This weekend saw St Valentine’s Day being celebrated in many countries around the world. It’s a day which in most countries today

is associated with romantic love. This is also true in Spain, but it’s not just lovers who celebrate and give tokens of their affection on 14th February.

The feast day of Saint Valentine, San Valentin, is called El Día del Amor y la Amistad in Spanish – the day of love and friendship. Just as in the UK, tokens of affection such as cards, flowers, chocolates and other gifts are exchanged, but these are not simply amorous gestures; they also extend to celebrate the spirit of love between friends.

Just as many people in the UK bemoan the commercialised nature of St Valentine’s Day, so in Spain a similar school of thought exists and those who like to poke fun at the ‘celebrations’ refer to it as El Día de El Corte Inglés, the Day of Corte Inglés – Spain’s largest department store. Non-cynics, however, celebrate unreservedly, donning traditional costumes, enjoying candlelit dinners with partners or other outings with friends, dancing and exchanging their love-themed gifts.

St Valentine’s Day celebrations in Spain are well worth experiencing at least once, but if you’ve missed 14th February, you may not have missed out altogether for this year. Some regions have their own special celebrations: in Catalonia love is celebrated on St George’s Day where it is called El Día de la Rosa (The Day of the Rose) or El Día del Libro (The Day of the Book), and in Valencia the most romantic day is 9th October, the feast day of Saint Dionysius, the local patron saint of lovers. If you are preparing for a trip or a move to Spain and need a Spanish teacher in London, get in touch.

This week we focus on a dialect widely spoken in the Southern part of Spain, Andalusian, or as it’s called in Spanish, Andaluz. It is spoken in Andalusia and Gibraltar as well as the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla on the north coast of Africa. The Andalusian dialect is, in fact, the second most widely spoken dialect in the country behind Castilian.

It has some differences in pronunciation from standard Castilian, although it is readily recognisable as the same language. Notable differences are widespread pronunciation of ‘s’, ‘z’ and soft ‘c’ sounds like the English ‘s’ rather than the ‘th’ sound of standard Spanish, and use of ustedes rather than vosotros for the second person plural. Regular readers of our blog may notice that these differences are also present in the Spanish spoken in Latin American countries, and that is because these former Spanish colonies were largely populated from Andalusian emigrants and so their dialects share many of the same fundamental characteristics.

Our Spanish lessons in London teach standard Castilian, but with a good grounding in this dialect, you should quickly adjust to Andalusian and other local variations as you travel to other regions of Spain and Spanish-speaking countries around the world.

Last week we mentioned some of the regional dialects which exist in Spain today. The region of Galicia in the northwest of Spain is one region where a distinct local dialect is spoken as a first language by around 56% of the population. This area includes the cities of La Coruña, Vigo and the capital Santiago de Compostela. During the Franco regime, it was forbidden to speak Galician in public, but the language was not to be suppressed and it has enjoyed official status in the region, alongside Castilian, since 1978.

As well as a language of its own, Galicia also has a number of cultural differences from the rest of Spain, which are often thought to be Celtic in origin. For example, at a Galician festival you can hear bagpipes (galleta galleo) and see pipers dressed in costumes very similar to those seen in Britain’s Celtic strongholds. There is even genetic evidence to suggest that the parts of Britain’s Celtic population actually came from Spain, although sceptics maintain that Galicia owes its culture and language to the fact that the area never succumbed to the Moorish invasions which so influenced the rest of the country.

Galicia borders Portugal and its language is closely related to Portuguese. The two languages remain mutually intelligible today, though Galician adheres to standard Spanish spelling conventions, a subject you can learn all about when you enrol in our intensive Spanish lessons in London.

You may have heard reference to Castellano, or Castilian, Spanish. This is something which often causes confusion amongst students and prospective students of the language. Is there a difference?

Spanish, as you may already know, has several variants which grew up out of the Latin language around 2,000 years ago. Today, some of these dialects, like Andalusian, Catalan, Galician and Basque (or Euskara) still survive and are official languages in the autonomous regions in which they are spoken. Castilian or Castellano, however, is the official form of the language as standardised in the 13th century by King Alfonso and regulated by the Royal Spanish Academy to this day. It is known as Castilian because it originated in the north-central region of Spain which includes Castile, but after it became the official language of government, it spread throughout the country and indeed to Latin American Spanish-speaking countries too.

