Miss Polyglot

It's really working!

2012-02-15T20:21:00.000-08:00

I'm about ready to leap into the air with joy. Shin-nan-da! How exciting! I just re-watched the first three and a half minutes of episode 13 from City Hunter (I've previously watched this drama). In those three minutes, I was able to piece together so many familiar words in the course of the characters' interactions, that I was following the conversation. Of course, it helps that I have a lot of background knowledge coming into the scene. It was AMAZING, though.

This TV method really works.

I've been using the subtitles, but they definitely teach me a lot of words. Every time I watch, I have my notebook next to me, making notes of commonly heard sound combinations and match-ups that I notice between the subtitles and the words leaving the actors' mouths. Today alone, I picked up on how to say, "Find it," "I know," and "fine." I recognized the questions "Where is it?," "What is?," "Where are you going?," and "Why? Why not?"

I've been combining the drama-watching with audio lessons from Talk to Me in Korean dot com and video lessons from KWow (YouTube).

The more words I learn, the more I recognize. It's like this gargantuan puzzle that's slowly coming together before my very eyes.

I have to recommend this very quirky romantic drama Flower Boy Ramyun Shop. It was easy to get sucked into and fun to watch.

Meeting with my Korean friend tomorrow. Yay!

INPUT STATS
Current KDrama:
시크릿가든 "see-kuh-rit-gah-duhn" (Secret Garden)
TV hours from last drama (Flower Boy Ramyun Shop): 12
Total TV hours: 90 (410 left to goal)

Bombarded by emails: I'm popular!

2012-02-05T20:36:00.000-08:00

Just a heads up that if anyone wants to learn any language at all and be tutored for free, all that person needs to do is make a profile on Conversation Exchange. I swear, I've never met a single Korean in my entire time living in Boston by simply roaming the streets, but, man, are they coming out of the woodwork to learn English! I'm being bombarded by emails of people (some from outside of Boston, too, actually) who want to learn English and teach me Korean. And it's all free. It's all about helping each other out. How cool is that?!

Of course, I've already got a Korean teacher/English student/new friend. I texted him to ask if he did his language homework for me (I did mine!). He texted back and told me how dismayed I will be over the pages and pages he has written for me to correct. i think you will say me "Oh too many diary! can you reduce it?" I told him to bring it on. I ain't scurred. In fact, I'm flattered to have a student who does his homework so diligently. Probably the best one I have.

It is not lost on me--I promise--the irony that I'm chuckling a bit at his text message, although I'm fairly certain I've butchered his beautiful language in my own (Korean) homework ramblings. We'll see what the verdict is on Wednesday. Odd grammatical errors, accidental misinterpretations, erroneous word substitutions, and funny accents. These are the parts that make the language learning process so pricelessly amusing. And we should never let the opportunity to enjoy and celebrate that awkwardness slip by.

In the meantime, enjoy some pricelessness from my favorite Korean actor: You're my eeeehbree-tiiiiing.

졸려. (Jol-lyuh.) I'm sleepy. 잘자! (Jal-jah!) Goodnight!

Intense.

2012-02-04T19:36:00.000-08:00

Just finished watching the last episode of City Hunter and I've finally stopped sniffling and started breathing normally again. I'm a bit sad it's over, actually. If you like action, political scandal, revenge plots, gratuitous fight scenes, spy technology gadgets, and true love stirred into your afternoon tea, I'd highly recommend checking this one out (p.s. it's currently streaming on Netflix). Here... check out twelve minutes and seven seconds of it here. Don't say I didn't warn you about the intensity level. Oh, and everyone in the entire series uses an iPhone.

As of this week, I was only half-way through the episodes and decided I couldn't wait any longer to see how the plot played out. It was taking far too long to watch each scene without subtitles and then go back with subtitles and watch them all again. So I watched the second half with subtitles. In the end, I understand that only watching with subtitles does interfere with my ability to pick out some of the words on my own, but I am willing to cheat a little. Input is input.

Actually, the subtitles helped me get no less than 20 new words into my working vocabulary. Well, into my notebook, anyway. As for their entrance into my long-term memory in a useful way, we'll have to see about that.

Two exciting things have happened with my Korean listening skills: I have enough vocabulary words that are familiar to me now that (1) I am able to recognize several words as synonyms of each other in context of speech. Also, (2) I have just started to hear combinations of familiar words. It's pretty cool.

Example: I know two words that can mean "really": 진짜 (jin-jah) and 정만 (jeong-mal). I have heard the latter used with the word 미안해 (mian-he) which means "I'm sorry," to form 정만 미안해 (jeong-mal mian-he) which means "I'm very sorry." You can also say 죄송합니다 (joe-song-hap-ni-da) to mean "I'm sorry." Hoorah for synonyms!

Because there are so many registers that you must use to address different people in Korean, I am finding that synonyms are many and varied. It's a little intimidating, but the cultural nuances of how they're used are amazing. I guess with a language that has two completely different systems of numbers to count, you have to assume that there will be a few other duplicates ready to spring out and surprise you later, as well.

Just so you know the kind of stuff I'm dealing with here... if you want to count to 10, you can write the numbers out like this, just as we do in English: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. But the actual word forms (one, two, three, etc.) can be as follows:

Native Korean Number System
하나, 둘, 셋, 넷, 다섯, 여섯, 일곱, 여덟, 아홉, 열
(ha-na, dul, set, net, da-seot, yeo-seot, il-gop, yeo-deol, a-hop, yeol)

OR

Sino-Korean Number System
일, 이, 삼, 사, 오, 육, 칠, 팔, 구, 십
(il, i, sam, sa, o, yuk, chil, pal, gu, sip)

Pretty exciting stuff. Looks like I've got my work cut out for me.

INPUT STATS
Most recently finished KDrama:
시티헌터 "see-tee-hun-tuh" (City Hunter)
TV hours (City Hunter): 36
Total TV hours: 78 (422 left to goal)

Way better than YouTube...

2012-02-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

What?, you might be saying. Better than YouTube?! What on earth is this girl talking about? My new Korean tutor. Yes, a real person. And a fairly normal-seeming one at that. No longer must I google search all of my pressing questions. This means that I have actual human interaction as part of my language learning! Hooray!

So, his English is pretty great (although he won't fully take my compliment). This turns out to be good news for both of us because otherwise we would just be staring at each other blankly. I know about thirty Korean words... forty tops.

When I tell him how good his speaking is, he brushes it off modestly. His accent, he says, is too strong and a lot of people have to ask him to repeat himself. So, during our little language exchange, we mainly worked on his pronunciation of the American English /r/ and /l/ sounds. In Korean, both the /r/ and the /l/ are just variants of the same consonant, ㄹ. That funny little letter that looks like a number two sometimes sounds more like an /l/ and sometimes closer to an /r/, depending on its position in the word and its juxtaposition with either consonants or vowels. If that confuses you, consider s in English. Sometimes it sounds like an /s/ (like at the end of the word "plants" because it follows the consonant t) and sometimes it sounds like /z/ (like at the end of the word "bees" because it follows the vowel e).

Anyway, I love teaching people how to change their /r/... Okay, make an 'aaaaaah' sound, and then slowly curl your tongue towards the back of your throat like this (miming with hand) 'aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrr'... goooooood. The both of us were sitting in the cafe making aaaaaarrrrrraaaaaarrrrrrrraaaaaaaarrrrrrrraaaarrrrrr noises. It probably seemed like we were suffering from food poisoning simultaneously, but I think he got the hang of it.

Then he announced that it was time for some Korean and proceeded to write these fantastic sentences in hangul (the Korean alphabet) for me to schlepp through ungracefully like a first grader sounding out Hop on Pop. I did, however, get a compliment from him that my pronunciation is very good on the words that I do know. That is my specialty, after all... mimicry. Don't know what I'm sayin', but boy do I say it well!

As far as him actually being Kim Hyun Joong in disguise (very good-looking Korean actor/singer, to refresh your memory), he shot down that idea pretty quickly via email last week.

I'm sorry that i am not Kim Hyun Joong, he is tall and handsome man, but i'm not. Don't look forward to appearance like him. i'm sorry about that. kkkk

But you know? He had nothing to be sorry about. Really. It was a win situation.

Looking forward to next week's session when I get to show off my pronunciation prowess and marvelous memorization skillz. It's all I've got for the moment. Thirty words, flashcards, and excessive optimism.

Shin nan da! I'm excited!

2012-01-26T18:16:00.000-08:00

That is just one of the very few things I can say in Korean 신난다! "I'm excited!" or "How exciting!" I say this because I'm going to hang out with a real life Korean person next week to do a language exchange. The guy's name sounded familiar when he first sent me an email through Conversation Exchange... and then I realized that it was nearly the same name as that hunky Korean actor/pop-singer that I daydream about. The guy told me to call him by the American name that he chose, because his Korean one is "difficult to pronounce," but you know me... always up for a challenge:

We'll just have to see how hard it is to pronounce your name. I'm pretty good at pronouncing things, so you may be surprised. I just realized that your name looks and sounds to me very close to the name of that famous pop-singer guy, Kim Hyun Joong. If you ARE him in disguise, that's okay, too. I won't tell anyone.

A girl can dream, can't she? And man, I love how polite Korean culture is. It carries through in how delicately they word their English and how many times they tell you they are happy/thankful for something very small that you may not even be worthy of being thanked for.

I'm really glad to meet you. I really want to meet you in person. I think i will be a good Korean tutor for you and you will be a good English tutor for me.

I think it was good news that you can't speak in Korean a lot for me, because then i should speak in English, it will be very good for me.

I think it is also good for you that I can teach you not only Korean but also Korean culture and somethings.

I tell you I really want to meet you again.

That pretty much made my day last week. I mean, the kid's English is pretty freaking good... if you consider the fact also that I can't even say anything cohesive or sensical (my opposite of nonsensical, of course) in Korean at all.

Ya, pae-go-ppah! Chin-cha? Chin-cha. Ko-pee? Ne. Ara-sah.
Hey, I'm hungry! Really? Really. Coffee? Yes. Got it.

In other news, I wanted to share a couple of articles here:
9 Hard Languages for English Speakers (of which Korean is one)
9 Easy Languages for English Speakers (of which Spanish and French are listed)

And a fun video-learning source: How NOT to say "You're welcome," in Korean

I'VE BEEN SLACKING A BIT, BUT HERE ARE THE INPUT STATS
Current KDrama:
시티헌터 "see-tee-hun-tuh" (City Hunter)
TV hours (City Hunter): 24
Total TV hours: 68 (432 left to goal)

Thanks for the great idea!...

2012-01-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

I have a language-learning friend in another part of the world right now who gave me a fantastic resource. It's called Conversation Exchange, and it revolves around the idea of getting native speakers together to teach one another. Brilliant! I plan to use this to find some Koreans in Boston. Culturally, I think they are a bit shy/reserved, so it's maybe the only way I can speak with anyone without being totally presumptuous and embarrassing myself. I can't even fathom what sort of sentence might leave my mouth if I tried to find a Korean speaker on my own: Excuse me, I notice that you are Asian. Might you also be Korean?

What I hear when I listen to Korean...

2012-01-18T19:06:00.002-08:00

Sound waves. After only 60(ish) hours of listening to Korean, just merely the sound of it is comfortable and pleasant to my ears. I have grown accustomed to hearing the pronunciations and the rhythms. I say that I am understanding words here and there... so what exactly does Korean sound like to me when I listen to it?

AT FIRST
Blahblahblahblah blah? Blah blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah. Blah. Blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah. BLAH! BLAHBLAH! BLAAAH! Blahblahblahblah blah blah??! Blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah. Blah. Blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah BLAHBLAH! Blah blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah. Blah. Blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblahblah. Blah?! Blah.

NOW
Blahblahblahblah blahaseyo? No. Blah blahblahblaaaaah love blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah. Blah. What?! Blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblahaseyo. Blaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah. HEY! DAD! BLAAAH! Blahblahhowblah blah blah??! Blahblahblaaaaah blah blahaseyo. Blah blahblah blahaseyo. Blahblah blah blah blah. Got it. Thank you. Blahblahblaaaaah blah blah I'm hungry blahblahblahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah BLAHBLAH! Blah never blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah. I'm sorry. Blahblahblaaaaah blahaseyo. Blah blah blahblahblahblah. Really? Yes.

