Those of you who know me in real life most likely already know that I spent a couple of years in my early twenties living in Mexico City. When I landed there at the age of 21 the full extent of my Spanish was the few words I’d picked up while watching Sesame Street as a child. So I knew that if I was ever to find myself crawling through a desert while in this huge city, I would be able to tell anyone I met that I wanted “Agua!” but that would be about it.
Almost straight away we (there were six of us) began our intensive Spanish lessons in the Berlitz language school. We attended these classes for four hours every weekday for about six months and I have to say that they were the best language classes I’ve ever had. I remember thinking that if Irish and French were taught using this method in Irish schools (no writing letters to imaginary pen friends and definitely no Peig Sayers!) I might have had a chance of actually learning those languages too.
Well, I say that the Berlitz classes were the best classes ever, in fact there was another method that I employed while living in Mexico that really helped me in getting to grips with Spanish. When we finally bought ourselves a small television after we’d been there almost a year I discovered the Mexican telenovela. I never persuaded any of my American roommates just how brilliant they were nor did they swallow my excuse that I was watching them for educational purposes.
The telenovela is often described as being a Latin-American or Spanish soap opera but really they’re not the same thing. They don’t usually run for more than a year so they’re more like a televised version of the old-fashioned serialised novels that Victorian newspapers used to do. The stories are always the same…beautiful girl from a wealthy family falls for caring, handsome but poor, and therefore unsuitable, cobbler/butcher/firefighter/circus performer or a variation on that theme and the main ingredient is plenty of melodrama…lots of evil step-mothers to slap young feisty heroines across the face. I loved them and would peer through the snowy reception straining to understand what on earth they were talking about. Plus they really did help me learn Spanish as it is spoken by everyday people…even if my vocabulary was a little unusual.
Well, the wonders of YouTube allowed me to have a little stroll down memory lane. So here’s a few of the best that I found and I hope you enjoy them. I mean…how could you not?
This last one is the original Colombian telenovela version of Ugly Betty which was brought to the US by Salma Hayek, obviously another telenovela fan:
