wrote on Dec 27^th, 2012 at 9:44am:

Is there anybody here who actually speaks or understands Catalan who genuinely thinks they have been accepted by the locals ? There are some nice and friendly people here, but it is a small percentage in my experience. Tortosa and Amposta are notoriously unfriendly, even to local catalans from 10 or 20km away, some of the local villages a lot better.

wrote on Dec 27^th, 2012 at 12:49pm:

wrote on Dec 27th, 2012 at 9:44am: Is there anybody here who actually speaks or understands Catalan who genuinely thinks they have been accepted by the locals ? Totally.  We went to Catalan classes as soon as we arrived here and managed to learn some Spanish beforehand. We have made some very good friends in the village and I don't think that they would have given us Christmas presents or invited us to their houses if we weren't 'accepted'.

Your experience relates to a Village, not Tortosa or Amposta, as I said, villages are different.




wrote on Dec 27^th, 2012 at 10:24pm:

I suppose it depends on whether you are dealing with Catalans or the rest of the world in your daily life as to whether or not you learn the language.  Spanish, of course is one of the major spoken languages in the world and well worth learning. The right to a translator is enshrined in EU law which is one of the things that seems to piss off the British when they are expected to provide translators in Polish or Romanian but they are happy to take advantage of it when they get pissed up and arrested in Spain. Again my point all along has been that the British are just arrogant in assuming that everyone will speak their language when they aren't tolerant of people who haven't mastered English when living in the UK.  Double standards.

So then, how do you view the locals view that everybody should speak Catalan ?

Do you realise that around here they do not even speak Catalan, they speak Tortosien, a mix of Catalan and Castellon dialect spoken with a very heavy [aka unintelligible] accent ?

People who do learn Catalan end up learning 2 versions, one of which is of zero use in Tarragona or beyond and one of which is useless [and ultimately offensive] to the rest of Spain and Spanish speaking people.