And if the conversation is formal, it sounds to me a bit like this:
Hello, blahblahblahblah blah? Blah blahblahblaaaaah blah blahsumnida. Blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah. Blah. What? Blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blahumnida. Blahblahblahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblahumnida. Blaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah. Blahblahhowblah blah blah. Blahblahblaaaaah blah why blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blahsumnida. Okay. Thank you. Blahblahblaaaaah blah blahsumnida. blahblahblahblah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah BLAHBLAHUMNIDA! Blah blah blah blahblah blah blahblah blah blah blah. Thank you. Blahblahblaaaaah blah blah blah blahblahblahblahumnida. Yes.

As my friend who goes on lots of business trips to Asia once put it, "You know you're listening to Korean when everything ends in umnida." It's true. It's the polite, formal ending... for verbs, I think.

Wonder what this will sound like in a few months if I keep up the listening practice?

"This is so exciting, you can totally do it."

2012-01-17T15:57:00.000-08:00

My sister has a friend who learned (as I recall hearing) Japanese by simply watching Japanese TV. I have been wanting to pry a bit into her process, as she eventually went to Japan and wound up being successful in her language-learning venture. Until I get anything close to a real interview, here is the majority of the conversation we had on g-chat today. It made me happy and hopeful:

Words in italics are words I have added to clarify things.

Me: question for you...

or... in fact... many questions

you learned japanese mainly through watching anime?

how did that process go?

just curious
Friend: I would say that the J-Dramas (Japanese dramas) help a lot more than anime because you can see the people forming the sounds.

Me: just wondering about how you did it. subtitles?

sometimes?
Friend: Yes, I watched subtitled shows and I listened to A LOT of J-Pop (Japanese pop music).

Sometimes my roommate and I would make subtitles for music videos as well.

Are you going to start studying Japanese?

Me: nope. i'm sort of addicted to the idea of korean

because i love the alphabet system

Friend: It goes in circles!

I mean each character is read in a circle, right?

Me: not a circle per se

as a block

each block is a syllable

and very phonetic

really clever, actually

and very easy to read

Friend: Yes, I love that exact thing about Japanese.

Me: is it phonetic too?

Friend: Yup.

Me: oh, how come i didn't remember that?!

cool

Friend: Well, they have three writing systems and two of them are phonetic.

Me: yeah, three--sheesh

well, technically, koreans have to learn a certain base number of chinese characters as well... just like the japanese

Friend: This is so exciting, you can totally do it.

Me: how proficient did you get?

just by listening all the time?

were you conversational before going to japan?

Friend: I got to the point where I could watch a drama without subtitles and understand almost all of it.

Me: nice!!!!!

how many years did that take? a whole year?

Friend: Yeah, about that.

But my speaking skills were only so-so until I went to Japan and started talking to actual Japanese people.

Friend: I'm told that the grammar of Japanese and Korean are very similar.

Maybe we can study it together sometime!

Me: nice

Friend: We shall reconvene on this topic.

Me: YES

While searching online for videos to show her of some K-pop (Korean pop music), I came across a video of one of my favorite Korean actors speaking Japanese. He looks a little out of his element, but I have no idea what he's saying. I wish I knew whether he is actually cracking jokes, or if his Japanese is so bad that everyone's cracking up. It sounds like he says "piano" around 3:22 and "fried chicken" a few seconds later.

It made me wonder if it is just as common for Asians living in Asia to know neighboring Asian languages as it is for Europeans to know neighboring European languages... or for Americans to know European languages, for that matter. I suppose I always thought that there would be more of a barrier in Asia, since the writing systems are all very distinct and not shared across languages. At least with European languages, they not only share writing systems, but they share much of the vocabulary (in the form of cognates) as well. Cognates (English/Spanish/French)= Enchanted (to meet you)! ¡Encantada! Enchantée!

Quite on the opposite end of the spectrum, I stumbled upon the blog of a man named Benny whose language approach is the opposite of the TV Method I am trying with Korean. He starts speaking right away! He's very dedicated and makes a lot of sense. I invite you to check out his blog, Fluent in 3 months, and watch his videos. He's learning Mandarin.

City Hunter is awesome.

2012-01-15T16:44:00.000-08:00

The good news is, I am more than one tenth of the way toward my goal of watching 500 hours of Korean television. Remarkably, I am picking out at least one familiar word per minute, if not more. They are fairly common words, and I definitely hear them better when the subtitles are off. My ears are in super listening mode then. I am starting to really like this language learning method.

I can't say enough good things about City Hunter. It's action-packed and the characters are easy to get attached to. Love it. I really appreciate that the bad attitude of the main male character didn't take the whole series to turn itself around. He was rude only for the first several episodes, and now he's actually acting nice to the main female character. If my expectations seem sadly low, I blame it on the first two dramas I watched. Why the main female characters stuck around as long as they did (and why I continued watching the storyline unfold) is beyond me.

In case I didn't mention this before, I have finally decided this: I am watching each scene twice. The first run-through, I watch without the subtitles and try to get the gist on my own, then I go back and watch it a second time with the subtitles. I decided that this is the way to go for a few reasons:

On a sentence-by-sentence basis, the subtitles give me clues about what I should be listening for. They have, on a number of occasions actually taught me a word. The best example of this was the word for "I'm sorry," which is pronounced mian-he (and sounds a bit like "bian-aaaay" when they say it). I noticed the characters saying these words every time the subtitles said, "I'm sorry," so I very quickly put that together when I ordinarily wouldn't have on my own for quite some time.
Using the subtitles, I go back and confirm my suspicions about the words I think I've heard from the first, unsubtitled run-through. Often, I find that I am right, which is great.
Input is much more successful and comprehensible when the whole story background is known. Without the storyline information that the subtitles provide, I have very little knowledge about the goings-on in this drama. I suspect that would make me less successful in deciphering some things and in making sense of what I am watching.
Interest! I lose interest in watching reaaaaaally quickly when I have no idea what is going on. For the sake of my continued watching and learning, I need to be engaged in the storylines that I am dedicating hours to watching anyway. I want this to at least be fun! And it is.

INPUT STATS
Current KDrama:
시티헌터 "see-tee-hun-tuh" (City Hunter)
TV hours (City Hunter): 19
Total TV hours: 63 (437 left to goal)

Blogs I want to make note of in case I'd like to look at them again:
Gorilla Teacher: Diaries of a Young American in South Korea
Korean Language Notes

To the Korean language I say, "Sa Rang Hae"

2012-01-12T19:47:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I'm rhyming in Korenglish. I just looked that word up. I figured there must be something along the lines of Spanglish, which is perhaps one of my favorite ways to write, ever.

"Sa Rang Hae" I mentioned in the last post, means "I love you." Looks like this: 사랑해.

I wanted to report about the effectiveness of the TV method and the things I've been noticing. First off, I can pick out quite a few words at this point, and have been noticing that I catch familiar words that I know while not reading the subtitles. I then go back and look to see if I was right, and sha-bang, it's right in there. I can see that this is a much different way than I learned Spanish. By listening to the language all the time, there is no way that I will become overwhelmed by the speed at which people talk. I will pick up words naturally in their contexts. Hurrah!

The horrible thing about learning a language by myself is, that I want to shout to the high heavens about all the things I'm learning. I want to talk to people about the dynamic characters in the shows I'm watching. I want to gush about how cool the words sound or the fact that the writing looks so beautiful when people scrawl it out or that I like wondering if my brain will take a long time to process a language whose grammar is flip-flopped from my own. It's so exciting!!! And no one to share it with.

Well, anyway, I'd be doing this in a notebook by myself (reflecting) if blogging never existed. I want to watch the evolution of this thing... this evasive thing that happens when languages charm us and start to take hold in our brains. I wish I could watch it happening. I wish I knew what makes words suddenly make sense, suddenly mean themselves. Like, at what point did mesa stop meaning "table" to me? At what point did mesa simply just mean mesa? There was a switch somewhere... that all of a sudden made the word itself. One day, mesa carried meaning to me without translation. It happens so slyly that I can't even see it happening when I watch for it.

With that, I'm going to leave you with a picture of one of the actors who I can attribute a great deal of my motivation to. Keeps me watching. Easy on the eyes. (Understatement.)

INPUT STATS
Current KDrama:
시티헌터 "see-tee-hun-tuh" (City Hunter)
TV hours (City Hunter): 12
Total TV hours: 56 (444 left to goal)

I wonder if by the time I reach 500 watched hours I will understand 25 percent of what I am watching, just like this other guy I read about online who was watching Mandarin TV. I sort of doubt it, but who knows? I'm curious to find out. I'm pairing the TV method with learning vocabulary and practicing writing words. I even make flashcards so I can practice reading. Love it.

A few links

2012-01-08T12:01:00.000-08:00

... that I don't feel like keeping open in my browser window, but may be worth having handy:

Life in Korea dot Com: Korean Language Practice
Learn Korean dot Net: Basic Lessons
Eat your Kimchi dot Com: A Canadian couple (I think) and their videos/blog on life in Korea
Digital Dialects dot Com: Korean Language
Hanghoul: A game where you shoot zombies while practicing the Korean writing system
Genkie English dot Net: Speak Korean (games and vocab practice)

TV Method Glitch

2012-01-03T17:14:00.000-08:00

So, I suppose I should have anticipated that I would want to know what is happening in the dramas. Last night I kept peeking through my fingers and going back to see what they said. Maybe I need to watch each episode twice, once with the subtitles, and then again without? That would take forever. The problem is this: If I am watching with subtitles, I am able to know at least what the characters' names are. I'm not quite able to separate names from conversation yet, and that should be the easiest part, since they say the names so much. Occasionally, the subtitles tell me what I should be listening for.

Also, I am sooooooo excited to report that Professor Oh's KWOW videos are already helping me. I am able to hear "I love you" anytime it crops up, and "really?" "really!" anytime that crops up, too. I also hear the word for sorry, which I used to think was pronounced "bee-ah-nay," but apparently it starts with the "m" consonant, and should be said more like "mian-hay." (This is figured out with the help of subtitles.) The first word I ever understood through context sounds like "ku-ray" and means something like, "Yes, I agree/Yes, that's right/Okay/Fine."

So, see? The subtitles help a bit. Maybe I should half-count watching subtitled Korean towards my TV Method goal. Like one hour of subtitles equals thirty minutes of no subtitles. Sigh. I really want to understand what the plot is about. Now I'm just justifying laziness.

Being attention-challenged: Friend or foe?

2012-01-02T15:34:00.001-08:00

As anyone who truly knows me can attest, my brain loves to splash around in puddles of "what if"s and jump from idea to idea like hopping on stones to cross a stream. It should, therefore, come as no surprise to you (or to myself) that I got lost wandering around in the grammar tide pools, even though I just spent yesterday deciding to forgo "usual" language learning and try the TV Method (see previous post).

Foreign grammar is so fascinating, though. I can't help it.

Less surprising still, should be the fact that a pretty face is often behind my greatest of distractions, as was the case today. I've gotten pretty hung up on this song, performed by Kim Hyung Joong (Korean-boy-band-pop-star slash actor), and especially love this live version. The dangerous part happened when I started imagining myself singing the whole song. I could, right? Well, yes. I could figure out how to memorize all the sounds with enough practice, for sure. But, of course, that's not good enough for me. If I'm going to try to sing along, I'm going to want to know what I'm singing. So what am I doing? I'm writing the whole thing in my notebook and color-coding the translation. Keep in mind that I do this sort of stuff for fun in my spare time. Here are my steps.

1. I look up the Korean Hangul version of the lyrics.

너 하나밖에 난 모르고

2. I open Google translator, then cut and paste the lyrics.

너 하나밖에 난 모르고 = You know I'm only one (Google translation)

3. I read the translation in the video to see if the Google one makes any sense. Generally speaking, I don't trust translators' accuracy at all. In this case, the Google translation is very different from the human translation. Opposite, in fact.

너 하나밖에 난 모르고 = I know of no one other than you (human translation)

4. I try to separate out the distinct words to see if I can figure out the syntax (word order) rules. I know that Korean is an SOV language, which means that the verb typically comes at the end of the sentence. In Google, you can mouse over certain words that will become highlighted in both languages' versions. That way, you can determine easily which part is which.

5. Sometimes it becomes necessary to search out the alternate meanings of what Google is telling me. Some words have multiple meanings or shades of meaning, so it is important to choose the best one.

