Whenever I watch one of those frequent programmes on television where Brits have relocated abroad and the presenter finishes by asking their advice, the answer is often to learn the language. It goes without saying that to function effectively in any community you do need to learn the language. There may well be anglicised pockets in many European countries where one can get by with no intention of learning the language but I can't help feeling that those communities end up isolating themselves from mainstream society. Certainly part of our relocation to Spain is to integrate with a different culture, to learn from those that live in the country and to experience and enjoy a different way of life. When we started out discussing this as a project in September we couldn't see how it could be accomplished successfully without a big effort to learn the language.

We registered in September for a course in Spanish. It was slightly daunting because having entered the (to date, to us) alien world of adult education we found that Spanish lessons came in four different levels. Neither myself nor Sally were overly confident about learning a new language from scratch but we were both sure that as we had a purpose to learning the language and a determintation we would certainly be putting in 100% effort. Consequently when we learned that the Level 1 lessons took place on a night that we couldn't make we were easily persuaded into signing up for the Level 2 lessons. In retrospect I'm pleased that we did. The course, a practical language course validated by ABC, is similar in standard to a GCSE and is really achievable within a year. We are just going along tonight for our final assessment, a written test. Consequently as well as working this week we have been swotting up on a few 'tricks' to include in the hopes of scoring the necessary marks; trying to engineer sentences that use the conditional, preterite, future and present tense as well as providing a space for a reflexive verb to shine is tricky in English never mind Spanish.

We've been lucky to have a good standard of teaching though and I feel that we got conversationally comfortable quite quickly. In October, just six weeks into learning the language Sally and I took a trip to Madrid and deliberately didn't book accomodation until we arrived so we were forced into using the little language we had learnt in the first six weeks of our course. We are a long way from being competent but we're hoping that much of our language learning will happen when we move to Alzira as there really is no incentive greater than needing the language to communicate. My own memory of learning French at school is that I learned more of the language on my two week exchange visit that I did in all the rest of the years at school. Here's hoping that moving to Spain provides a similar experience and a similar boost to our language learning skills.

Emily is inquisitive about language and has picked up a few words and phrases from us as we have gone along but has had no formal language lessons. I think she would find language learning in a classroom environment tricky at six years old. She will however be in a school where most children are Spanish and where although, after the age of seven, English is the language of the classroom, the playground will buzz with both Spanish and Valencian. (Valencian, although those native to the city would argue differently, is in essence a dialect of Catalan.) Consequently all advice is that Emily will learn both those languages far quicker than Sally and I once we live in the country.

Those who have been following this blog will know that earlier this week we began to advertise some of our accumulated unnecessary items in the hopes of drastically reducing the amount of 'stuff' we needed to move to Spain. I had a really great conversation last night with somebody who came to buy the car roofbox I had advertised in the local paper. As I do when selling, I chatted in the hopes of finding some common ground. It turned out that they were buying the roofbox to take a visit to parents who had moved to Denia in Spain, barely 45 minutes drive from where we will be living in August. The coincidence of this and the feeling of the world as a small place was quite surprising. To Sally, Emily and myself this move to Spain is an 'out of the ordinary' adventure that seems to be well worth exploring and yet such a move is so common that when I sell my car roofbox it is to the family of folks who made the same move six months ago. I'm pleased to report that they chose to buy the roofbox, so in order to build up courage and strength for tonights exam Sally and I have cash in hand for a Weatherspoon's curry and pint over the road from the college where Spanish lessons take place.