Learning a language is one of the most important things you can do – in Spain once I really ballsed it up
WANT to get a REAL sense of Spanish?
Then learn from a footie legend who picked up the lingo while playing for one of the country’s top teams.
Sports pundit Gary Lineker is among a host of famous faces who have signed up to teach kids on CBBC show Celebrity Supply Teacher.
Ex-Spice Girl and children’s author Geri Horner will give lessons on creative writing, chef Heston Blumenthal will be giving cookery tutorials and Manchester United ace Marcus Rashford will be covering PE.
And Gary will be livening up the classroom by helping little ones learn Spanish through football.
The ex-England striker learned the language when he transferred from Everton to Barcelona in 1986. He also attempted to master Japanese during two seasons at League club Nagoya Grampus Eight.
Gary explains why sticking to your mother tongue could be an own goal, both on and off the pitch . . .
MASTERING a language is one of the most important things you can do.
That became apparent to me when, on arriving in Spain, I decided to buy some furniture.
Keen that my bedside cabinets had drawers, I asked the shop assistant if they had two tables “con cojones”.
The poor woman burst out laughing and explained that in Spanish, drawers are “cajones” not “cojones” — I’d accidentally asked for two tables with testicles.
I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish when I signed for Barcelona but I knew I needed to learn the lingo.
I had realised that players at foreign clubs who immerse themselves in the culture do better on the pitch than those who don’t.
I looked to greats such as Kevin Keegan, who learned German when he joined Hamburg, and Ray Wilkins, who mastered Italian at AC Milan.
Then there were others — who I won’t name — who were lured abroad just for the bigger pay packet back in the day and barely lasted a season.
I’d studied a small amount of French and German at school but I was so focused on becoming a footballer I didn’t put the effort in.
I had a bit of a wake-up call over my lack of language skills on my first day of training.
It’s a shock to the system being in a changing room full of blokes bantering and you have no idea what they are saying.
Luckily, the team took me under their wing. On the bus to the training grounds Barcelona keeper Andoni Zubizarreta drew a stick man and woman and taught me all the body parts.
To get a firmer grip on the language I avoided the ex-pat nightclubs out there and enrolled in a Spanish language class with my then wife Michelle and my team-mate Mark Hughes.
Poor Mark was only 19 and struggled with the classes. I think he dropped out after two or three but Michelle and I stuck with it.
For two years, three times a week after training, we’d go to school to learn Spanish.
DREAMS IN SPANISH
It was tough at first as no English was allowed in the classroom, but looking back it did me a world of good.
I started playing football when I was small and the skills came naturally. Learning a language was the opposite. It was really hard work and not something that came easily to me.
So I made sure I read Spanish newspapers every day and watched the local TV stations. In two months I could get by. After six months I was getting pretty good and in a year I was speaking pretty much fluently.
By the time I left in 1989 I was thinking and dreaming in Spanish.
From the get go, I made sure I did my post-match interviews in the local language.
Even if I didn’t always make sense, it sent out a strong message to the club that I was there for the long haul.
Being able to talk to fans gained me a lot of respect and appreciation when I was over there.
And when a match goes badly, the pitch can be a really lonely place. But because I was able to speak to my team-mates, it helped me through some tough times.
When I went to play for Nagoya Grampus Eight in 1992 it was a whole other story.
I took eight months of Japanese lessons before I went out there, and did classes there too. But it is a very difficult language, with a completely different alphabet.
I learned enough to get by but I was nowhere near as good at Japanese as I was with Spanish.
It’s been more than 30 years since I lived in Barcelona and I’ll admit my Spanish is a bit rusty.
Nowadays when I go there I’ll try to speak the language but Spaniards always want to speak to me in English.
So many foreigners speak English that it can seem a pointless exercise trying to pick up another tongue.
As a nation, we are not great at learning a second language, we can rest on our laurels slightly.
But I would argue that it’s more important now than ever to learn, and at the moment we’ve all got the time to spare.
Having a second language opens up so many opportunities to you and your kids, whether that’s working abroad or in hospitality in the UK.
KEEPY-UPS
Travel might be shut at the moment, but that won’t be the case for ever and you’ll be giving your family a leg-up during this downtime.
Children’s brains are like sponges, they pick up languages so much faster and better when they are younger.
And there are so many online tools and courses that I wish I’d had at my disposal when I was first learning.
Although I’d always warn against online translation tools — they give a very literal translation which doesn’t always make sense.
For example, if you type “it’s raining cats and dogs” into Google Translate it won’t mean anything to a foreigner in their own language.
MOST READ IN OPINION
Getting kids to do anything can be tricky, as I’m sure mums and dads who are homeschooling have realised by now.
In my Celebrity Supply Teacher episode I teach counting to ten in Spanish by doing keepy-ups.
So if you make it fun, it opens up an exciting new world for youngsters which doesn’t involve sitting at a desk.
- Celebrity Supply Teacher will air on CBBC and BBC iPlayer from June 8. Watch Gary’s episode on June 15.
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