6. Once I feel I have a syntactical translation that is true to the human translation (above), I write the rough English equivalents under the Korean Hangul and color-code it all.

너 하나밖에 난 모르고
you (are) the only one i know (Success! That looks a lot like "I know of no one other than you.")

7. I try to read along with Hyung Joong while he sings... and if I'm brave, sing too.

"Neo hanapakke nan moreugooooo..."

So that's it. I guess I have to stop for today and start doing a few responsible things like laundry and food shopping and such. I promise to watch an hour of unsubtitled Korean TV before falling asleep.

Trying the TV Method

2012-01-01T16:21:00.000-08:00

For anyone who's ever heard me talk about it, I'm going to try to use "The TV Method" to learn Korean. Basically, that means that I have to watch an INSANE amount of TV in the target language without subtitles, with the intent of learning the way that babies learn... by observing and understanding nothing for much of the first year. This, seems to have both its pros and cons.

Pros:

I don't have to concern myself with grammar or even trying to understand. It supposedly just happens after awhile and starts making sense.
I already watch too many hours of foreign movies on Netflix. Might as well be learning.
The sounds and rhythms of the language become familiar to me well before I start trying to speak or produce anything myself.

Cons:

I like to know what's happening in the story.
I fear that I may get bored of watching so many hours of incomprehesible conversation and just stop.
I love learning about grammar. Nerd.

Here's another article about why listening to many hours of a language before trying to produce it is a great idea: "Listen First". There is a language learning approach/theory called Automatic Language Growth (ALG) that runs on these principles.

So, if I want to take this approach seriously and give it a shot, I need to watch anywhere from 500-800 hours of Korean television. I'm going to count the first two dramas I've already watched, even though I watched them subtitled.

Playful Kiss: 17 hours
Boys Over Flowers: 27 hours
Total: 44 hours of Korean
Left to go: 456 hours

Fingers crossed that this works. Fighting!

Korean script

2011-12-29T10:09:00.000-08:00

I can now phonetically read almost any Korean word put in front of me. The only part I have yet to learn are the dipthongs and double consonants. Basically, dipthongs are two vowel sounds joined together in the same syllable to make a new vowel sound.

I can thank...

(Once again) Judith Meyer for her online Lessons 1-5 (Lesson 6 is pending)

Professor Oh, who I found on YouTube, and has some sensationally funny and helpful videos: The first two Learn Korean 1: Pronounce the Alphabet and Learn Korean 2: Write the Alphabet (Basic Consonants + Vowels) have already been immeasurably helpful. She gets silly in her KWOW (Korean Word Of the Week) videos, which--in my opinion--are entertaining to watch even if you have no intention of learning Korean.

Since Judith has not yet finished her sixth lesson--which would deal with the dipthongs I still have to learn--I plan on watching and taking notes on Professor Oh's next two videos:

Learn Korean 3: Double Consonants (and some words)
and
Learn Korean 4: Dipthongs (complex + compound vowels) with MINI DRAMA!

The girl has some serious video skillz.

Save the drama for your mama.

2011-12-27T21:59:00.001-08:00

The Korean drama, that is. I unapologetically have been sucked into a series genre which is second in nerdiness only to anime. The acting is so bad sometimes, that I wonder how the scenes can evoke anything other than the gag reflex. Instead, I find myself laughing out loud or muttering at the characters on the screen as tears stream down my face. Here's how Korean dramas sucked me in:

Netflix. Yes, I can blame a lot of my wasted time on the streaming movies available on Netflix. Since I watch so many subtitled movies (See? I do read!), Netflix suggested "Playful Kiss" as a series I might be interested in checking out. I'm not going to recommend it, as it is more than mildly aggravating to watch... though watch it, I did. All twenty-something hours of it.

Just this morning, I finished watching the last hour-long episodes of another (much better) series called "Boys Over Flowers/Boys Before Flowers." The lead characters are less idiotic, the lead female is less helpless and pathetic, and the lead male is less of a complete jerk. Plus, there are four dreamy Asian main characters in this one (see image below). I've sort of developed a crush on the one to the far right. (What, am I in? High school?!)

But on a more serious note, I really started to appreciate some things about what I was watching:

the sound of the language.
the fact that I started to recognize words that were being said.
the cultural differences between the US and Korea.

I also realized that:

Koreans use a phonetic alphabet.
Korean is an SOV language, which means that the verb comes at the end of the utterance (among other very distinct word-order differences characteristic of SOV languages).
I have always wanted to learn to read and write a new alphabet.
I have wanted to learn an SOV language since I learned about it in grad school.
the path to learning Korean = talking to cute Korean guys.

So, I took myself to the public library tonight and checked out an audio book on learning Korean. Turns out, I have to learn the entire alphabet pretty well before it even lets me get to Lesson 1. Thankfully, I stumbled upon Judith Meyer's free online lessons to reading and writing Hangul, the Korean script. Her lessons were so well-constructed that she had me easily reading about fifty words in the span of thirty minutes. And writing several independently, too. Brilliant!

So, with that, I sign off. Goodbye! Annyonghi kashipshiyo! 안녕히 가심시오!

keu-ri-seu-ti
그리스디

Will I ever Finnish?

2011-05-11T19:17:00.000-07:00

Day 2 of my learn-to-count-in-many-languages challenge. Tonight I learned Finnish. And, by golly was it a real mouthful. See for yourself. This is worse than French, I think.

"They wouldn't be able to count seconds," my roommate remarked. "It takes longer than a second to say each number. They'd have to skip a few, like, 'sixty-three, sixty-six, seventy...'"

Surprisingly, though, the outrageously long names for Finnish numbers have not discouraged the country's math scholars from rising to the occasion. According to the 2009 PISA report (Programme for International Student Assessment) Finland was the top country for science education and the second place country for math education. Impressive.

Livemocha...

2011-03-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

I am trying out his new site that one of my former grad school professors recommended to me. It is called Livemocha. In addition to having a pretty kick-ass name, it also seems to have quite a lot of free perks for its members. There is a three-day free trial of everything, but I think a lot of the basic services and beginning lessons are free.

The best part about this site is the fact that you can submit writing or audio clips of yourself speaking, and honest-to-god, real people read or listen to your submission, rate it, and give you helpful suggestions. At my fingertips are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of native speakers of my target language (in this case, French), but I could also get help with Spanish, too, I suppose.

AAAAAAAAAND... If I am helpful and review submissions by people who are learning English, I earn points towards a "teacher score" which can help me get more free lessons if I rack up enough of them. I will have to report more on this as I test it out.

The only downside right now is that I cannot figure out how to record anything. My computer and Flash and this website seem to all be speaking different languages.

Language faux pas

2011-03-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

Today I was reminded how funny language really is. There are just some things that--no matter how hard we try to be vigilant of what is leaving our mouths--simply come out wrong. That's half the fun of words, really.

Me (reading aloud): And then he stuck the flower in his button hole.
Student: Stuck it in his WHAT hole?!!
Me: No, no, no... Butt-ON. The word is butt-ON. Oh, for goodness sakes...

I lost the inability to hold my "teacher face." We all laughed for a full minute.

I told them that next year I will be reading, and then he pinned the flower to his lapel.

It reminded me of the several occasions in which I put my foot in my mouth after saying something unintended in Spanish. And invariably... it always has something to do with bodily waste-removal or procreation-type activities. That's just the nature of the beast.

Incapaz

2011-03-04T18:06:00.000-08:00

Soy incapaz de dejar de escucharla. I can't stop listening to Julieta.

Hoping to pass the sickness on.

Spanish again...

2011-02-21T17:12:00.001-08:00

Since I am going to a Julieta Venegas concert next weekend near Boston, I decided to put the French down for a bit and spend the majority of this week trying to memorize all of the choruses to all the Julieta songs in the CD of hers that I just downloaded. Because, let's face it, it's waaaaaay better to go to a concert when you know the words to the songs and can sing along. I have quite a lot of work ahead of me. If I memorize three songs a day, I might make it. Or perhaps I should just listen to the whole CD as many times as humanly possible before then.

Already, it's really amazingly good and I'm only at song number two. Here is the video for Bien o Mal. It will make you laugh out loud.

I highly encourage anyone who has never heard Julieta, to poke around on youtube to watch her videos, or just download this album, Otra Cosa. I'm going to go ahead and recommend it to you even though I am now only on song three.

You'll freakin' love it. Promise.

Oh, and... here is a whole montón of Spanish crossword puzzles. Awesome. I just wish I could figure out how to have it give me the answers to the words that I don't know.

Progress with French numbers

2011-02-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

So, I sort of already learned the numbers 1-100... a week early. I was so motivated today that I studied them for, like, three hours. I think maybe the French "r" makes my throat go all wonky. I was saying quatre-vingt so many times, which is the beginning of all numbers in the 80s and 90s, and that silly "r" is very prominent there. When I finished my language lesson, I suddenly had to keep clearing my throat. I wonder what it feels like to try to speak French with post-nasal drip. Or maybe the French never get that.

I know that part of setting a "smart" goal is timeliness. That's why I took my long-term goal and broke it up into the component parts to make it happen. I've been making a lot of goals lately... but they are pretty helpful. I like them and they keep life interesting. I just have to be careful not to have too many. Then I get confused and never accomplish any of them.

Here is a fantastic page with audio quizzes in French numbers. I was actually doing really well hearing the spoken numbers and writing them down quickly. It's another About.com site. French Numbers: Listen & Repeat. If you scroll down a bit, you can click on "Listen" and a new tab will open up with an audio clip of a woman rattling off numbers faster than you can write them down on the page (if you're new to it, that is). Exercise 1 is slower than exercise 2. With another set of numbers (1-69, I think) there is an even faster exercise 3. Craziness. I got good at hearing and recognizing the numbers with this, though. It is a great tool for learning to hear the numbers. After listening and writing all the numbers down, you can click on "List," which is under "Listen," and you can check to see how many you got correct.

Then, once I had heard the way the numbers sounded enough times, I went to test myself with some Quia games that some nice person had cooked up. I was then able to say them on my own aloud. Hoorah.

BIG QUESTION. Who invented the French counting system? It's absolutely ridiculous. I wonder if that guy was shot or bowed-and-arrowed. Or clubbed over the head. Certainly deserves it, by the way.

10 = dix (ten)
20 = vingt (twenty)
30 = trente (trente)
40 = quarante (forty)
50 = quincante (fifty)
60 = soixante (sixty)
61 = soixante-et-un (sixty-and-one)
62 = soixante-deux (sixty-two)
63 = soixante-trois (sixty-three)

Up to this point, the French numbers have a number structure similar to both English and Spanish. Up to this point, things seem rather normal. Things quickly move downhill from here as the you-know-what starts to hit the fan.

70 = soixante-dix (sixty-ten)
71 = soixante-et-onze (sixty-and-eleven)
72 = soixante-deux (sixty-twelve)
73 = soixante-treize (sixty-thirteen)

Wait, really?
Yes.
Really.
It goes on like that for a bit until...

80 = quatre-vingts (four-twentys)
81 = quatre-vingt-un (four-twenty-one)
82 = quatre-vingt-deux (four-twenty-two)
83 = quatre-vingt-trois (four-twenty-three)

Awesome. Then it gets even better...

90 = quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenty-ten)
91 = quatre-vingt-onze (four-twenty-eleven)
92 = quatre-vingt-douze (four-twenty-twelve)
93 = quatre-vingt-treize (four-twenty-thirteen)

My roommate: "So you have to do math just to say the numbers? If you wanted to add, you'd have to add before you add?"
Me: "Yeah, makes me think maybe French people aren't that good with numbers."

Anyway, I knew the French numbers were severely messed up before I started. That's why I made it this week's goal. I'll keep plugging away.

Goal setting

2011-02-06T13:37:00.000-08:00

I've been having a lot of success with goal-setting this year. Goals are fantastic if you do them right. There is a sort of "check" system you can run your ideas through to see if your goals are "smart" ones. Google "SMART goals" or checkout websites like this one for more information on goal setting.

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely

Therefore, because of my success in my daily life attempts to keep my apartment fairly clean, I will make a language goal in French.

Long-term French goal:
By this time next year (2/6/12), I will have gone to a French language meetup group. I would like to be able to hold my own in a very basic conversation. Right now, I would never put myself in an immersion setting, because I simply don't have the means to express basic things.

