Radio: Let’s Learn Spanish

Would “the big cockroach” be la cucaracha grande? If it would, it’d be a dandy name for some of the hotels I’ve stayed in in my time.

Is that the same con that’s in chile con carne, the popular Mexican blue plate special?

What do these babies do in the plural?

Last week banter like this was making language teaching great fun for teacher and pupils alike. The Spanish lessons were being given by radio and their popularity was zooming. Some 4,500 listeners had written to Manhattan station WQXR for Spanish-English word lists accompanying the thrice weekly broadcasts* of Let’s Learn Spanish.

This two-week-old transcribed program was the second broadcasting experiment† of the TIME Inc. Radio Programs Department (TIME, Sept. 28). It was designed for a postwar world in which many U.S. citizens will want to learn to speak other people’s languages—especially the predominant language of the other half of the American continent. The program aims to impart a working knowledge of everyday Spanish in 39 broadcasts.

Semanticists have worked out a basic English (850 words) to teach to foreigners who want to learn to speak American. But Americans, who are not good linguists, have been offered no such simple introduction to other people’s tongues. Let’s Learn Spanish is designed to teach a basic Spanish. Its pedagogical method is a succession of conversational exchanges between an unmistakable American, Joe Bishop, and a Spanish-speaking friend, Pepe Obispo.

The program’s natural flow and fun springs very largely from the characters and voices of Joe and Pepe. They are neither professors, semanticists nor actors. Joe is huge, hugely bald Joel Grover Sayre, author (Rackety Rax, etc.), newspaperman (New York Herald Tribune, etc.), Hollywood scenarist (Gunga Din, etc.), scholar (Oxford, Heidelberg, etc.), a Midwesterner who looks like a transcendent ward boss and has also been described as a “wandering behemoth.” Friend Pepe is black-haired, blue-eyed, impeccable Pedro Francisco Domecq, Vizconde de Almocaden, U.S. representative of his family’s ancient (1730) Spanish sherry business, whose tart, fluent radio style amiably betrays his delight at becoming a teacher.

Let’s Learn Spanish not only offers a Spanish vocabulary appropriate for ordinary use, but also gives listeners a chance to hear it used without pedantry. There are “heavy-duty” adjectives, outrageous word-fixing puns, “today’s special,” nouns that “walk out with” adjectives, phrases like “considerable jive in the singular,” and a host of colloquial asides.

Sayre spent four months working out a usable basic Spanish and writing the script. He found that the average Mexican laborer has about 500 words at his command, a white-collar worker some 2,000. With some advice from Harvard’s famed Semanticist Ivor Armstrong (“Basic English”) Richards, he boiled the Spanish course down to a working vocabulary. This 13-week transcribed series is available to any radio station.

Whether Spanish can be taught by radio remains to be seen, but recorded language teaching is growing and a number of New York State public schools think that Let’s Learn Spanish can help. They have made the program a part of their curriculum. Explains Sayre, who once taught school himself: “We are just two or three guys trying to have some fun, teach some meat-and-potatoes Spanish, teach something on the air without stuffiness. There are plenty of people who would just as soon learn a little something as have a free sample of shaving cream.”

*Mon., Wed., Fri., 5:30-5:45, E.W.T.

†The first: WQXR’s 9 to 9:15 evening news roundup.