No doubt, one of the hardest parts about moving to a foreign country is the language barrier. Not being able to speak, read or write results in "walking around confusion"; basically you are unsure in almost everything you do as you go through your day. Every activity is a challenge - reading menus, figuring out instructions, or just getting basic directions. And we didn't arrive with strong Spanish skills - my four years of high school Spanish (many years ago) seems roughly equivalent to Leo's one year of middle school Spanish. (My habit of throwing in Chinese words when I can't think of the Spanish doesn't help either).
This is another area where smartphones and new technology are a huge help. We have become avid users of Google Translate, both on the phone and on the web. We use Duolingo to up our spoken Spanish skills. And the other day we heard about and downloaded a cool new app, Word Lens. You just point your camera at a sign or a menu and it translates real time right in front of your eyes. It's very simple, great for solving the "walking around confusion" of living in a new country.
Of course, English is widely spoken in Barcelona. I'm pretty confident we'd be struggling a lot more if we had moved to Almaty or Sana'a. Still, there is one extra complication about learning the language in Barcelona - they actually speak two languages. Everyone speaks Spanish, and just about everyone also speaks Catalan. Most people seem to switch back and forth between the two regularly, and not even realize they are switching. (We had a local friend tell us confidently that "all of the menus are in Spanish" at the very moment we sat down to dinner with a menu only in Catalan).
It's somehow comforting to me that modern technology is not immune to this dual language problem, sometimes with amusing results. We tried that new app Word Lens on the Catalan menu at our club the other day, and this is what we got:
To be fair to Word Lens, they don't claim to support Catalan. Still, we laughed out loud at "Compote of Apple Piss." Would you rather have that, or "Splint of Veal with Herbs, Pepper, and Bad"? Clearly, Catalan is as confusing to Word Lens as it is to us.
We had the paella.
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