Don't need to go to a foreign country to learn a language.

Hi,

I came across this site by accident and saw an article written on the subject of:

'Myth #1:
"The best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country"'.

I found it at: http://www.antimoon.com/other/myths-country.htm

I do not know who wrote the article because I don't see the name on that site, but I would like to add my view on it.

I agree totally with the idea that it is a myth to believe that the best way to learn a foreign language is to go to the foreign country.

Everyone I meet all seem to think the best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country. I strongly disagree. It was the first time I have actually seen an article that mirrored my own thoughts on the subject.

I had clients who were going to move to Portugal, Spain etc. and they all had this naive belief that by simply being in a foreign country it would magically over a period of months and years make them reasonably fluent in the foreign language. As if by some miracle they would become bilingual with no effort on their part. They weren't even studying the language before going to the country!

This was when I was in England and my clients were British. I had to explain to them that unfortunately if you are serious about learning a language then it requires effort, study and dedication if you want to learn a language. One lady I can remember looked at me with such a sad and depressed look when I told her that.

The truth is she didn't want to believe me. She wanted to believe, like everyone, you can learn the language just by being in a country. As if by magic breathing the foreign air would make you fluent in the language over time. How wrong she is!

I explained to her that the best way to learn a language is to first get yourself a grammar book with exercises and start at the first chapter of the book. With each chapter you are introduced to the "rules of the game". You learn how to say "the" in the foreign language and how to say "a". You are introduced to foreign nouns and verbs and the rules regarding their declensions and how to conjugate the verbs. Then you are introduced to pronouns and the positioning of them. Each chapter introduces you to new rules of the "game", so to speak, with exercises to practise and become familiar with these new rules.

Learning the "rules" of the grammar of the language is the basic building block of the language.

After having gone some way with familiarizing yourself with grammar it is time to hit the reading! One does not need to finish all the chapters on the grammar before starting to read. You can start reading when you feel it is right for you.

One then buys either a magazine or novel and the largest language dictionary available and you start to read one word at a time! It means also that you will be looking up every single word because you will not know them! It means you will have to "slog away" at this boring method, looking up every word you don't know and then a few seconds later you will forget that word! It's boring but that's life! If it means underlining every word and looking it up in the dictionary then so be it. If it means destroying that book or magazine with ugly lines under most words then so be it. The truth is you are beginning to "chew" and "chew" into the language, you're chewing it to the bone! You will come up with so many phrases that one will have to learn them by heart, by writing it out or by coming across it in the magazines and novels so often you remember them.

Reading, reading and reading will beat anything any day!

It will beat watching a foreign film. It will beat listening to foreign music. It will beat chatting to a foreign person in a café. Yes I said that! Why? Because that foreign person is not going to be with you throughout the whole time introducing you to as much vocabulary as you could have learned if you were instead in your room reading and underlining all those words you did not know, and then trying to memorize the new vocabulary.

It is the EFFORT you make on your alone time that helps you to learn and memorize new words and phrases. THEN you can go to another country and "pop out" into the street and practise what you have learned. Then you can use all the words you already have stored in your memory and use them to "chat" with someone. Of course this is a bonus and a good thing to do. But the common mistake is in assuming that this is better than studying!

If I knew not one word of German for example and decided to fly to Germany for the first time in my life and told myself I would spend each day sitting at a café drinking beer trying to start a conversation with a German person, how far do you think i would get without knowing German grammar or vocabulary? Before you can even utter a syllable you need to have the ammunition inside your mind. You need to have some store of German words, phrases and grammar at your disposal. It does not come to you by just sitting there and soaking in the atmosphere of this pleasant German café.

If there was a German person willing to talk to you at the café and he knew your language then he would help you to some point by translating some words to you. You would repeat those few words out loud to him and you may even write them down. That is too in a way making some effort and that too is studying the language. But it is not enough! It is too limited. The amount of hours spent at the café and... you have learned how many words from this German person?

You don't even know the rules of the grammar. In the end, you will gain far greater progress by not going down to that café, but by remaining in your hotel room studying some grammar and doing some reading! Then you can practise what you have remembered on a German person at the café. That is the dessert.

