Monday, October 22, 2007

ADN (again)

The ADN newspaper is reporting the surprising victory of Kimi Raikkonen on four pages today. That's fine with me, the only problem I have with this is that his last name is Räikkönen. It will not surprise me if these ignorants spell his name next time as Rayconen to castellanized him even more.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The resistance of many Spanish people toward foreign languages is quite astounding.

The fact that people nowadays study English -which is something essential today- for 12 years at school, 12 years and when they leave bachillerato their level isn't even B1 (lower-intermediate) is actually not the result -although it helps- of a poor educational curriculum but rather the attitude of many Spaniards towards foreign languages.

In Spain, speaking English is a luxury. In other developed European countries, it's a given.

In fact, El Pais newspaper is quite unique for the fact that its "International" section comes first, and then the "National" section. This was done because, when it was founded in the late 1970s, Spain had inherited the Francoist doctrine of distrusting anything that came from abroad: be it food, ideas or languages.

El Pais tried to ofsset this by "forcing" so to speak its readers to read first the International section, so that people in the "new" Spain could learn that Spain is just another country in Europe and in the world, so that they could learn about what goes on in other countries, especially European at a time when Spain still dreamt of entering the EU.

This week, El Pais has done some kind of radical reformation. But in an interview on TV its editor said that they were keeping the International section first. I understand why.