She spoke French as a child. That’s why I chose the English subject at school. I had good teachers, but my classmates laughed at my forced accent. Besides, I was bored. On TV they were doing a boring didactic series called Muzzy. It was my worst selective grade. I didn’t study English again. But I dated someone who taught it and asked him for some. Fatal For him it was work and I didn’t want you to give me lessons. Of course, I used his books and learned from the songs we listened to.
We watch Los Sopranos in the original version with English subtitles, a practice I maintain when there is one. One day I entered the room of a cousin whom I have known for almost twenty years. She was a teenager watching live Korean TV, which someone was subtitling in English at full speed; followed the program without problem. It is one of the abysmal differences between analog and digital. The standard of my time was so low that I made fun of it in the first novel. In the reissue, a decade later, it was unlikely that the narrator could not understand a letter in English.
English colonizes everything, and no matter how much you want to stay abreast of what’s going on, you have to know it. It is a mandatory requirement in most jobs. That’s why there are so many promises of magical courses that will have you speaking English in a week or while you sleep. My level of oral expression grows from the second beer, and the written level leaves a lot to be desired. But it would be disturbing (or should be) if, as a journalist, he didn’t understand it. Let’s not say a president of the government; there are no interpreters in the international political rolls. Feijóo complained that Sánchez brought the elections ahead of him just when he was getting ready to take lessons. Perhaps he expected the empathy of those who are proud to be negated with English. But if there are, they are few and at different times.