The trouble is most people think that the dessert is more important than the main course! The main course being studying on your own time! All the rest like travelling to a foreign country, listening to foreign music, watching foreign films, chatting to a foreign person etc., these are all extra bonuses which help you to fine-tune your knowledge of the language and fine-tune your pronunciation skills, the street vocabulary etc. But these are all secondary to the real work involved in learning a language, which is pure hard graft study of the grammar, vocabulary and reading, reading and reading.

Wynton Marsalis, the famous trumpeter, became an accomplished jazz musician by practising everyday on his own for hours and hours on his scales and arpeggios and other exercises. He was working, practising his "guts out" on these boring scales and arpeggios because he knew that in the long run he needed to gain the speed and agility of both his breathing technique and fingers to run up and down the scales with ease and quickness.

He did not waste his precious hours of practise by playing the trumpet with band members when he had no mastery of the trumpet! You don't learn the trumpet by jumping right in and playing with other musicians thinking that somehow magically your playing will improve. No, you master the trumpet by first doing the real hard work, the real hard grafting, by practising, practising and practising on real hard exercises. You do the main course first, later comes the dessert.

The trumpeter has to master the TECHNIQUE first before he can enjoy the music playing! And mastering technique means you need the self discipline to do the necessary exercises and study. The same goes for a figure skater on ice. Before he/she can enjoy the experience of skating he/she must do the necessary repetitive and boring exercises to master the technique. And the same holds true in learning a foreign language!

We all want to skip the boring bit. We all don't want to study the grammar. We all would rather go to the country, sit at a café and pretend that we are learning the language.

My brother, before he moved to Italy, was studying Italian at home in his room every day and he would do some reading. His Italian was quite good. Then he moved to Italy. About two years later I visited him. His Italian was worse than it was before he left for Italy! Why? Because he said stopped reading Italian and got a bit lazy. In other words he did not progress any further despite the fact he was in Italy, because he stopped reading! He confessed this to me and knew it was because he stopped reading. Yes he can speak Italian but the point is that it did not improve but got worse because he did not do any reading of novels and therefore did not expand his vocabulary. His vocabulary was only limited to his daily activities.

Going to a language class is not going to make you learn a language. Most people enroll to a language class thinking that that is enough to learn a language not realizing that it is your ALONE time studying that determines whether you learn a language or not. The same goes for going to another country. You can live in a foreign country for 30 years and still not have made much progress. It is not the number of years in a foreign country or the number of hours at a language class that determines ones proficiency at a language.

The point I am trying to get across here is that the only thing that makes you learn something is when it is YOU who applies the effort. Everything else is just pure pretence.

>> He did not waste his precious hours of practise by playing the trumpet with band members when he had no mastery of the trumpet! You don't learn the trumpet by jumping right in and playing with other musicians thinking that somehow magically your playing will improve. No, you master the trumpet by firs doing the real hard work, the real hard grafting, by practising practising and practising on real hard exercises. You do the main course first, later comes the dessert <<

Well actually playing in a band really does improve your trumpet playing quite a bit. Of course you couldn't jump in right away as a complete beginner, but after you have taken lessons and practised for awhile, playing in a band will dramatically improve your playing.

To learn Spanish, there's no reason to go to Spain. Just head down to Laredo, San Antonio, or even LA or New York City. The Spanish you get in these places won't be Penninsular Spanish, of course.

Likewise, for French, no need to go to Paris -- just head up to Quebec (or even Haiti). These are foreign countries, of course, but it's sure a whole heck of a lot easier to get to Quebec than France.

I think a combination of book learning and actual practice is always best. I took Spanish in high school, when I wasn't really paying attention, and now that I live in a Spanish-speaking part of the US, I realize how ill-prepared that made me to actually jump into conversation, Still, lately I've been trying to at least make some small talk with my Spanish-speaking coworkers, and I've been surprised how much vocabulary has come back to me. I still have to grope for words and I still have to shut down certain paths of conversation I would like to go down because I just don't know how to say X or Y, and it's frustrating, but also rewarding. And they sometimes grope for the words in English, and between the two of us we get our points across -- sometimes it's pretty funny, you have to act things out!

