Sweet Spanish and English lessons....

Last week (see previous post) we were thinking about skill sharing as a way of being generous during Lent. Yesterday I had another chance to see this in action, as I spent an evening with two friends - one from Germany and one from Peru. Our newest team member, Anja, has been in Spain for less than three weeks, and is keen to start learning as much Spanish as possible; I've been trying to help out a little here and there. Meanwhile, Ada (whom I live with) wants to keep improving her English whenever she can. Ada also wanted to learn how to make a delicious German-style apple cake that Anja had made last week, and so we decided to combine all of this skill-sharing into one evening together. Armed with our eggs, flour, sugar and quark, we headed to Anja's house for a time of English lessons, Spanish lessons and baking lessons! Anja learned new Spanish words, and Ada learned new English words, while I facilitated the translation... and Ada and I learned how to transform our big golden apples into big slices of delicious cake.

Sieving flour, peeling apples, kneading pastry, whisking egg whites...... These were among the vocabulary words that were learned in English and Spanish. We worked hard, and we laughed a lot. Despite a background of thirty years in teaching languages, including teaching English as a foreign language, I had somehow never come across the fact that "kitchen" and "chicken" are two words that can easily be confused by foreigners. We laughed when Ada asked if the apples were in the chicken.... but Anja (who lived in Australia and taught English to foreign missionaries before moving to Spain) told us that many of her students had the same difficulty with those two words. I discovered that, "Is the chicken in the kitchen?" is a particularly difficult tongue twister for speakers of some other languages.

Soon the sliced apples were arranged on the pastry and the fluffy filling was poured on top. The baking lesson was over, but we had another hour of English and Spanish learning while we waited for the cake to bake in the oven. At last it was done, and we can all testify that it was delicious. It's Ada's birthday this weekend (same day as my brother's) and she plans to make the cake again when she has some South American friends round for dinner. We hope to have these Spanish-English encounters on a regular basis.... but we won't always bake at the same time, as we want to make sure that the language lessons aren't always so fattening!