Short-term French goal:
By the end of this week (2/13/11), I will be comfortable in the French number system, numbers 1-100. I will be able to look at the number form and both (a) say the French name of the number aloud and (b) be able to correctly write/spell the French words for the numbers on paper.

As I just mentioned, there are a lot of holes in my French knowledge. I am starting to really piece the puzzle together bit by bit, but need some of the basics. Here is a list of language tools/abilities I will need to be conversational in French (the list comes largely from what I find very useful conversationally in Spanish):

Familiarity/practice with basic verbs: Need, want, be able to, think, make, do, like/love, wish, have, come, go, give, say, tell, see, hear, know, find, look for, study, teach, learn, etc.

Knowledge of common small-talk expressions and questions as well as common responses to these comments and questions

Topic-specific vocabulary to talk about my job, my hobbies, my life, my family, etc.

Colors, numbers, alphabet, months, days, etc.

Words/phrases that come in handy when vocabulary holes prevail: Stuff, something, thing, kind of/sort of, a little, you know, how do you say... ?, what is this called?, like this, etc.

Very important, highly used words: Maybe, if, however, but, together, far, near, everywhere, everyone, everything, next, last, first, now, later, again, still, yet, yesterday, of course, etc.

Already-constructed sentences to express facts about your progress (how much of the language you know and don't know) as well as ability to ask for clarification from others: What are you saying? Could you repeat that? What does _____ mean?

As you can see, I have a quite lengthy list, but I will add to it as I think of things.

I just took a multiple choice quiz on my knowledge of numbers 1-100 and got 88 (quatre-vingt-huit) out of 100 (cent) questions right. Fantastic.

Hasta pronto et au revoir, mis amigos.

Watching lots of movies in French

2011-02-05T16:33:00.000-08:00

I've been keeping up the French lately... or at least listening to it. I know there is a language-learning tactic that involves watching movies repeatedly without subtitles. The good news about French is that I am already starting to get a feel for the pronunciation, and am able to pick out words in fluid speech. I have no idea what is happening in the movies, but I sure do enjoy listening to it.

At this point, I am having a whole lot of fun repeating things that I hear, but I don't know enough to say anything worthwhile yet. It sounds so beautiful, though.

I want to keep going, so I will continue to watch movies. Right now, I am watching "A Very Long Engagement" for the second time. The first time, this morning, I read the subtitles, so this time I already know what the storyline is, and I can relax and listen away. Perhaps that is cheating a little, but I don't really care. I've been studying Spanish for eleven years now and I still don't always understand movies without the subtitles.

The process is slow-moving, but fun. I would like to take a French class or do what (in Spanish) we call an "intercambio" with someone who speaks fluent, native French and wants to learn some English. Spanish and Portuguese speakers are easy to find around these parts, but I wonder how easy it will be to find French speakers?

I'm getting really good at pronouncing the French "r," by the way.

Au revoir.

Back to le Français...

2011-01-17T13:17:00.000-08:00

Not sure exactly why, but I've taken a renewed interested in picking up French recently. Actually... I think it might have been spurred by daydreams of joining two of my friends on a trip to Norway this summer. I've got my fingers crossed that I can scrounge up the money to go. Naturally, I started to ask myself what the Norwegian language sounds like. So I started poking around online for some language information. That, in turn, reminded me that it had been a super long time since I'd practiced what little French I know. So I started back up.

So far, so good. I'm surprised at how much it's starting to come together and make sense in little basic pieces. It's fun to be a beginner at something again. Floundering and flubbing up over the basics is sort of refreshing. And it has the added benefit of making Spanish feel comfortable like a pair of old, comfy pantuflas (slippers).

Here is my current level of French understanding: Téléfrançais. Thank you, Max, for turning me on to this.

If anyone's been wondering...

2010-08-16T23:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, I still have some stuff to post about Germany and Holland. If I decide to get to it. Probably will. Eventually.

This evening, I went to the Trader Joe's where I worked for three-and-a-half years, and had two fairly long Spanish conversations with two former co-workers. Both asked me if I'd been to Spain this summer. Apparently they heard it in my voice. Probably the speech rhythm more than the pronunciation of the words themselves. I don't reaaaally have the Spain-Spanish accent, unfortunately.** One commented on how much faster and more advanced my speech was than last year. I'm not sure it is, but it made me feel good anyway.

**Here is a very good sample of the Spain-Spanish accent. They use a lot of vosotros (familar plural "you"). They also make a "th" sound for every word with a soft "c" or a "z" where other Spanish-speaking countries make a "s" sound. So, the word cerveza, instead of sounding like "sir-vay-sah," in Spain sounds like "thir-vay-thah." Additionally, the "s" sounds that they do hve, carry a twinge of "sh." And god do I love the way it sounds. I love the woman's voice at about 0:36 in the video when she asks the guys what they're doing in the parking lot. To which the guy on the left starts making really weird noises, and the guy on the right answers her with que te caga en la hostia, tía... very, very Spanish. "Just alcohol, alcohol, alcohol..." the guy tries to assure her. Sure, like we buy that. Doesn't look like just alcohol. The guy in the black shirt at about 3:00 will also give you a good idea of the accent.

Oooh, and this lady's accent is fantastic. I wish I could sound like that. Can you tell how much I love it? Maybe just a little.

In my search for a good example of a Spain-Spanish accent to link, I found this: a man singing the Bohemian Rhapsody (karaoke-style) with a Spanish accent. I snorted a few times laughing. You may as well.

Some more Spain...

2010-08-08T09:33:00.000-07:00

My last evening in Spain, I managed to do something that I have wanted to do for years: I wrote on a dirty car. My friend documented the process (see image below). Now, to really understand how awesome this is, you need to understand something. In Spain, they don't simply write lávame ("wash me") in the residue and grime, as we are accustomed to doing in the U.S. Oh no, it's much better than that. They write guarro. The first time I saw that written on a car, I remember asking what it meant. My friend told me and it cracked me up for the rest of the day. I then made it my life-long goal to find a vehicle deserving of such a compliment.

Pocket Oxford Spanish Dictionary © 2005 Oxford University Press:

guarro -rra sustantivo masculino, femenino (Esp fam)

(persona sucia) filthy pig (colloq)

(indecente, vulgar): es un ~ he's really disgusting

Here is my handiwork. The layers of atrociousness on this automobile were such that I had to actually lick each finger before writing to cut through to the surface of the car itself. I am not sure if exclamation marks are usually part of the finished product, but I deemed them appropriate for the situation.

I like to think that the car owner was not terribly insulted by my actions, but perhaps... inspired to give the little guy a nice "rinse." Or a scouring.

Actually, one of my Spanish friends who knew about my guarro dream, had earlier that day pointed out a marginally unclean car for me to leave my mark. Only after I had completed the task, did he admit, "That was Alberto's car." Hahahahahahahahahaha. What a dirty little trick (no pun intended). Sigh. Oh, I love it.

On the subject of writing things on public surfaces, I came across quite a funny sign in a Spanish restaurant bathroom:

It reads: "Directed to bathroom painters and artists. If you want to do it, please make it something pleasant, decorative, and original. (1) So that we don't have to paint the door again. (2) So that later they say that these places don't inspire sighs and passions."

I wonder, actually, if the translation of "sighs and passions" might instead be something a bit sarcastic, meant to hint more towards "astonished gasps and feelings of anger and retaliation." I say this only after years of reading the back of many a bathroom door. When people bring Sharpies with them to the john, they generally have an agenda to share with the world as well: Not always a pleasant one, and usually inviting of follow-up commentary. That's the way it works.

Then there are people who bring cameras with them into bathroom stalls. I mean, what's with those people?

I love this hat. I really do. I love it because it uses the abbreviated version of one of my favorite Spanish swears. Joé, qué caló, is what leaves the mouths of native speakers when they say, joder, qué calor. It basically means, "f$%# it's hot out!" ¡Qué calor! = "What heat!" Also, it made me realize that the sound I often hear from Spaniards at the beginning of sentences, a strong "HO" sound from the back of the throat (like a combination of Santa Claus and the French "r"), is actually the beginning of a swear that they don't finish. ¡Joé! or ¡Jo!

If you'd like to read up more on this swear, what is probably one of Spanish's most versitile, you can visit the linked words in this sentence. Or you can visit the Word Reference Forums. The explanations in the forums are, however, in Spanish. And if you don't know Spanish, then, joé, that's not going to help you at all.

Last subject of today's blog entry is one that I had a lot of fun with. This was part of an airplane ride with Vueling airlines. They had an absolutely brilliant page in their in-flight magazine in which passengers from various, sequential flights create a piece-by-piece story. The first sentence was started by them, and then they left a bunch of lines for the rest to be filled out. My Colombian friend and I added to the English side, and then to the Spanish.

Here is the English side:

I wrote the "... but it did..." part, and my friend followed with the "My neighbors..." part.

And here is the Spanish side (translated below):

Magazine:
I didn't think that all the food would go bad in a week.

Passenger in a previous flight:
Who would have thought that a trip of 48 hours would become a week-long odyssey?

My friend's addition:
From the moment I left, I was in a race against the clock to bring the "snack" to its destination.

... and, last but not least...

My addition:
At first, all went well. Apart from being in a hurry, I had my red cape, a basket, and much excitement to see my grandmother.

Ah, yes. I felt clever.

What I wouldn't give to see how the stories ended up...

I'm back!

2010-08-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

I am back in Boston, and am settling happily into my apartment. I just got a sad email from my friend Vanessa in Madrid. Let me cut and paste the sad part. Here is the context in case you missed it: Read Story 3.

My friend's words:

Por cierto, el otro día compramos una bolsa de pimientos del padrón en el súper y nos acordamos de ti... creo que nos picaron 4 ó 5 de toda la bolsa (había unos 30 más o menos). Y tengo que decir que ¡pican mogollón! así que los que nos pusieron en Plaza de España debían de ser no picantes o tuvimos mala suerte...

(Translation)
By the way, the other day we bought a bag of Pimientos del Padrón in the supermarket and we thought of you... I think 4 or 5 out of the whole bag were spicy (there were about 30). And I have to say that they are incredibly spicy! So basically, it must have been that either the ones they gave us in Plaza de España were not spicy or that we had bad luck...

To which my response was:

Tendré que ir al bar de "tapas" en Brookline... a ver si venden pimientos del padrón. Espero que--si lo tienen--no sean tan flojos como los mios de ese día.

I'll have to go to the tapas bar in Brookline... we'll see if they sell Pimientos del Padrón. I hope that--if they have them--they aren't as wimpy as the ones I had that day.

By the way, I like that my friend used the word mogollón (bolded in the above quote). I have never seen it befofe, so I'm looking it up right now, but I think it must be interchangeable with un montón (a whole lot).

Yup. I was right (see below).

mogollón m fam
1 (gran cantidad) loads, an awful lot [de, of]: había un mogollón de animales, there were loads of animals
2 (lío, alboroto) mess, racket

Alright. Good to be back. I've got more stories and pictures to post. Stay tuned y hasta entonces.

From an internet cafe in Düsseldorf

2010-08-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

Stay tuned. I may or may not have time to update this before getting back to Boston. But there will be updates. Probably Friday. And lots of swell pictures.

Love from Germany,

Tschüss! (Bye!)

I am in Germany, uh... I mean Holland

2010-07-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

Today I find myself in Maastricht, Holland, which appears to be the bicycle center of the universe. I apologize in advance for not being able to show you any pretty pictures in this post. So, the truth of the matter is that my German friend and I (not the one that I went to the theatre with) were going to travel from Dusseldorf to Munich, and weeeeeell... it turns out that a miniscule mistake in online ticket-ordering can prevent you from being able to fly. Even if you already bought the very expensive tickets. In simpler terms, both tickets were bought under the name of the same passenger, and apparently that (a) isn't fixible and (b) doesn't "fly" with the airport staff, pardon the pun.

Anyway, I arrived in Germany on Wednesday, after a very nice last couple of days in Spain that I still need to write and post pictures about. So far, I have had a surprisingly smooth transition between countries. Allow me to explain.

