The Australian makes the European scene that has gone viral for speaking Catalan: "My Instagram has exploded."

Barcelona"My Instagram account has exploded. Friends tell me they want to be my agents," laughs Finn Higgins, an Australian from Melbourne. The 24-year-old arrived in Barcelona less than two years ago to study a master's degree in landscape architecture at the ETSAB (UPC). He learned Catalan and always speaks to those around him. "I learned Catalan with the friends From the floor, with social networks and Carles Porta, I'm hooked on Crimes", he says.

What he didn't imagine is that a video taken of him on the street the day CF Europa played the derby with Sant Andreu would go viral because he speaks such good and fast Catalan. His case shows that emotional ties and the complicity of one's environment are essential for learning the language.

Higgins knew about "Catalonia and the Existence of Catalan" before coming to do his Master's in Architecture because in 2014, a student from Gràcia, Enric Sagarra, son of urban planner Ferran Sagarra, former director of the University of Barcelona, showed up in his class in Melbourne for a year. Over the course of ten years, the students kept in touch, and Higgins visited his friend a couple of times. So when he thought about doing a Master's to further his studies and leave Australia, he thought: "In Barcelona I have a friend, a renowned architecture school, and a culture that interests me."

He landed in Barcelona in July 2023. The year before, he had taken a Spanish course because the UPC's Master's degree is taught in Spanish, and there were no Catalan courses offered in Australia either. Even so, the reality has surprised him: "I didn't imagine I would speak Catalan better than Spanish, but it turned out that way."

"Whenever people ask me how I learned Catalan, I say it was through a lot of luck and a lot of effort," he says. He attributes this luck to the fact that, within two weeks of being here, he was already sharing an apartment with three Catalan-speaking kids. "That's a step foreigners can't take," he admits. Since he couldn't speak Catalan, they started in English, but he took a free Catalan course at the Consortium for Linguistic Normalization, and at Christmas they decided to change languages at home. "This was a very important moment, extremely difficult at first, because I had only taken a basic course, and changing languages meant rebuilding relationships with friends," he recalls.

The other crucial element of socialization was football: his friend making him a member of Europa. "It's an environment you can go to every week if you don't have many friends and can't hold a conversation; if you're watching football, you feel Catalan and it's not uncomfortable," he explains. This was a space for peer socialization, allowing them to immerse themselves in Catalan and dare to use it without shame. Little by little, he has built a "very strong network of Catalan friends."

Avoiding the Erasmus and expat bubble

Higgins has a clear opinion: "If you don't speak Spanish, learning Catalan can be easier. I began all my relationships primarily in Catalan, and that's why I practiced it every day, just to live a normal life. I know a lot of Spanish-speaking people who arrive, form their relationships in Spanish, and although they understand Catalan and say they want to speak it," it changes. The student has also observed "the English-speaking world that lives in Barcelona, ​​​​and is very old, but they live in a totally different world," he says. But he doesn't blame them: "It's hard to find someone willing to make the effort to speak with a person who can't say anything to help them learn it," he says. But at the same time, he is surprised that foreigners don't want to learn more Catalan to find more friends here.

In his case, Catalan "was a political decision, but not the only one," because he has always found himself in environments where it is simply "useful to speak Catalan," with friends and their families. Even for his master's thesis, he needed Catalan to read bibliography. "It would have been difficult if I hadn't known it," he says. The language is even an advantage when it comes to flirting: "If you try to flirt in English in Barcelona, ​​you have no shame, I can't," he says, laughing.

The worst part, for him, was trying to maintain bilingual conversations. "Here, many people don't mind if the other person speaks Spanish, and it's natural to maintain Catalan. For me, this was impossible at first; I was doing a crazy mix of two languages ​​I was learning," he recalls. The best part is people's reaction when they hear him speak Catalan. It still surprises him: "It's impressive," he says. The virality of the video reaffirms this.