Bloomberg’s Spanish Good Enough For New York Press Conferences

| Sunday, January 4, 2009

If true, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is to be congratulated for his efforts over many years - rarely does a well-known politician say anything comprehensible when he tries to speak in a foreign tongue.

(Image by thurion on Flickr.)

Anyone who teaches languages will recognise Mr. Bloomberg’s Spanish learning efforts as those of a typical busy professional trying to speak better and master a language he needs for his work:

Latinos are a sizable and rapidly growing segment of city voters – as much as 20% by some estimates – and with no Latinos in the race at the moment, every viable mayoral candidate is brushing up on his pretérito verbs.

Wearing the badge of a true believer, Mr. Bloomberg even repeatedly professes that the one thing he would really like to do, New Year’s resolution or not, is to improve his Spanish:

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
My Spanish. I’ve been studying for seven years and I still speak como un novato.

For their part, Spanish politicians have traditionally been atrocious at speaking English and are ridiculed on Spanish TV and later on YouTube every time they try.

Even Franco once tried a quick speech in English (see below).

Current Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero speaks very bad English even though he had English classes for a number of years.

Watching the clip below of ZP trying to talk to Chirac and Schroeder, it would be easy to be cynical and say it’s no wonder international relations are in the state that they’re always in.

He claims it’s because he speaks better French but, if you listen to the third clip below and speak even a little French, you’ll see that is – as politicians like to say – a bit of a mis-statement. Update: thanks to the US Airways Hudson River crash, we now have a video clip of Michael Bloomberg speaking in Spanish at a press conference.