Upon arriving, I located a Spanish girl from my flight (who had been living in Germany for a year) and she helped me buy my ticket to Dusseldorf from the Cologne airport train station. Spanish.
She introduced me to another person who had also been on our flight: a guy from Brazil who had been living in Spain for several months. He was taking the same train as me. More Spanish.
On the train, we began speaking to two Colombians (in Spanish, obviously) who were living in Germany. They asked me if I was Spanish, and then, upon finding out that I was a gringa (American girl), they started (good-naturedly) making fun of my Spain-Spanish accent.
As soon as I saw my German friend, we launched into full-on discussion... in Spanish.
Once I had dropped off my things in her swanky apartment, she took me to a tapas restaurant. Where the titles for the menu items were in... you guessed it, Spanish.
I would like to take the time to remind anyone reading this that I was in Germany... in case the trend of events was beginning to inspire doubt.
The next night, we hung out with a group of Spanish-speaking Germans, a girl from Colombia, and a girl from Argentina... at the despedida (goodbye party) at a Mexican resturant for a girl about to live abroad in Latin America for several months.
Am I in Germany? Really?!
Oh no, wait. I am in Holland.

It is time for my friend and I to go eat. We are hungry.

It's my last full day in Madrid

2010-07-27T03:39:00.000-07:00

FIRST AND FOREMOST: If you'd like to leave me a comment or say hi, I'd highly encourage it. I like writing for an audience and enjoy knowing who my readers are. :)

Leaving this city always makes me sad, tanto por la gente como por la ciudad en sí (1). I have no doubt that I could stay here (working) for quite a long time and be happy. I have a certain level of comfort here that I don't have in any other "foreign" location, and perhaps that is why I love to return so much. It's fun for me to feel like I fit somewhere where I don't actually belong.

(There are numbered footnotes at the bottom of the post... because I like footnotes.)

I am not leaving with quite the same level of expertise in spoken Spanish that I was hoping for, and here's why:

The focus of this vacation was much more on it being a vacation, on experience, on travel, and on spending time with good people, no matter what language they were speaking.
I didn't have a job like I did years ago that forced me out of the house and into an all-Spanish, sink-or-swim environment. That's what I would want next time I'm here... something to do daily that requires me to get up and go somewhere, and grab a newspaper en route.
Because I had no job, large chunks of the day were spent either at home, watching dubbed TV, or out, meandering the streets by myself. Neither of those situations is particularly good for practicing speech unless I happened to be very inclined to talk to myself outloud in Spanish for hours on end (and correcting myself) or extremely adept at engaging strangers in conversation. I actually happen to be pretty good at both of those things, but for some reason, it really wasn't a great avenue to take this trip.
I was not here long enough or consistently enough to conseguir a Spanish-speaking novio (2), which I know from primary sources and a tad bit of personal experience is the number one way to buy myself a one-way ticket to Fluentville. So since that was not the reality of things this time, Boston it is then. Any takers? I'll be accepting applications for the position upon my return. Persons with low threshold for human error need not apply.

Why not all hope is lost: Strangely enough, I might wind up getting better at my Spanish while traveling through Germany. Say what?! you ask. Well, as it turns out, the chica I will be visiting is the very same girl that I lived with three summers ago in Madrid. She lived for years in Spain, and has since become fluent. I suspect that she speaks rather accurately (and at the very least, much better than me) since she spent quite a while studying Spanish grammar as part of a degree she earned in Spain. Her default language with me is Spanish because it is easier for her than English. I plan to use that to my advantage.

That said, I would like to liven this post up with a couple of pictures and stories.

Story 1: I went to El Rastro after not having been there for years, and mulled around, looking for this and that and hoping to find a few bargains (which I did). In my meanderings, I came across this man. He was playing the guitar with one hand.

I watched for a while at first and then started to walk away, but then I thought, "Geez, this sort of thing doesn't happen too often. I've gotta talk to the guy." So I waited until he was done with song two, marched myself right over, and introduced myself. "I'm really impressed," I told him in Spanish. "You play well." Then I showed him that I too had only one hand and he nearly jumped back in surprise. "No way!" So we talked awhile, I bought his CD, and before leaving, I shook his left hand with my right, and was back on my merry way with a smile.

Story 2: I was hanging out with some good friends of mine (an American guy and a Spanish gal) who were giving a tour of Madrid to a girl from Finland. This was another day of nearly all English, but fantastic nonetheless, because of the wicked (3) awesome people I was hanging out with. Here are a couple funny signs:

This sign should read: "[Red do-not-enter symbol] Excepto vehiculos autorizados (except authorized vehicles)"
Instead it reads: "[Red do-not-enter symbol] Excepto culos autorizados (except authorized butts/asses)"

I love word-play vandalism.
This Plaza de España sign comes first in Spanish. Then underneath, the Spanish is translated to English. Can you see the difference? No? Look. Look harder. Still no? Keep looking (4).

Story 3: While hanging out with aforementioned group of wicked awesome individuals, we stopped for some food. Below, you can see Los pimientos de Padrón, a famous Spanish dish in which the saying goes unos pican y otros no (some bite and some do not). According to this website that I am linking to here about Los pimientos de Padrón, about ten percent of the peppers "bite" or you could also say "are spicy." This was not my experience. I kept a running tally (see below).

As you can see, early on in the game, I was not encountering any spicy ones. Now, according to the approximate 10 percent, one would expect a spicy one somewhere in the next three. Perhaps my standards for what I considered to picar and what I considered to not picar were too high. Perhaps my tastebuds are made of steel. However it went, though, of the forty-one peppers on my plate (forty-one!!!), my friend Vanessa claims that the one she tried did, in fact, picar. That would be my luck. She seemed like she had to think about it a bit before reporting that it was spicy. Was it, then, actually that spicy, or did the spiciness not hit her until a few seconds later? I will never know.

The interesting thing about these peppers, is that they naturally occur this way. Some are naturally hot when you eat them. Neither the color, the form, nor the size tell you whether it will have bite. Interesting. Veeeeeeery interesting.

Story 4: If you will please note below that I have taken a picture of ice cream and some signs:

This is not just any ice cream, though. Oh no. This is the ONE PLACE IN ALL OF MADRID that I have EVER found that SELLS SOY ICE CREAM!!!!! Sorry to assault you with caps. Soja sin azucar is "soy without sugar." Now, I don't care much for the "no sugar" aspect. Really, me da igual (5). But I looked at the guy with a suspicious smile and asked, "Seriously? Is this ice cream made without milk?" And he answered, "Yes, and all of these as well," with a sweeping motion of his hand, indicating nearly half of the flavor selection. "The cinnamon, too?!!" I asked, barely able to comprehend what I was hearing. "Yep, the cinnamon, too." For a few seconds, I was without words. He asked me if I was okay. "Yes, it's just... it's like a half-miracle. I... I almost can't believe it. I haven't found soy ice cream anywhere else in Madrid. Heck, I can't even find it in ice cream places in the US usually." He looked at me and smiled, "Pues, chica... aprovéchalo (6). What flavors can I get you?"

The best part of this conversation was that I got to use my new favorite language construction: medio + noun/adjective. It makes me feel like I know what I'm talking about. Medio milagro = half-miracle.

"I can't even find ice cream places that sell soy ice cream in Boston!" I exclaimed to my friends when I made it outside. "Well, I guess you'll just have to move to Madrid, then," one told me. I guess that's as good a reason as any.

Ha. Just kidding, Mom. Juuuuuust kidding.

Kristy Spanglish/Other Translation Guide
(1) "as much because of the people as because of the city itself." Is it weird that I can't figure out how to accurately phrase that in English?
(2) conseguir = find, obtain; novio = boyfriend
(3) I've been teaching the entirety of the non-English-speaking world about the word wicked and our love affair with it in Boston/New England.
(4) There is no difference.
(5) I couldn't care less.
(6) Well, girl... take advantage of this.

Eres un bombón...

2010-07-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

I've heard a lot of funny pickup lines, but this one really made me laugh. Two nights ago as I was walking home at (I know, I know) 4:30 in the morning from the Metro stop, this Spanish dude pulled towards the sidewalk and rolled down his window. I realize that it's not spectacular to talk to strangers, but at first I thought he was going to ask me for directions (which I would have answered with, "Sorry, I don't know the area that well"). But instead, he asked me where I was going. A casa, I told him, starting to walk away. Eres un bombón, he told me, and then held up a joint and asked if I'd like to hang out with him for a smoke. I politely declined the invitation, said goodnight and continued on my way. I enjoyed being called a "chocolate candy," however.

Doesn't Ricky Martin have a "shake your bombón" song? He might, now that I think about it. No, wait, it's "shake your bon-bon." My mistake.

Below, is a picture of me in all of my "bombón-ness" underneath a Magnolia tree in Madrid. Apparently they are living fossils. They evolved before bees were around. I had no idea these things were so genetically solid. Way to go, Magnolias!

Also, I'm quite excited by this Metro ad (below). It makes me smile every time I see it: "Alicia. Teacher of young children. She's always the first to arrive to class."

That's me. Also, this chica has some seriously awesome style. She's gotta be the cool teacher. Some of the other ads show her very, very cool lace-up boots.

Lastly, I was pretty dang psyched to find the same advisory warning on a Spanish cigarette box that I saw on one in Italy. I wanted to compare the two. As you can see, they are very similar. I would undoubtedly find it (1) very easy to understand written Italian if I started learning it, but at the same time (2) terribly confusing to try to remember the which words belonged to which language, once I had to produce something.

I am off today to try to buy some things in the "Taste of America" store. As gifts, that is. I think it may be the only place in Spain that you can buy rootbeer. Or peanut butter. Or Jelly Bellys. :)

Venice Beach Ultimate

2010-07-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

Finishing up the story of last weekend: Once I took the train to Venice, I took one of the canal boats to this island called Lido. That's where the beach tournament took place. As the Spaniards I hang out with already had all of the slots filled for their team, I was on the pick up team, which consisted of a couple of American (USA) girls, some dudes from France, a guy from Belgium, at least a couple of Italians, and probably someone else that I am forgetting. This was my team.

How we were able to communicate at all was semi-miraculous. It was largely thanks to the great lengths that Europeans go to to learn English. It makes me feel very fortunate, mostly. At first, we had to get used to each other. Then, little by little, we started feeling and playing like an actual team. The rest of the teams we played against had two main advantages: (1) the advantage of having played together for awhile for months or years and (2) the advantage of all speaking a common language. Cheers and instructions from our sideline came in many colors and languages. At the end of one of our games, our elected "speech giver" was asked to give the end-of-game speech in French. I understood about ten percent of it. Or less.

This is what Lido looked like (partly), with cute, windy roads:

Most of us rented bikes and rode around the island like that, ringing little bells. Of course, they were old 1950's-style bikes with giant baskets in the front and reaaaaaaally bad brakes. The good news about the bad brakes is that the bike rental did not come with the option of a helmet rental. Everytime a car passed me in transit, I held on tight to the handlebars and sucked my breath in a little bit. Here is me on a bike.

Below, you can see the gorgeous beach we played on. The sand was amazingly soft. Stepping in the sand was like walking through granulated silk. Scorching hot granulated silk.

Did I mention how suffocatingly hot it was in Venice last weekend? I don't believe I did. I just asked one of the guys I'm staying with how many degrees it was when we were there, and I really loved his answer: Ehhhhh... trienta y bastante. Which translates roughly to "thirty degrees and some unnecessarily high number in the ones place" or "dude, it was hotter than it needed to be." For the "metric impaired" (and I know I certainly am), thirty-five degrees Celcius is about ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. Now, ninety-five degrees in Madrid is pretty tolerable, what with the air being very dry and all, but keep in mind that Venice is on the water. So the humidity "adds ten degrees" as my friend over here commented, but as he was talking in metric degrees, perhaps we can assume that it felt like it was one-hundred ten degrees. It did, I assure you. It was one of those lovely climates in which the only relief is a shower, a swim in the ocean, or a leisurely dip in a plastic kiddie pool with seven members of Madrid's ultimate team (true story). And once out of the shower/ocean/kiddie pool, there is never the luxury of drying off. Even if the water eventually evaporates, it is replaced by sweat.

So I spoke English most of the weekend, unfortunately... but I had some opportunities to utilize the Spanish at Saturday night's tournament dinner and after-party. I'd tell you what kind of nonsense my crazy Spaniard friends provoked at aforementioned party, but I'll leave you wondering. Because it's more fun that way. I will say, however, that the limbo was involved.

When all was said and done, I left Lido and returned to the Venice "mainland" I guess you could call it. I spent a full twenty-four hours with my new friend from Colombia, during which, I was babbling on and on in Spanish, and wishing it had been like that all vacation. We stayed in the house of a really sweet Spanish couple (also in their twenties) who were living for a year in Venice. This is a picture of the downstairs of their house.

