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5 Things I Learnt From Living In Spain And Not Being Fluent In Spanish

Tom Stevenson

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Back in September 2015, I decided to move to Barcelona to teach English. I had spent the previous three years living in Australia and New Zealand, as well as travelling around the Philippines and parts of Southeast Asia.

I was not finished with travelling or living abroad, so teaching English in another country was a good way of staying abroad while earning money at the same time.

I have no idea why I decided to live in Barcelona. I think it was due to the city having a beach nearby. I had been there before when I was younger, but it was a brief trip.

I was very much moving to the city without a clue of what to expect.

In my research, I realised that they speak two languages in Barcelona. Obviously, they speak Spanish due to the city being part of Spain, but they also speak Catalan, which is the language of the Catalonian region.

This left me in a quandary before I left. Should I learn Catalan, or should I just carry on learning Spanish? I wasn’t sure what I should do.

After doing a bit of research, it soon became clear that although everyone spoke Catalan, they also spoke Spanish too, so it didn’t matter too much about learning Catalan.

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