But it's ultimately pretty rewarding, and it lets you have a glimpse of the real person behind the face when you can actually talk to them. It encourages me to try harder. Usually both of us are shy, but once you make a personal connection, the grammar mistakes aren't such a big deal. I have a friend at work who moved tothe US from Mexico some 20 years ago, and she lived in the US for 3 years without a word of English before she finally just dove in and started to learn. She speaks very well now. Sure, she still makes lots of mistakes with grammar and vocabulary, because English is so full of irregular forms and exceptions to the rule, but in terms of WHAT she is saying, I think she is so articulate and fascinating, and it is always a treat to talk to her when I have a spare moment. She's really inspiring. It's really not about perfection sometimes. And all, language isn't an art form, it's just a tool for communicating with other human beings.

I'm from Seattle. Vancouver is a good city to go to if you want to learn Chinese. Seattle is good too, but there aren't as many, and you certainly couldn't get along with no English. Vancouver seems like such an international city. There are a lot of foreigners there, mostly from Asia. There are many places in the city you can get along without speaking English. The trick is to pretend you are a foreigner and cannot speak any English. This tends to work. Especially if you disguise your American/Canadian accent while you speak Chinese with say an Italian or German accent. Otherwise sometimes people will get annoyed if they think you are Canadian and just wasting their time stumbling around with Chinese. Unfortunately this means that you cannot bring a phrasebook or dictionary.

If you want to learn Spanish, go to the Eastern part of Washington or British Columbia.

>>You are introduced to foreign nouns and verbs and the rules regarding their declensions and how to conjugate the verbs. Then you are introduced to pronouns and the positioning of them. Each chapter introduces you to new rules of the "game", so to speak, with exercises to practise and become familiar with these new rules.

Grammar self-learning: I know that learning your native language from childhood onward and learning a foreign language (possibly at any point of your life) are different things. The difference is threefold. One, native speakers have perfect access to the native language right from birth, and a lot of caretaker speakers helped you along, like your parents and school teachers and little classmates. Two, suppose you were raised in a country where you could have decent education, it follows that you also receive years of training in the native language - as far as I know, most school kids in all countries I know so far must take their native language as a school subject. Then, you are supposed to write compositions, do exercises... I didn't learn Chinese grammar consciously, but in my country, Chinese lessons did offer me a lot of reading knowledge. This is exactly the point of teaching Chinese at school - to make kids like me literate. Every country should be quite similar. Three, like as an adult in your home country, even if you were illiterate, you still have perfect access to the mass media, other native speakers, etc, all the time and you are always practicing your native language in your country.

While it may be true that you can't emulate the whole native-speaking environment as a foreign learner, by common sense you don't necessarily have to emulate the environment exactly - you don't even have to be in the target country, as Wolf's analysis goes, for example. The most important should be rather whether your own self-learning environment is conducive for acquiring this foreign language, and to the largest extent, acquiring it EXACTLY LIKE what native speakers did until today.

So, for example, for grammar, it's true that it's difficult to ask ordinary natives to tell grammar or even teach you forms... (which should rather be the job of teachers, if you insist on having face-to-face grammar teaching). In this case, beginner's grammar books should be a much better choice. While native kids acquire grammar by talking, you may just have to do sth different, i.e. to do it by reading instead. Well, normally, unless you get a teacher to teach (and necessarily in a didactic way), otherwise native speakers won't even be able to tell what grammar you are speaking. It may well be normal that you know more grammar than native speakers, but still, rules are just for minor monitoring...

>>One then buys either a magazine or novel and the largest language dictionary available and you start to read one word at a time! It means also that you will be looking up every single word because you will not know them! It means you will have to "slog away" at this boring method, looking up every word you don't know and then a few seconds later you will forget that word! It's boring but that's life! If it means underlining every word and looking it up in the dictionary then so be it.

It seems you've read Farber's book. There is some truth in it, true, but I'd say looking up every single word, while valid, isn't the only way to go - but at the moment I can't really think of any others. Farber's method is hardcore and, as somebody (like amazon dot com?) says, his method is essentially a grammar-translation one. What I just think is having some textbooks won't hurt at all, and indeed it's advisable to have some. I think both Farber and Lomb's methods of reading - a combination of real texts and, less importantly, textbooks - are some of the good examples you may look into.

>>If I knew not one word of German for example and decided to fly to Germany for the first time in my life and told myself I would spend each day sitting at a café drinking beer trying to start a conversation with a German person, how far do you think i would get without knowing German grammar or vocabulary? Before you can even utter a syllable you need to have the ammunition inside your mind. You need to have some store of German words, phrases and grammar at your disposal. It does not come to you by just sitting there and soaking in the atmosphere of this pleasant German café.