There, we hung up all of our wet things to dry for the night, all sat down at the red and white checkered table cloth, and ate dinner. This was one of the precious times this trip when I have been "in the groove." I was following normal-speed, slang-filled, conversation with four native Spanish speakers. Not only was I understanding everything, but I was participating like a normal human being, and even joking around. And they were laughing! Not at me either, but with me. I love those moments. I wish I could bottle them and let them out the next time I trip all over a verb conjugation and feel bad about myself.

Okay, I think that's all. Tomorrow, I'll have to write about today.

La Katarsis del Tomatazo: Spanish Theatre

2010-07-25T03:46:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to the theatre. The Spanish theatre, to be exact. "Have you ever been to the theatre here before?" my new friend asked me. "Nope," I said. Maybe more appropriately, he should have asked me if I'd ever been to a theatre in which I got to throw produce at the actors. My answer still would have been "no," but how often do you get to ask that question, really?

My new friend (who happens to be German), his roommate (who happens to be Cuban, I think), and I (who happen to not be Spanish either) went to a production called La Katarsis del Tomatazo. If I really fully understood the name of the comedy troop or if I understood more of the skit explaining the name, I would elaborate. Unfortunately, I don't understand much more than the fact that tomatazo is the opposite of a diminutive form for tomato... and thus indicates the noun form of something grand-scale that involves tomatoes.

Yes, we got to throw tomatoes.

We had the option to either applaud at the end of some skits or to throw tomatoes. Since I didn't understand many of the skits, I just threw tomatoes. At one point, my German friend turned to me and said, "Don't worry, I only understand 70 percent of this." I maybe understood the other 30 percent. Our native Spanish-speaking counterpart, on the other hand, was laughing like crazy at about just everything. Sigh. Comedy. It's the hardest part about learning a language, so they say.

El botellón

2010-07-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

So... thanks to a younger friend of mine in his early twenties, I got to really understand the full Spanish nightlife experience. Last night, I was privy to watching the non-tourist activities that occur on Friday and Saturday nights in Madrid. Apparently, it's quite the phenomenon, and it's called el botellón. Wikipedia defines it in the following way:

Botellón (Spanish for Big bottle) is a social activity among Spain’s youth, who gather in public areas to consume alcohol as an alternative to going to a bar or club.

"Wow, this could never happen in the States... " I commented to my 23 year-old madrileño friend as I observed a park-full of young people gathered with plastic cups and their beverages of choice. "Bueno, es prohibido..." he answered me. Prohibited. Apparently, if the police show up (and they did), participants simply have to get up and move (a slow meander is sufficient) to another spot... as if the police are sheep herders. But instead of sheep, they are herding inebriated teenagers and twenty-somethings.

If you are curious about el botellón, you can visit the Wikipedia page. If you're not, you can just take my word for it. It looked more or less like a tailgate party in a parking lot. But without grilled food. Or cars. Or old dudes with beer guts. And it was a plaza instead of a parking lot. Not sure if that helped. I guess my only complaint would be that the participants of el botollón don't tend to clean up after themselves too well (see picture below).

This photo was taken in 2005, when my (then) roommate and I made fun of the trashy state of the park near our house on a Saturday morning. Haha. Now I know why.

And, in the true spirit of el botellón, I am taking a "plastic cup half-full" approach to analyzing the whole evening:

I was allowed a glimpse into true Spanish "youth" culture.
Given my surroundings, I was able to practice my Spanish with kids who threw around a LOT of slang and didn't always slow down for me to process it. Halfway into the evening, it felt like my own speech was flowing out of me like a river.
No one I hung out with last night actually knew how close to the brink of thirty I was. When my friend and I asked one of his friends to guess, his friend looked at me, " I give you... twenty-five years... but that's on the high end. Probably less." The next words out of my mouth may or may not have been the Spanish equivalent to, "You're my new best friend."

I think I might go to the store now. I ran out of leche de soja, and that's kind of a vegan crime. I will finish my Italy saga and include some nice pictures. Soon.

Adventures with Italian... and, as always, Spanish

2010-07-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

Part 2: Milan

After a rather uneventful (and happily so) flight to Milan, I was at last in Italy. I took a bus ride to the central bus station, and talked to an Italian who knew neither English nor Spanish. It was tricky, but Spanish served me well. I was able to ask him questions in Spanish and he was able to answer in Italian. Pretty awesome. That's what I was hoping would happen.

I decided to catch a later train to Venice so that I could wander around and pretend that I was Italian for awhile. Thankfully, the "looking Italian" part went pretty well, as I have that genetic advantage of having Italian descendants on my mother's side of the family. Check. What usually thwarts such illusions is the fact that when I open my mouth, the language I'm most likely to speak is not Italian. Sure, I know some words and phrases like molto bene! and ciao and grazie, along with foods like linguine, spaghetti, ravioli, etc... but those are not likely to sustain me in any situation except for buying pasta in an Italian supermarket.

I talked to as many Italian people as I could, always asking first if they spoke Spanish because... boy do I hate letting people hear me use English! I don't know... I guess it's just a part of me that wants people to see that, although my language is not perfect, I am putting in the effort. I always feel that, as an American, I have to represent my people well. I want other people to say, "Hey, maybe all Americans aren't bad after all... that one was trying really hard to speak our language." We (native English speakers) have the luxury of having the world at our fingertips. We don't have to learn other languages. We let other people learn ours. I like to struggle through to show that I appreciate how much work the rest of the world does to bend over backwards to talk to us. Anyway, enough of my soapbox rant... I had a few people thinking that I was a Spaniard... including two native Spanish speakers from the Dominican Republic that I later met at the train station when I bought my tickets.

Here is a picture of the first place I stopped in... a little Milano cafe with a sign bragging of soymilk accommodations in their caffeinated beverages. Be still my beating vegan heart.

Then I stopped at a bookstore to enjoy their air conditioning and found a few gems:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid! Apparently schiappa (skee-AH-pah)** is someone who is incompetent. Not a direct translation, but pretty fun. Love it.

Then I happened upon this book, which, to my best knowledge, is entitled "Vegetables: Cooked and Raw." Now, all was going just fine, each page with a giant picture of a vegetable, until I turned to this page. The pages went something like this: Carrot, tomato, artichoke...squid? What?! I wish I had been able to read it to see the justification for such an obvious blunder. Last I checked, squid was filed away under "c" for "certainly not a vegetable." Apparently, according to Italians, I am wrong.

More to come. Ciao!

**Thank you to my friend Justin for steering me correctly on my Italian pronunciation.

Italians and Brazilians and Americans... oh my!

2010-07-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

Madrid Metro: I went from the bottom of Line 6 to the top of line 8

So, as I said earlier, this weekend was a spur-of-the-moment trip to Italy. Here's the story:

Part 1: En camino al aeropuerto (on the way to the airport)

So, I didn't exactly get to go to sleep on Thursday night. As I had (intelligently) booked a flight to Milan at six in the morning on Friday and the Madrid subway system doesn't start running until five, that was unfortunately not an option. So, I found myself in the position of having to take the last metro of the night before the system shut down... which would mean sleeping at the airport. What can I say? I travel in style.

I was on the last metro to pass through Plaza Elíptica (línea gris), and happened to be seated and waiting near four people (in their twenties) who previously entered with a giant pet carrier and a girl dragging a very unwilling dog by the leash. Well, that, and a whole bunch of bags. I wondered where all those Spaniards were going, aside from the fact that they were obviously bound for the airport with such luggage. This fact was confirmed when one of them started echoing my sentiments (in Spanish)... "are we going to be able to catch the last metro to the airport?" Another answered, "No problem. If not, there are buses that can take you there at this hour." I took a mental note to stick close to these people. If I happened to miss the last metro to the airport, I sure as heck wanted to be around people who knew their way around the bus system.

So, as it turned out, only three of the four people actually got onto the metro when it pulled into the station. One of the guys started speaking to the others about how he would not be able to get back home if he stuck with them on the metro any longer. I realized then that he was not a native Spanish speaker. The other two assured him that they did not need his help anymore, and that he could bajar (get off the train). He gave the standard goodbye cheek-kiss and an adios, buen viaje! to the girl and then left.

With only two remaining, I had the nerve to ask, Váis al aeropuerto? (Are you two going to the airport?) Which then started a friendly little interchange in which I found out that neither of them were Spaniards. She was a bubbly and beautiful Italian girl with thick-rimmed glasses who had just finished an eight-month stay in Madrid, and was returning home with her dog and all her things. He was her adorable Brazilian boyfriend who was cheerfully accompanying her to the airport to see her off at seven in the morning.

When the time came for all of us to bajar as well, I went back over to them and asked, Os ayudo? (Can I help you guys?) To which they looked pretty relieved and accepted since they had about four bags, a giant dog carrier, and a reluctant dog between the two of them. So, when the train door opened, I grabbed onto one end of the carrier and we all started walking (half-running) to the connecting line that would take us to the airport. Unfortunately, since that line is several hallways, escalator rides, and twists and turns away, we missed the last metro to the airport by about sixty seconds. My new friends and I decided to split a cab to the airport, as there was no other way to get there. This meant that not only did we have to find a cab, but we had to find a cab that would fit three people, five bags, a dog carrier, a dog, and a partridge in a pear tree. That was its own adventure. Also, once we got the cab, one of the roads to the airport was shut-down, so we had to get out and wait for a bus to Terminals 1 and 2.

Now, there are several good things about this story... (1) I would not have missed the last metro to the airport had I not helped these people with their dog carrier, (2) I wound up taking a much longer time to get to the airport, so I wasn't sitting in Terminal 1 alone for five hours, (3) they were the nicest people in the planet to hang out with, (4) since we all came from different places, I got to speak Spanish with them all night, (5) I got loads of practice with vosotros (the plural familar "you" that everyone and their mom uses in Spain) and the resulting verb forms, and (6) did I mention how nice they were?

So, to wrap up a ridiculously long story, I got to the airport terminal, said goodbye to my nice travel buddies, and was about to lie down on the floor for two hours to sleep infront of the Ryanair check-in stations... but then I asked a question of one of the on-duty airport security guys, and--wouldn't you know it?--I talked to the dudes for the next hour and a half. Neither could speak English, so that was pretty awesome. I could tell they were amused by my ramblings. That's what I gotta do, though. Talk to old guys. They always appreciate chattin' with the ladies. Even if the ladies mess up conjugating verbs once in awhile.

Until the next entry, ciao.

I will leave you guys with only the beautiful image above of the Madrid metro system. Oh, if only the metro were that awesome in Boston.

Italy for the weekend.

2010-07-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

I am taking a last-minute, impromptu trip to Venice, Italy to play in an ultimate tournament on the beach called "Redemption." I am leaving in a few minutes to catch the last metro of the night and then I will sleep in the Madrid airport. In case that doesn't hit home for you, my flight is at 6 in the morning. I don't really know where I will be sleeping this weekend, but most likely outside. We'll see if someone is nice enough to let me into their tent. I've been told that it's too hot for sleeping bags in Italy these days. So basically, I will be living like a bum. Don't tell my mother. Oh wait... she reads this.

Also, this is the first time in my life that I bought a plane ticket without really being certain if I was going to be allowed into the tournament, where I would sleep, what I would eat, how I would return, etc. For a gal whose job it is to plan every square inch of a day for ten and eleven year olds for nine months of the year, this is rebellion to the opposite extreme: Plan nothing and hope for the best.

This is for you, mom.

I'll let you guys know how my Spanish fares while talking to Italians.**

**I'm technically half-Italian.

Ciao, Madrid! I'll update when I get back on Monday night or Tuesday!

It takes two hours to do laundry, so...

2010-07-14T03:47:00.000-07:00

I have returned from Prague and am now back in Spain. I (sadly) was not in Spain when Spain won the World Cup, a tragedy that prompted my friend to email me the comment Vaya fiesta q te has perdido!!! ("Hot dang, did you miss an awesome party!") On the plus side, I did have a blast of my own. Here was our group of friends: A boy from Slovakia, an American cheering for Holland, a Ukranian gal, and me. I was in the middle of Old Town Square in the center of Prague, which, as far as locations go, was pretty killer itself (see image below). The sea of Spaniards (minus those from Holland) erupted in a cheer so loud, that I could have imagined that I was in Spain anyway. The only difference being that after the game, there were far fewer people out on the streets causing mayhem. The excitement was more localized to certain streets, and there was no dancing in public fountains (which I found out--via Facebook--is what I would have been doing if hanging out in Madrid with my usual crew of Spanish friends).

