survive in a new family as well as be able to make friends. Also if you really want to be intimate with someone I think it is best if you speak each others languages.
But still I resisted.
“One day when my ‘Spanish’ is better, then I’ll get started”
But meanwhile I was taking it in – I had to – I was sitting for hours listening to Catalan at home and at parties and in the street. People were kind – they switched to Castellano for me but soon enough I would be lost with that as well and they’d slip back into their normal language.
I got very depressed about it as I also wasn’t improving my ‘Spanish’.  I’d complain to friends about how hard it all was. To my mind Castellano had to come first and Catalan would follow…..sometime.
Occasionally people would say – ‘you have to start learning Catalan’ – and that would make me even more determined not to. I don’t like being pushed. Of course I was learning it even without trying – and that annoyed me too.
I remember the day it all changed. It was summer solstice last year and we were dancing on the terrace of a house in the middle of the woods. My friend Diana suddenly said – I think you should stop studying Castellano and concentrate on Catalan. I felt something solid inside me melt and soften and open up and I said Yes, that’s right.

From then on it has been easier and so much more enjoyable that I thought possible. I have always loved the sound of the language and now that I allow it in,  I am not using precious energy to resist it. I also believe I am connecting to a deeper level of language – reaching down to a place that is older and more communal that we can imagine. I read out loud and even when I don’t understand the words I get the gist – that’s magic isn’t it?
French helps too – the roots intertwined somewhere in the past.
A few weeks ago I went to visit an elderly woman called Pepa in Barcelona – she has a small flat in the Barri Gotic that I rented when I first came here more than 5 years ago. At that time I barely spoke Castellano and she knows no English. She was the first person to ask me if I would learn Catalan and I remember how alien the idea was. I knew almost nothing about Barcelona, Catalunya or the Catalan language. I still thought I was in Spain. I thought of Catalan as something similar to Gaelic or Welsh.
I hadn’t seen her since that first visit and so it was a great pleasure to call on her and start to speak in Catalan. We talked for about an hour and all the time I was thinking – I can’t believe this is me!
These memories serve as markers of the big change that has happened in my life and that I am still undergoing.