There should be a reality check: who do you think you are when you talk to a German (or any other foreign nationality, anyone who's NOT from your country, and most probably has never been to your country either)? Me, I'm just an ordinary Chinese guy, and 99.9% of them have never even known anything about my language, country, culture, and probably forget my name all the time. And I can say 99% of Germans aren't linguists of German phonology/grammar, etc, so if you have any questions, you'd better consult a good dictionary, for example, before asking questions you can find in a book, any of them. Like when talking to Germans, the best thing is just to ask for Umgangssprache (colloquial usage), and probably things like swear words. In urgent situations, of course you should ask Germans to read difficult texts for you, but still, knowledge, by common sense, has to be acquired by yourself. You can't gain knowledge by asking people to do the job for you, nor can you gain it without (in this case, learning German) biting the bullet.

So, in short, and I happen to be a German learner, I can say that learning German still (I'm a student, and the most Germans I talk to are also students) depends a lot on silent reading, daily exposure, etc. The German taught by German speakers during, at large, daily conversations is so limited that I can't even feel they are putting new input into my head. Because, just like how I may make my speech in Cantonese totally slurred but still completely comprehensible for other native speakers, you can make a lot of mistakes, during conversations, that go UNCORRECTED. Even young Germans, just like young Chinese if they are learning my native language, won't normally correct your German, at least not all the time. Sometimes they're polite, sometimes they won't bother, and sometimes you all focus on the content, NOT the grammar and vocab anymore. And what's more, you can use a lot of body language, made-up words, English words, whatever, to fill all kinds of vocab gaps. And by common sense, you don't learn more German by speaking the German that you already know (and preferably correct German). But for new content to emerge, it must be that 1) the Germans give you new input, or 2) you get it yourself. If you were born again, now by German parents, then you can wait for 18 years to be raised totally in German, plus education in the German language, to become an adult German speaker. But otherwise, for mere mortals like us, we just have to self-learn a lot.

This sounds ridiculous when you are removing German from the Germans - learning on your own AND alone is totally un-social and there could be the danger of not even knowing the Umgangssprache. Yet, I think this is a sensible way. It doesn't look anything like how you acquired your native language, or me Chinese. Yet, the acquisition environment for native speakers, and the one of self-learning, I think their effects are quite similar.

But of course, people are afraid of remaining alone to learn such a social tool as a language. They, at large, want someone to accompany them, like a teacher (who should be some of the best language guides, seriously), or a native speaker who doesn't even know your background and situation well. But the ironic thing is, quite counterintuitively, you'd better learn a language by first removing it from the people. Plus, like the Germans or the Chinese, native speakers use a lot of Umgangssprache and very often only simpler words, and regardless of cultural background, personally I also tend to make my speech as short as possible, unless if I want to speak like giving a lecture. And therefore, I'm now in a situation where, while I can make my understood very easily in spoken German, I'm now pretty much like an illiterate person in German, and even without the oral fluency of an illiterate German. (Rather, the good points of being in Germany is just that I came to meet a lot of people, but this has strictly almost nothing to do with learning German itself. Again, there you go, learning German is sometimes quite another thing from meeting Germans...)

>>If you were born again, now by German parents, then you can wait for 18 years to be raised totally in German, plus education in the German language, to become an adult German speaker. But otherwise, for mere mortals like us, we just have to self-learn a lot.

Supplement: and so I've also brought up the issue of time. I don't mean language learning has to be that theoretical and difficult and physicist, but... a language itself, just because it's worth calling it a language, it itself already has a lot of cultural values, literary traditions, and a kind of cultural heritage among its native speakers. For such reasons, a language is so huge and creative that you might well have to spend years and years to reach a decent level to enjoy its culture.

So, we have the Umgangssprache, which keeps on being updated every year. There already have been a lot of vocab shifts in Cantonese or Chinese in general, for example, and what you get in the 90s are already very outdated now.