My proudest moment was teaching a cute Arabic-speaking guy from Saudi Arabia to yell ¡Vamos España! at the appropriate moments. He did me proud.

To draw this entry back to the theme of my blog, the language there was so interesting. Almost nothing looked familiar! I am so used to being able to sort of read signs, that it really threw me for a loop to have to try to recognize such drastically different words. Some of my new favorite words in Czech:

Ovoce (fruit) and zelenina (vegetable). Every good vegetarian should know these. I don't think those two words are in their plural forms because, as I understand it, that is done mostly by adding a "y" at the end of the word.

Pozor! It means "Careful!" "Watch out!" "Attention!" It was everywhere, and I made sure to exclaim it with enthusiasm every time I read it. I was talented at this because in Czech they roll the "r"s just like in Spanish.

As I said before, pluralization comes from adding a "y" at the end of the noun. That's how we get such awesome aisle signs in this supermarket: Crackery, snacky, and (my favorite) chipsy. Apparently, the Czech people, upon adopting the word "chips" did not know that it was already plural. So they have pluralized our plural form. Aside from these words that are obvious in meaning, I did have another very proud moment where I read a sign of about three words that I recognized... something like, "store open daily until 9." The best part about it was that the words for "store," "open" and "daily" were all words that did not look even remotely English, and required me to recognize them in variations of forms I had seen them in previously. Go me.

With that, I will do some yoga and check on my laundry. Then I plan to leave the house.

Hasta la próxima.

Spain versus Holland in the World Cup Finals, and I'm in... PRAGUE?!!

2010-07-08T02:23:00.000-07:00

Hola amigos y amigas!

That's right. I'm in Prague (Czech Republic). The city is absolutely gorgeous and I have many pictures to document that fact. I have been busying myself with the task of figuring out simple, basic Czech words. The amazing and beautiful part about trying to read things here is that... I can't! Well, technically I can since the alphabet is the same roman alphabet that I'm used to. I just don't recognize more than one or two percent of the words. There are some words that I do recognize and I imagine that it is simply a matter of them having been appropriated and then integrated into the Czech language (like alkohol or fotograf, for example). I have also discovered a few words that I excitedly point out every time I see them, like the word for fruit and vegetable (ovoce and zelenina). My friend's challenge for me is to find the written forms of the numbers one, two, three, four, and five. I so far have successfully located two and three, I think. not sure.

Anyway, I also find myself in the predicament of being in Prague during the World Cup Finals of Spain versus Holland. Seriously? I missed my opportunity to be in Spain because I extended my stay in Prague? We will see if this situation can be worked out among my friends and I, who are also looking to last-minute book a ticket to either Madrid, Barcelona, or Amsterdam. I would love to watch the finals in one of those two countries (although preferably Spain).

Back in España: ¡Maravilloso!

2010-07-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

So I'm here again in Spain. I know, I know... I've been here before. I look at it this way: Some people live in other places for extended periods of time, months, years even. I am doing more or less the same thing, just chopped up into little, smaller trips. When it's all said and done, perhaps over the duration of my life I will have lived here two whole years. ¿Quién sabe?

This is where I'm staying. It's the size of a tupperware container. My friends are certainly generous with the little space they have, and I'm trying to take up as little of it as possible: The size of my suitcase and the molecules displaced by my body. That is all I take from them.

And the view...

Anyway, after all the adventures I had on day one, I felt like I had filled the majority of my "bad luck quota."

The airport lost my luggage (but don't worry, I've already got it back).
There was a huelga (strike) with Madrid's metro, so none of the efficient public transportation was working.
So I had to take a "tour"--let's call it--of the city by way of the bus system... and by "tour" I mean that I went on a wild goose chase in search of my friend's piso (apartment)... which should have been even easier than chasing a goose since the apartment certainly isn't a moving target.
My friend was an hour late back to his piso because of the huelga. I almost didn't get into the building because I rang the wrong doorbell. I rang the bell of the 3rd apartment of the 12th floor on the right side instead of the 3rd apartment on the 12th floor on the left. Turns out there is a big difference. Once I finally got in, I waited in the stairs until he got back, all the while wondering if he would. But he did.
One of my socks fell into the inodoro (toilet). Actually, that was day 2, but it goes well with this list. Don't ask.

Right now I'm doing exactly what I wanted do do here: watch a soccer game with my friend. This is how I learn all the good madrileño (from Madrid) swears and sayings. And really, it doesn't matter if the team he's rooting for is winning or losing. His words are colorful either way. He even talks to the players through the TV: "Wow! #$%$! How stupid you are! Red card! To the street with you! I can't $@#* believe it!" More or less, but in Spanish. We aren't even watching a game with Spain in it. It's Holland versus Brazil. I can't wait to watch the Spanish game tomorrow night in Spain. I'm going to make sure I situate myself close to this friend. It is a sure-fire way to epitomize my language enrichment. Note: Not language for use in front of most grandmothers and people like, oh saaaaay, your boss.

And he just used my new favorite word. Esto es uno de los partidos que molan... (this is one of the really awesome games). ¡Joder! ¡Cómo está este partido! ¡Cómo mola este partido, tío! Molar basically means "to rock" in the sense that, "Dude, that rocks!" Molar, how I define it, is "the act of being totally wicked awesome."

In general, I have felt a little linguistically handicapped. I am constantly at a loss for words and keep mixing things up. The good news is that I correct my mistakes after I make them instead thinking about the sentences for hours before I say them. Well, that is, until I get shy... them I start thinking more and talking less. I hope that goes away soon.

This weekend should help. I'll be speaking a LOT of Spanish and playing a LOT of ultimate. It's the ultimate tournament that my friend organizes yearly in his pueblo, and it promises to molar mucho.

Notes in Spanish

2010-02-22T19:29:00.000-08:00

I have discovered (and doubt I have written about it here, more than just briefly) a wonderful audio tool to advance my Spanish knowledge. Notes in Spanish (dot com). I have absolutely fallen in love with Ben and Marina, the wonderfully adorable married couple that record the audio sessions and create the fabulously-detailed transcripts (for paid members) to go along with them.

Don't feel like paying, you say? Never fear! There are three levels of audio: Beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Each level has some free content to download and enjoy. I believe all you need to do is go to iTunes and type in "Notes in Spanish" to find and download the free files. I would actually like to do a more complete review of Ben and Marina's site and language tools, but right now I am totally, one-hundred percent exhausted and need to get some shut-eye.

Hasta la proxima.

Gusto en conocerte

2010-02-18T20:54:00.001-08:00

I wonder sometimes, how very long it will take me to answer a confident "yes" when someone asks me if I'm fluent in Spanish. I'm not sure if I've posted this before, or just thought it to myself enough times that I suspect I must have. Because... well, there's no clear line. There's no "this side you're fluent, this side you're not" barrier that I can simply step over one day, or from which I can conveniently measure my distance in inches or feet or miles. No, this is a clear-cut example of how nothing in the world of bilingualism and/or multilingualism is blanco or negro. Everything comes in shades of gris.

But knowing that does not stop the internal questioner. When will I know?! Is it like what they say about finding the one you will marry? "When you know, you just... know... You know?" No. I don't. I really don't.

What I DO know, however, is that I must keep doing what I've been doing all along: Practicing, speaking, listening, writing, learning, interacting... Hola. Me llamo Kristy. Gusto en conocerte.

Okay, so it's been too long...

2010-02-10T12:52:00.000-08:00

Abandoned, neglected, dejado... these are all words that adequately describe my blog and anyone who may have been following it. This is not to say that I have not been practicing Spanish. Au contraire, mes amis! Wait, that's French. ¡Al contrario, mis amigos! I have been speaking up a storm, especially since getting my current job as a teacher in a program where, like, 90 percent of my students speak Spanish at home.

In fact (odd and lovely phenomenon), I have been increasingly asked by native Spanish speakers where I am from. And, not only that, which Spanish-speaking country I am from. A woman from Guatemala at the gas station last night asked in Spanish, "Where you from? Chile?" The fact that I am even asked this question at all astounds me. Considering that it happens now at least once or twice a week, makes me realize that, wow... this is a very good sign.

For anyone who actually reads this and practices Spanish, this may help you with some verbs: Linked verbs in Spanish

I went to Quebec City

2009-08-10T21:16:00.000-07:00

... and now I'm hooked on French again!

It was amazing to be surrounded once again by a language other than English! My mind loves working constantly to solve the word-puzzles. Also fascinating to me was being able to actually see myself build from the ground up. The more words I acquired during my four-ish days there, the more I had in my artillery for figuring out new words from context. It builds slowly, sloooooowly, slooooooooooooooowly upon itself, but it does go up.

I don't think anyone else on the trip was as fixated on the street signs, restaurant menus, and conversation snippets as I was.

This actually means that I am not going to Mexico or any other Spanish-speaking country this year. Sad, yes. But I will manage just fine with the Spanish I already have.

More to come! I will upload some pictures with French words in them! Until then, à bientôt et au revoir!

Like stepping into a library

2009-07-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when I start really forcing myself to speak Spanish, I start realizing how much of it I really don't know. Obviously, with more confidence, any language learner will enter into increasingly complex conversations and try to use increasingly complex sentence structures. Why have languages developed to be so complex, you might ask? Well, because certain ways of saying things have certain (different) connotations to them that require slight, subtle, or sometimes not-so-slight-or-subtle alterations of expression. Along the course of learning Spanish, for example, I have evolved to be able to say the same thing, but each time, more specific, with more personality.

Basic textbook Spanish
Tengo hambre. (I am hungry.)

Slightly more advanced texbook Spanish
Tengo mucha hambre. (I am very hungry.)
Tengo muchísima hambre. (I am very, very hungry.)

Colloquial Spanish
Tengo un montón de hambre. (I am really freaking hungry.)

Colloquial Spanish with a twist of humorous exaggeration
¡Ay dios, me muero de hambre! (Oh my god, I'm dying of hunger!)
¡Tengo tanta hambre que me muero! (I have so much hunger that I'm dying!)

I'm sure that there are some weird sayings that are pretty widely known (except by foreigners) that express hunger without even mentioning it. For example, if I were really, really hungry, I don't think it would be out of the question for me to mumble in English (to myself or to others), "Seriously, I could eat a horse." I'll bet there is something along those lines in Spanish.

To tie this all back in, I think there is the same feeling upon realizing how much I don't know in Spanish as there is upon stepping into a library. I realize, all of a sudden, how much information is in a library, and I start wondering, "What's the point? I'm never going to learn all of this, so why bother?" Entering a library can often be a sobering experience, don't you think? So is stepping forward into a different language, into the jumble and our of your comfort zone. It's scary. It's intimidating. It's embarrassing. It really is.

"E" de "elefante"...

2009-07-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

Hola, ladies and gents! I'm writing here to report that not only have I been arduously continuing with my Spanish, I have managed to land a job in a bilingual program in which I will be actually teaching in Spanish. Scared? You bet your carne asada I am! At this point, I have worked on my Spanish for so many, many, many hours, that it really is uncountable.

Today, I called up the headquarters (located in Madrid) for a worldwide language school that teaches Spanish in several different Spanish-speaking countries. I had this moment before the phone call picked up in which I deliberated whether I should immediately break into Spanish or request to speak to someone in English (1) out of fear and laziness and (2) to make sure that I wasn't misunderstanding everything.

The call went like this: It started with a woman picking up and saying, ¡Buenos días! and a few other words that translated roughly into "How can I help you?"... which made me wonder how most people would be able to converse with her in Spanish if they were, in fact, calling about taking classes to learn Spanish. ¿Está Antonio? (Is Antonio there?) I asked her. (Aside: I had spoken with Antonio a few weeks prior, in English no less, about his suggestions concerning which countries and schools had the best programs.) No, he was not, she told me.

