Is that for those who can or can't play chess?

Work it out, it might help your brain

Oo-er a challenge. Now let me think: will I accept.......

Slow thinker hey take up speed chess.

Speed chess... now let me think................

seems to me this is getting off thread, oh dear.

Plus I think there's been enough feeding the troll for one day.

No he didn't, it's in common use here in Andalucia by the locals and I use the word myself!

I guess Spain is a lot different from other places due to the large number of tourists , but funnily enough where I live I have noticed over the years that it tends to be the British who end up speaking the best Thai , and a lot more of them make the effort to learn some Thai. Of course there are people who go years without learning any but maybe this just says something about the people woh end up in Thailand / Spain.

When I used to go to Madrid years ago I think all I learnt was 2 beers , lighter , papers , how much ?

You can go a long way with that !

chess.com

check it out. Play online with people from all round the world.

No it isnt. You've just let everyone know how little Spanish you know!

I used it once in all innocence many years ago and swiftly got corrected.

A friend married a Russian girl and brought her to live in Spain. She steadfastly refuses to learn Spanish. "I speak good English and that's enough". They have friends who are Indian and they have just the same attitude. So it's not just Brits.

I've noticed a similar thing. If you learn a language seriously and realise you need to learn the grammar structure, then you will end up pleaking a very correct form of the language. A bit like learning BBC English.

Locals speak the language more thru absorbtion, especially these days when the teaching of grammar in UK classes seems frowned upon.

My kids learned german for several years at school, and knew nothing about grammar. Consequently, their German was useless outside the narrow constraints of their classroom vocabulary.

Is that still so? In my second year of secondary school (1962-3) I was taught practically the whole of English grammar, logically and scientifically, and I'm eternally grateful! It was also a help in learning other languages. Now teachers in language schools have to learn their grammar from scratch before they teach it to foreign students. But don't worry, sooner or later the pendulum will swing back to grammar only, with no free expression. The happy medium is a difficult concept for education theoreticians.
By the same logic maths shouldn't be taught because children will learn to count anyway!