And second, we have the language taught at school. Native speakers read this didactically taught German. We read this German too. This is where both of us would be reading the most similar stuff. Normally, native speakers read this when they were smaller; and us at the beginner stage. You can well forget the textbooks for this language - I don't remember anything of Chinese textbooks, but a lot of basic stuff is what even I need for talking normally to other Chinese. Let me say, we have a sentence pattern with "although" AND "but", unlike English where you can only write either word, not both. But in fact, in spoken Chinese you can drop although or but and still produce the same meaning. I learned it as a rule when I was 7, and I've been using this rule ever since. It must be a rule, as far as I can tell, but it makes no difference whether I know this rule consciously. More importantly, textbook Chinese has become an essential part of passive language in the heads of, like, young Chinese. They all know it, and if you don't know it even as an advanced learner, you might well miss out a large part of cultural life of young native speakers. Just like Americans watched a lot of Sesame Street and Simpsons, well, you'll understand it and you never watched anything like this, like me.

And third, we have the technical language. But this should be the easiest, but also the least practical for ordinary learners - the most ambitious of those who want to become adults who can function perfectly in the target country.

I did hear of people who, for "practical" reasons, give up the Umgangssprache and focus entirely on written language, like the third one, like if they are aspiring to gain a PHD in Germany, or even when they are already staying in German as students. Again, I see some points of doing so. No, sometimes, maybe life is just too short for all that Umgangssprache + textbook language + technical language altogether. The youngest German adults spent 18 years to acquire the first, to learn the second, and to have at least some ideas of the third. What about you? Would you want to spend another 18 years for that?

Another supplement: well, not to exaggerate, you won't probably need 18 years, maybe 5 years will do, if you can cut down on dabbling in other languages, for example.

Normally, though, if you treat this very serious self-learning scheme as a part-time job over 5 years, and, like, given that you don't learn another language, which might take away the precious time you can invest on, say, German, I think things like the Umgangssprache shouldn't be that difficult after all. And preferably with stays in Germany.

In the past 2 years, I also went thru a lot of German in different situations. I read old-fashioned textbooks written by Chinese guys. I read German slang. I talked to Germans on and off. I learned a lot of textbook German in the university. I taught myself a lot of even more textbook German with self-learning guides. And I read a lot of my monolingual dictionary. Every time, I just have to make sure that I'm still understanding, and no matter where I go, every moment that I read German, it's also the moment that I gain more associations between German words. ----- Somehow, even for my native Chinese, I do need associations. You'll understand that. I don't normally need a dictionary intended for foreigners to explain new Chinese vocab. I know them ALL, sort of. But if I do need to learn new Chinese vocab, just like every other Chinese adult, I'll only look for associations, or even by guessing. This is where I use Chinese to explain Chinese, and, given my native speaker instinct, of course I can do it within seconds only. I think this is also pretty much the starting point for foreign learners to go monolingual - gradually - in German.

Here in the UK we have experienced an influx of people from Eastern European countries recently incorporated into the European Union, and because of this they have an aurtmatic right of entry into this country - almost (but not quite) as easily as it is to pass from Scotland into England or from wales to England and vice versa.

These people came here to work and many of them had little or no working knowledge of English at all - many hardly knew a single word of English - waiters and waitresses are just one example of this - but in hardly any time at all they became amazingly proficient speakers of our Language simply because of necessity and day to day contact with the British people. The UK is not quite like Continental countries where they are far more likely to use English just for the convenience of monoglot Brits - it doesn't work that way here.

Here in Britain the incomers have to speak English or else they are all at sea without a paddle and are left to flounder or sink without trace effectively.

Unfortunately Brits are not so accommodating when it comes to other people's Languages, whether it's here on our own territory or even, arrogantly you might way, on foreign fields. Our mindset is this - Britain is the birthplace of the Global Language so speak it or lose it! Sad but so true.

And Sir Damian, I told you so, about the situation in Hong Kong, where loads of expats get by without any command of ___.

Your neighbor, Germany, the people don't speak anything other than German at large, but still students generally have a decent command of English just like those from Hong Kong. So even without the official status, young Germans at large speak as just passable English as we do. I'd only say it has something to do with the German culture. In fact, I can't tell, but I suspect it's somewhat similar to the British, as far as "European" is concerned.

Here, it's entirely up to you whether you learn a language, and whether you master it. They, Germans, don't have that many problems like the Chinese, whose mindset is much often affected by judgments of other people, a lack of maturity, and too much utilitarianism. And they, Germans, they never say anything about languages. Even without the need of asking any German, just go to a bookshop, and if you already know a smattering of German, you can tell just how many good books they can buy in their country. Like for languages, I say so, no one cares whether you learn a language, and you don't even have to ask anybody or consult a class or so. In Germany, just like Britain, you can find loads of self-learning guides.