Nowadays, Castellano and Español are effectively interchangeable terms. The name Castellano is generally used only to differentiate the ‘pure’ Spanish from these other dialects which are, after all, still undeniably Spanish. The Spanish Constitution of 1978 enshrines Castellano as the official language of the state, and so whether somebody refers to it as Spanish or Castilian is often simply a matter of personal, regional or political preference. As a learner, all you need to know is that Castellano is the ‘mainstream’ form of the language which has the highest number of speakers around the globe and which we teach in all of our Spanish language courses. So there’s no need to feel daunted or imagine you need to master different versions of the language as Castellano is spoken and understood right across the Spanish-speaking world.

It’s the time of year when many people are thinking about learning a new skill, and it just may be that learning a new language could fit the bill for you. If so, Spanish is an excellent choice. Though we’ll admit to a certain bias in favour of Spanish, there are statistics to back up this claim.

Spanish is now the most popular language for young people to learn. In 2013, the number of students taking Spanish at GCSE rose by 25.8 per cent, a bigger increase than any other language. Government is keen to boost learning of modern languages, especially after the results of the 2013 European Survey on Language Competences showed that only 10% of 14 to 15-year-olds in the UK achieve fluency in a second language as compared to an average of around 40% across Europe.

But learning a new language isn’t just the preserve of the young; many people take up a language later in life. It may be that they want to communicate more effectively with business colleagues on the continent, because they wish to relocate abroad, or simply for their own interest and enjoyment. Whatever your reason for tackling a new language, one-on-one tuition such as our Spanish courses in London can deliver much better results as lessons can be tailored to fit your own objectives and ability. What’s more, research from several universities suggests that learning another language can actually slow ageing of the brain and delay the onset of several types of dementia, so there are advantages beyond the potential improvement in career prospects or personal gratification that a second language affords.

With so many points in favour of learning a second language, why wait? Contact us to start your Spanish course now.

You may have heard of Spanish referred to as a Romance language, but what does that actually mean? It’s nothing to do with romance with a small r in the sense of being romantic (though the word has the same root, and many do think that Spanish does sound very romantic!), but rather it derives from Roman – the Romance languages are those that have their origins in the spoken Latin of Roman times.

The Romance languages evolved between the 6th and 9th centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. They include French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Romansch (spoken in parts of Switzerland), but by far the most widely-spoken of the Romance languages is Spanish, with an estimated 410 million native speakers worldwide. English is not a Romance language because, while it does have many words derived from Latin, it is more heavily influenced by Northern European languages, and as such is classed as Germanic. That doesn’t mean, however, that you won’t recognise a single word as a beginner in Spanish. They may belong to different families but our two languages share as many as 40% of words from the same root and with similar meanings – called cognates – which makes learning Spanish much easier than tackling a completely unrelated language. They also form sentences in much the same way.

Here at Lingua Clinic, a private tutor will guide you every step of the way through your Spanish journey. We offer Spanish tuition in London in several different formats. You can choose private, group or intensive lessons, depending on your personal preferences and learning objectives. We cater for all levels of learners and can fit around your busy schedule. So say ¡Feliz año nuevo! and make Spanish your resolution for 2015.

New Year’s Eve (Nochevieja or Fin de Año) is a time for family celebrations, usually consisting of a meal of shrimps or prawns and lamb or capon. Since 1962 the countdown to midnight has been broadcast on national TV from the clock on the Casa de Correos building in Puerta del Sol Square in Madrid where many people gather to see in the New Year in Spain’s equivalent of the UK’s broadcast from Big Ben.

For just over a century it has been customary to eat a single grape on each chime of the midnight bells. This tradition, known as Las doce uvas de la suerte (The 12 grapes of luck) was actually begun in the early 20th century by vine growers to dispose of a particularly good harvest, but superstition now has it that the practice will lead to a prosperous New Year – as will the wearing of new red underwear on New Year’s Eve. After the bells, fireworks, greetings of “¡Feliz Año Nuevo!” and toasts ensue and many revellers then go on to New Year parties (cotillones de nochevieja) which can last until morning.

