Spanish Flight: Follow the Announcements

How to play: you are the passenger in seat 32A on a flight to Barcelona, and everything anybody says to you is in Spanish. An announcement comes over the cabin speakers, or the attendant stops at your row — and instead of picking a translation, you do the thing: raise the window blind, fold the tray table away, switch the reading light off, press the call button. The whole cabin is on screen the entire time. What makes this one Spanish rather than any other cabin is that the instruction often arrives as one word: Recójala is recoger + la — fold IT away, and the «la» is there because la mesita is feminine. Quíteselos is three pieces at once. And the accent moved when the pronoun was glued on, which is how you know it is one word and not two. The trap the whole deck is built around is bájela: it lowers the blind on one leg and puts the tray table down on the next, and both are feminine, so the pronoun tells you nothing — only the noun in front of it does. One more thing to unlearn: Spanish says «abróchese el cinturón», never «su cinturón», because the reflexive has already said whose it is. Three surfaces answer the three kinds of cue: the cabin panel, a seat map of thirty seats for anything with a row number in it, and the service trolley at meal time — ¿pollo o pescado?, ¿con gas o sin gas?, a cortado and a wedge of tortilla. Get it wrong and the wrong thing happens — reach for the seat belt when you were asked about the overhead locker and the belt really does fasten — then the panel marks what the line asked for, the crew put you right, and the cue comes back around later. There is no failing and no time limit. What the clock remembers is how long the leg took, and the stamps how many you got first time. Five legs make the flight: boarding, the safety demonstration, cruise, the meal service, and landing — and the cabin grows from four things you can touch to eighteen as the flight goes on.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The Level row is where on the Lesson 5 scale the next flight sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. Each level flies the leg the lesson has reached: the lesson's early levels board through the safety demonstration and cruise, and from level five the meal service and landing hold at their fullest while the lesson keeps going. The three difficulties are how much of each line is written down: Beginner puts the respell and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the respell alone, Advanced the Spanish by themselves. The difficulty is a free choice at every level. It is the fifth lesson of the Spanish course, and it picks up where Spanish Flight: Follow the Announcements — the check-in hall — leaves you at the gate.