How not to learn Spanish

At some point in the 1970s, I decided to learn Spanish. So I signed up for a weekly evening course at my local college, which at that time was in Livingstone in Scotland. The class was small, the set text (Teach Yourself Spanish) was awful, and the teacher was a Spaniard who grew increasingly frustrated with his students. His frustration was reasonable, because, between us, we demonstrated several ways how not to learn a foreign language.

I suspect that Spanish is probably the easiest language for an English-speaker to learn. Unlike French, spelling is phonetic - you can almost always say the word correctly if you understand the rules for pronunciation. There are few sounds that do not occur in English. The two main exceptions are the gutteral sound of the letter ‘j’ (or ‘g’ before ‘i’ or ‘e’) and the trilled ‘r’. Also unlike French (but like English), Spanish clearly stresses one syllable in each word. Once again, there are clear rules determined by which letters end a word, with exceptions indicated by an accent over the stressed syllable.

So it must have been particularly irritating for the teacher to find that several of his students utterly failed to follow these rules, however many times he explained them. Why did this happen? I observed three reasons:

1.    One man pronounced every Spanish word exactly as if it was English. The idea that different languages have their own system for pronunciation was clearly one he could not adapt to.

2.    Two young women pronounced Spanish exactly as if it was French. They must have learnt French at school, and decided that it was typical of all foreign languages, from Swahili to Lithuanian.

3.    One very respectable middle-aged woman refused to pronounce the Spanish ‘a’ sound (like a short ‘a’ in English) and insisted in pronouncing it ‘ah’. She had obviously learnt as a child that it was vulgar to take a bath, and that you should instead take a ‘baarth’. She simply could not demean herself to sound (as she would have regarded it) common.

These students had paid their own money and devoted time to come out on a cold Scottish winter evening to learn a language. They were failing despite their own best efforts and the best efforts of their teacher. What their failure shows is that before you can learn, you must first forget. Adopting a new skill or any kind requires the abandonment of the way you carried out this task before. This is particularly difficult when learning a foreign language because the dialogue in the class is still in your mother tongue and you cannot but help thinking in that language. This is why immersion in a foreign country away from people who speak your own language is usually the most effective way of learning. You then hear nothing but your new language, and are forced  to speak it to engage with daily activities like buying food and asking directions.

There is another, quite different, reason for failure to learn a foreign language: impatience. I became irritated by my fellow-students and gave up the course. I might study Spanish again one day.

Why we are going to pay more taxes

I have been watching an entertaining television programme called Inside the Factory. Two presenters (Greg Wallace and Cherry Healey) look at how popular foodstuffs and household goods are produced, packaged and distributed. It is striking that virtually all the factories they visit process huge quantities of sauces, fish fingers, sausages and so on with hardly a person in sight. There is usually one man or woman charged with keeping an eye on the machines, a man with a forklift truck loading a lorry in the packaging area, and (presumably) a man driving it away. Some factories do employ a few squads of people to sort and load foodstuffs, but it is surely just a matter of time before a new machine is devised to replace them.

This reminds us that mass production is no longer a method for producing cars, washing-machines and other goods, but has been extended to much of the economy. Steel mills, once full of moulders and stokers, now employ very few people. A new mill in Austria produces 500,000 tons of steel a year with just 14 employees. Dockyards  once employed hundreds of day labourers to unload ships with picks and shovels. Now  there are thousands of containers unloaded by giant cranes, each controlled by a single person. Once the containers have arrived in this country, they are transported to vast automated warehouses, usually located near motorway junctions.

Mass production combined with efficient distribution, nationally and internationally, has radically reduced the price of goods. It costs only £1000 to ship a 40-foot container from one side of the earth to the other, and a container can carry a lot of mobile phones and textiles. As a result, it costs less to transport goods from the Far East to your supermarket than the cost in petrol to get them from the supermarket to your home. Even that stage of distribution is changing, with the expansion of home delivery. In the near future, we will probably see most supermarkets closing their doors to the public and just functioning as bases for vans taking goods to peoples’ homes. The low cost of transporting goods internationally has resulted in fruit and vegetables from around the world becoming available out of season, and shops in Britain selling cheap clothes made by low-cost labour in China and Bangladesh.

But there are sectors in the economy where automation and the consequent gains in production per worker have had less effect. These are the personal services: work such as public order, teaching, healthcare and social care, and the various forms of bodily maintenance (hairdressers, nail-bars etc). Even with all the technological advances in healthcare, 40% of the NHS budget still is allocated to meet the cost of its staff. For residential and domiciliary care of the rapidly-increasing numbers of very old and disabled people, staff costs are probably a much higher proportion of expenditure.

In the past, many personal services were staffed by women, traditionally underpaid. But rises in the minimum wage, court rulings on payment for sleeping-in time, and the shortage of cheap immigrant labour which will follow Brexit all mean that staffing costs will rise in this sector of the economy. We also now have greater expectations of personal care. We no longer tolerate warehousing large numbers of elderly, disabled and mentally-ill people in large understaffed institutions. Better care here requires more staff, which in economic terms means falling productivity per employee. Unlike the production of textiles, this work can not be outsourced to the Far East (although it will no doubt eventually occur to some politician to reduce taxation by deporting the elderly to India). There is also a public demand for more policemen (particularly policemen that can be seen by the public) and smaller class sizes in schools. 

There are therefore two contradictory trends, with goods getting cheaper to produce and distribute and the personal services getting more costly to provide. This will tilt the balance of expenditure in the next few decades from goods and to personal services. Since many of these personal services are provided by government, this means that taxes will rise, and rise. Fortunately, most people will be able to afford this because they will be paying less for food, clothing and their motor cars.

The alternative to rising taxes is endless ‘austerity’. Governments which try to maintain taxes at their current level will only be able to achieve this by progressively reducing personal services, to an even greater degree than has been the case since 2010. This would inflict a steady deterioration in the quality of life of the great majority of citizens, with increasingly unsafe streets, poorer healthcare and personal bankruptcy as a consequence of having to pay for their parents’ personal care.