The town of Bérchules, on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada in the La Alpujarra region, has a rather unusual tradition. Back in 1994, the town suffered a power outage which disrupted the usual New Year’s celebrations. Not to be deprived, the locals instead held their party on the first weekend in August. New Year’s Eve in August has since become quite a tourist attraction, with visitors swelling the small town’s population of only 800 to around 10,000.

If learning or improving your existing Spanish is one of your New Year’s resolutions, get in touch to arrange Spanish tuition in your home or office throughout the London area.

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you may already know that the Christmas season in Spain starts on 8 December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, or Inmaculada Concepcion. It might be a little early yet to wish people a happy Christmas (Feliz Navidad) but it’s never too early (or late!) to try your hand at the Spanish language. So, as we enter the festive season here are some ideas and vocabulary for you to try out.

Spaniards listen to Christmas carols (villanciscos) and often sing them at family gatherings, particularly when children are present. You would recognise the melodies of some carols and songs which are also popular in Spain, such as Silent Night (Noche de Paz), O Come All Ye Faithful (Adestes Fideles) and Jingle Bells (Cascabel), and of course Spain has many traditional Christmas songs of its own besides these. Music is a great aid to language learning, so why not download some of these carols and get to know the lyrics?

Christmas is, of course, also a time for eating and drinking with family and friends. If you like cooking, you could try your hand at making a selection of the foods eaten at the traditional Spanish family feast on Christmas Eve (La Noche Buena), or if you prefer you could bake a Christmas cake (la tarta de Reyes) or a Christmas pudding (el pudin de Navidad). Refer to your dictionary if you need to but do follow the original Spanish recipes as this is a great way to reinforce and grow your vocabulary of foodstuffs, and the tasty treats you will enjoy are an added bonus!

For a more in-depth understanding of the language, join our Private Spanish lessons, provided at your workplace or home throughout the London area.

In the last of our series of profiles on fashion designers from the Spanish-speaking world we look at Adolfo Dominguez, or Adolfo Domínguez Fernández to use the Spanish naming custom where, if you remember, Dominguez is the paternal surname and Fernández the maternal one.

Dominguez was born in May 1950 in the city of Ourense, in the Galicia region of Northern Spain. His father ran a fashion boutique in the city which the young Adolfo took over in the early 1970s and where he first started to produce his own designs. Fast forward a decade and Dominguez was ready to take his urban designs further afield. He showed his collection in Madrid in 1981 and went on to open his own store there and subsequently to build a successful chain of stores across Spain and the world. His first collection was launched under the tagline “La arruga es bella” meaning “Creases are beautiful”, a fitting description for his tailored designs from natural fabrics in loose-fitting styles.

Dominguez is as much known for his marketing strategy as for his clothing range. He made the early decision not to take his range into multi-brand retailers, instead setting up his own sophisticated distribution system to deliver his designs straight to the buyers via his own stores, franchises and more recently online. In 1997, in the ultimate mark of success for any business, Dominguez’ company was floated on the Stock Exchange.

To learn more of the vocabulary of fashion and business, enrol on one of our Spanish courses, available throughout the London area at a time to suit your busy schedule.

A relative newcomer on the fashion scene compared to some of the other designers we have profiled recently, Silvia Tcherassi has  none the less become one of the most influential contemporary Hispanic designers in her 15 years in the industry with her eclectic designs which have been described as “having the delicateness of a ballet dancer, while at the same time, the strength of a rock star”.

She was born in 1970 in Colombia and is based in Miami. Her meteoric rise to the top of the fashion world has seen her become a household name in Latin America and pick up several prestigious awards along the way including the title of “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”, an honour awarded by the French government to those who have made significant contributions to the arts or literature.

Tcherassi is renowned for her prêt-à-porter range and her stunning accessories, but in 2007 she branched out into the design of spaces with the launch of her Tcherassi Hotel Collection, the first of which is a renovated colonial mansion in Cartagena de Indias in her native Colombia.

Her activities go beyond design. She is also spokesperson for UNICEF’s “More Arts, Less Mines” campaign and in 2010 she published her first book, entitled “Elegancia sin Esfuerzo” (Effortless Elegance) in which she shares her advice on how to dress stylishly. If you are taking Spanish lessons, then you might like to add it to your reading list and see how much you are able to understand.