They were just speaking a different language to me. The great chess authors of this world weren’t being deliberately vague. That was kind of like getting annoyed at my Spanish friends for not ‘just’ speaking English, simply because I didn’t speak Spanish (yet). Is that too much to ask? Just say it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and keep your medieval time contraption, you weirdo.Įxcept, that is not entirely fair to the titled chess authors of this world.

I don’t want to have to go through all these variations and work out what you mean, just tell me, I thought. I felt like I was trying to find out what time it was, and when I asked the author they smirked and handed me a sundial. I was so annoyed at these Grandmasters and their hieroglyphic-looking tombs, all letters and numbers, making no sense. When I first tried to read a chess book I was furious. Oddly, I did blame chess authors for the exact same issue. I took responsibility for the language barrier myself, and I tried to get better at speaking Spanish to resolve the problem. I never blamed my Spanish friends for this. Sometimes, the meaning of whatever I and my Spanish friends were trying to say to each other was simply lost and we’d just have to shrug, laugh and move on. There was a language barrier between me and my Spanish friends just as there was between me and my titled chess friends (or chess authors I believed were my friends). (Are you also learning chess and would you like support? As a chess coach specialing in Adult Improvers, I offer a free 60-minute trial lesson which you can book here.) This is not a very efficient way to communicate.īut I also feel like as adults this is how we play and learn chess to begin with. Then my brain thought of a reply in English, translated that back into Spanish and then my mouth tried to pronounce the words with varying degrees of success. My brain would then hear these Spanish words and translate them in my head into English. I started out by hearing Spanish words (those were pretty easy to come by because I was in Spain).

Well, when I first moved to the Asturian mountains in Northern Spain, I thought learning Spanish might be a good idea. Embarrassing.īut what does a Scottish man mixing up the words 'mantequilla' and 'manguera' in his first few months in Spain have to do with chess? I think I’m putting in a world-class irrigation system, and the farm shop guy thinks I’m trying to bake the world's largest cake. What I was actually trying to order was 400 metres of water piping.

The chess lv.100 review