The Germans learn languages for 1) school, 2) studies (like Romanistik, French language and literature), or Latin for classical studies, 3) travelling, etc. But what people think is also what bookshops offer. The Chinese also write a lot of language books, but most of them are for English exams, and the minority - i.e. any language other than English - consist largely of books for exams as well. We do have phrasebooks, but... at large, they're boring and lack the kind of creativity I can see in language books from Britain/Germany. And given our geographical distance, it's a fact that the Chinese at large know very few languages - and very few Chinese ones as well.

And it also happens that it seems language education is particularly problematic in my country, though we don't have the English-only movement, political arguments, etc, as in the US in the 1990s. Well, problematic in the sense that people are usually afraid of trying. It will be more obvious when students from different countries are put together in the same classroom setting. In short, affective filter is especially serious in the Chinese context.

Here in Britain the incomers have to speak English or else they are all at sea without a paddle and are left to flounder or sink without trace effectively.

_______________________________

lol, not so sure, I was in London last week and I heard many languages in the street, none in english.

I want to point out that the comments made by the original article are partly true.

Looking at the original purpose of the comments, it forces readers to understand what the original poster is trying to point out as the website creators of antimoon are also pointing out - to spend more time studying, learning and practising English of acceptable quality rather than waste time on poor quality English.

However, there is a great advantage to living in a country full of native English speakers. It is so much easier to make fluent English speaking friends, join fluent English speaking events, access better and cheaper English resources, etc. Since English is already all around you, learning English a whole lot more efficient than spending time searching for extra materials on the internet (although this is good too).

Be careful of an English speaking country though, as there are plenty of uneducated users of English. While they may have the apparent ability to speak fluenty, their quality of writing may show a different picture altogether. So the difficulty is not where you get your resources, it's more a question of how easy it is to access and how high the quality of those resources are. After that, it's just plain old study and hard work.

Good luck to all of you!

A propos where best to learn a language: a linguist, EFL teacher, translator and interpreter, I first began studying Spanish (among other languages) at evening-classes in the 1950s, and was, within a few years, capable of translating commercial material professionally. Then, after a 20-year pause in (mainly English-speaking) theatre, I returned to language-work and went to Spain - for the first time by myself, and not staying in hotels, etc. - to teach EFL (English as a Foreign Language). By now it was 30 years since I began using Spanish (including literary, as well as commercial, translation, and reading Spanish verse onstage), but the SHOCK of being confronted in Spain with rat-a-tat spoken colloquial Spanish all day and every day, in the streets, in my digs, on the radio and TV, at work, in my much-increased social life, was, for a while, like suddenly being a complete beginner again....However, over the year I was there, my oral fluency and aural comprehension improved - of necessity - more-realistically and at a far-faster rate than while I was still in the UK. So the quasi-theoretical 30 years background in the UK proved a useful base; but in no way could it have prepared me for using the spoken language 'in situ'. There was, incidentally a humorous incident. At my first (Tuesday and Thursday evening) classes, way back then, the tiny Don Quijote-like native-Spanish teacher used to end the Tuesday classes with a farewell none of us could understand, and were too shy/polite to ask about, but remembered parrot-fashion from much-repetition. 'Fins al dijous que be!' he would say. I never found out what it meant until, when teaching EFL, in Catalonia, in fact, 30 years later, some 'Spanish' friends I had made used the phrase. 'What does it mean??' I asked, in Castilian ('Spanish') Spanish. It turned out to be the Catalan (Spanish dialect/language of Catalonia) for 'Till next Thursday!'....It had taken me 30 years to find out! But meantime, Franco dead, Catalan, which had been banned during his time, had been revived with a vengeance, and one day, standing on a corner in the little town where I was teaching, I was asked by an agitated car-owner (car screeching to a halt next to me), in Castilian, whether I spoke Castilian. 'Si,' I replied. and he asked me where such-and-such was; but I didn't know. 'Soy extranjero,' I explain, 'I'm a foreigner.' 'Incredible!!' he exclaimed, 'the first person we meet who speaks Castilian, and not Catalan, and he's a foreigner!!!' (I suspect, though, that many of the Catalans they had met DID speak Castilian, but were getting their own back for the Franco years....)