So, following her lead, I launched awkwardly into Spanish, explaining what I had already discussed with Antonio. She wound up connecting me with Marco to further help me, and I continued the awkwardness there. Now, I need to stop and make a distinction: At this point, I don't have butterflies in my stomach anymore when I speak on the phone in Spanish. Furthermore, I'm pretty good at holding my own. What kills me, though, is not being able to see the person's face. So much awkwardness (and I really keep using that word since it is the most suitable for my purposes) can be eliminated with a smile, a clarifying gesture, a nod of the head, that is not even remotely possible via the phone. On top of that, I feel that I can pretty accurately tell people what I need, but have an exceedingly difficult time understanding what they are telling me. I would be lying if I told you that, over the phone, I understand more than 75 percent of the things being said to me. A lot of it sounds mumbly-jumbly. The rest I fill in using the context. I had to stop him several times to ask questions and ask him to repeat certain things or explain certain words he used.

Finally, I told him that if he could email me a lot of the information, as he offered, it would clear up any of the things I perhaps didn't hear correctly. He agreed. But wouldn't you know it, I had to spell out my email address over the phone. Now, anyone reading this who has ever picked up a telephone in the North American continent knows how much of a pain in the neck this can be in English. I grew up hearing my mother's side of phone calls, and have adopted her exact wording, "D as in David... E... S as in Sam..."

But now all of a sudden, I was faced with doing this in Spanish. Before I even got to the second letter, the guy interrupted me, requesting that I give him words to clarify the letters. Uh, bueno... K de... K de... (Uh okay, K as in... K as in...) and for the life of me, I could not think of one Spanish word that started with the letter K. He suggested something agreeable, and then it was on to D. Crap, I couldn't think of anything for that letter either! We went on like this for all nine letters, the conversation sounding very much like a kindergarten discussion of "Hey kids, which words start with this letter?!" and me feeling like I could have essentially thrown all nine years of Spanish study down the inodoro (toilet) for this disastrous ineptitude of mine to play the alphabet game.

¡Qué fracaso! (What a failure!)

The only letter that jumped out at me immediately was E de elefante (E for elephant). I think I ought to collect a list of words to use in case this ever happens again.

Oh, and I might be going to study for a week in Mexico. That's why I called in the first place. Ja! Eso me hace super emocionada!

Good podcasts and blog

2009-06-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

www.podfeed.net

If you go to the above site and type in a keyword from another language, the search engine will pick up podcasts in that language (provided, of course, that the language you choose can be expressed using the roman alphabet). Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to download these because I have a Mac and that makes everything way harder sometimes. Sometimes, but not always.

This site is excellent if you want Spanish podcasts from Washington D.C. It's a good way for me to keep up with politics. Killing two birds with one stone (man, I hate the mental picture that saying drudges up).

ALSO: I like this guy's blog. A lot. Spanish Only. I don't always agree with him 100 percent (and what fun would that be if I did?), but I love his dedication to the sport: Screw Grammar.

Language guilt

2009-06-14T11:44:00.001-07:00

Now, if there's anyone who can tell you about guilt, it's a former Catholic. I won't go messing that topic in with the subject of language learning other than to say that I have noticed in myself and in others a very real shame, embarrassment, and apology-inducing guilt that seems to accompany learning a new language. There are, of course, people who don't feel this way at all, but continue about their way, unabashedly speaking out (grammatically correct or otherwise), and not giving a hoot about who hears them make mistakes or not. I envy these people.

For many of us, however (myself included), not being able to express ourselves as we would like in our second languages can become a frustrating ordeal fraught with disclaimers, self-put-downs, and "I'm-sorry"s. How many times, for example, have you heard someone tell you, "I very sorry, my English not so good." Why are we so sorry?

Last weekend, after a very long trip to Maine and back, I could barely manage to keep myself awake, but I had to buy groceries to be prepared for the coming week. I went into Trader Joe's and, in the process of talking to many of my native Spanish-speaking co-workers, I found myself flailing and failing hopelessly to tell them about my trip. I didn't know the words for "canoe," "paddle," "oar," and a few others. Furthermore, words in Spanish were simply not coming quickly enough to my brain. I was caught in a sea of ahhhs, uuuuuuhs and ummms that washed over my speech repeatedly, like water lapping up over someone's face as they struggle to tread water. My friends are always nice, patient, and helpful, but a few of them kind of chuckled at my fight with the language. One even asked me what happened to my Spanish. Que te paso, Kristy? No has estado practicando? ("What happened to you, Kristy? You haven't been practicing?")

But I have. I told him. I've been practicing everyday. Reading, writing, listening, speaking... all of it. I had no good answer for him, except for apologies and self-degrading words about my declining abilities to express myself. One guy even tried to tell me something three times, and I couldn't tell if he was making a statement or asking me a question. I finally had to tell him to give up what he wanted to tell me because my brain wasn't processing Spanish very well.

I felt stupid, verbally clumsy, and, worst of all, personally responsible for my utter failure.

When I stopped to realize all that I can do, all that I can say in Spanish, and all of the friendships and interactions I have been a part of because of knowing all that I know, it seemed stupid to feel stupid. It's not my first language, for goodness sake! All of a sudden, I became acutely aware of this phenomenon. It is so strange to really think that the trials of language learning so often take on a weight of personal responsibility.

To illustrate further, I had one teacher in college who used to remark after we came to class late or didn't do our homework, "Y'all may not think I take it personal... but it's personal." He felt personally hurt when we didn't put in our effort into his class. Perhaps he thought it reflected on his teaching. To me, it seemed very clear that it wasn't his problem, but belonged to the people who didn't make a point to be on-time or ready for class.

And perhaps we shouldn't be taking it personally either when we don't conjugate a word correctly; when our native accents tarnish our attempts at pronunciation, when we can't think of anything else to say except, "good, thanks"; when we fail to remember the word for a ordinary, everyday object; or, heck, when we never knew that word in the first place. Could I maybe have studied more, practiced more, sought out more interaction? Sure, I'll bet I could have. But... life is too short to feel bad about things like that. It really is.

I feel bad calling myself a Polyglot...

2009-06-13T14:48:00.001-07:00

... before it is even true. Especially when I see this dude's page: Omniglot blog.

Humbling. Very humbling.

I feel more like a poly-not.

Sabes, me muero de ganas de volver a Madrid...

2009-06-03T21:52:00.000-07:00

That reads: "You know, I'm dying to go back to Madrid..."

I am.

I just wrote an email to a friend, which certainly is language practice, although I would be lying horrifically if I told you that I didn't spend too long on it. I spend as much energy crafting a letter in Spanish as it would have taken me to fix up a cover letter for a school district that I'm applying for. I guess we all pick what's important to us, don't we?

At any rate, I also would like to report that I became absolutely fixated with belting out this Juanes song at the top of my lungs all the way to and from work today. I just discovered it on my iPod, and I'm not sure how it got there, although I have my guesses. It taught me two new words. Hoorah!

And, if you've ever even had like, two classes of Spanish in your lifetime, you will enjoy this video: Qué Hora Es?

Podcasts en español

2009-06-02T20:15:00.000-07:00

I am right now listening to some podcasts on this lovely website (I am listening to el Bloguipodio) and am pretty happy to report that I really can understand nearly everything, save a few words. In fact, I am typing and listening at the same time, and still getting a lot of it. Multi-tasking! That must be a good sign.

I decided to follow the advice of one of the blogs that I have been reading, which is to get more input in Spanish. Of course, I am not getting any better if I am talking to myself in the car. I can only improve the fluidity with which I speak the words, phrases, grammatical structures that I already know, but I can't add anything to that, to my skills, without input from native speakers. And, hey, if I'm not getting enough of that in real life, then I need to find it elsewhere. This seems like a fun way to get my news and keep me up-to-date with things that are happening in the world, while at the same time, becoming exposed to some really rich and topic-specific vocabulary.

¡He vuelto! I'm back!

2009-05-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

It's been a rough semester with student teaching. I think about things I could post practically every day, but haven't for a while. I guess I'm a little discouraged with my Spanish. I've been finding it very hard to articulate myself these days. Not sure why... but I've been reading a lot, so that's good.

I would like to dive in head-first to improving. I'll either have to kick it up a notch, start dating a Spanish speaker, or live in another country for awhile. Any of those would help.

Lately, I've been plugging away at "The Little Prince" in Spanish, el Principito. It's a pretty quick read, actually, I just don't happen to read that fast. But the problem is more that I only give myself time to read a page or two here and there. I'm not using a dictionary, though, so it really is going rather fast. Aside from some tricky few words, I can understand nearly everything easily, or at least guess at word meanings through context.

Poco a poco, se va lejos.
Little by little, one goes far.

Some blog links I found...

2009-05-01T03:28:00.000-07:00

Five Recommendations for Lazy Language Learners
Confessions of a Language Addict
Spanish Only

Post soon to follow.

Some Spanish poems that are muy awesome...

2009-04-26T19:19:00.000-07:00

de Las palabras que se lleva el viento por Juan Carlos Martín Ramos:

VERSO Y REVERSO
VERSE AND REVERSE

Verso y reverso,
Verse and reverse
haz y envés,
front and back,*
la otra cara de la luna
the other side of the moon
no la ves.
you don't see.

Hay palabras que se dicen
There are words that they say
al derecho y al revés,
backwards and forwards,
cuando pases esta página
when you turn this page
puede ser que ya no estén.
they may no longer be there.

*This talks specifically about the front and back side of a leaf. Funny that there are such specific words in some languages for things that require many unspecific words in another.

EL CUENTO DE NUNCA EMPEZAR
THE STORY THAT NEVER STARTED

Érase una vez un cuento
There was once a story
que nadie puede contar,
that no one could tell,
que acaba por el principio
that ended at the beginning
y empieza por el final.
and began at the end.

Érase una vez un cuento
There was once a story
que se cuenta sin contar,
that one told without telling,
cuando empieza ha terminado
when it began it had ended
cuando acaba va a empezar.
when it ended it was beginning.

I took some artistic license with the translation here, so please disregard the fact that the English is in the past tense and its Spanish source in the present.

Can you read fingerspelling?

2009-04-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

Do you know the ASL (American Sign Language) alphabet? Try to read the words as they are spelled out with images. It's hard!

Test your skillz.

As it turns out, I have to undo years of forming the letter "d" incorrectly. Oops.

My Multilingual Trader Joe's World

2009-04-24T20:13:00.000-07:00

I decided to start up a running tally to see how diverse the population really is that passes me in a constant stream as they buy tortilla chips, free range eggs, and wasabi mayonnaise, among other delightful items. Here is what I discovered about our Trader Joe's customers:

NES = Native English Speakers
NNES = Non-native English Speakers

Tuesday, April 21, 2009
39 NES and 14 NNES
25.9 % of the 53 people were non-native speakers of English

Wednesday, April 22, 2009
50 NES and 20 NNES
28.6 % of the 70 people were non-native speakers of English

Thursday, April 23, 2009
117 NES and 40 NNES
25.5% of the 157 people were non-native speakers of English

So, we're looking at a little over 25 percent (or 1 out of 4) of the customers that pass through the Trader Joe's where I work are people for whom English is a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth, etc.) language. How cool is that?!

I'm going to keep up my little experiment because it certainly makes the time pass nicely at the register (slash) gives me something to do. It also encourages me to engage all of the customers in conversation... since, without that, I can only make guesses about who will have an accent and who will not. This would not work, considering how often I am surprised.

Reaaaaaally missin' España

2009-04-21T20:45:00.000-07:00

I was reminded of it tonight: There is nothing quite like successfully making a friend in another language. There really isn't. Makes me nostalgic for Madrid and her bars, beers, patient friends, and complete strangers, that made language acquisition possible for me years ago. Occasionally, when I step back from myself and hear myself blabbering on like an idiot, barely aware of the words before they leave my mouth, I am taken aback by how far I've come, remembering the sense of elation, accomplishment, awe, that first overcame me the moment I realized I was speaking without stopping. It was the first moment that I really felt like I could talk to people and it might perhaps be worth their time to listen. It reminds me how my students must feel upon crossing that barrier... and the frustration they must feel before reaching it.

It takes awhile... and it's hard. But it's worth it.

It's soooo worth it.

Ricky Ricardo's Spanglish Little Red Riding Hood

2009-04-20T20:17:00.000-07:00

I Love Lucy: Ricky telling Little Ricky a bedtime story

I guess I'm not the only one telling stories in Spanglish. Mine's not as awesome and seamless as his, though.

El Chico que Gritó Lobo y Otros Cuentos

2009-04-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

Gracias a dios for all those Spanish-speakers who work at Trader Joe's with me. They keep me on my toes... linguistically speaking, that is. My tall friend from Peru has this funny way of taking one joke and beating it into the ground until the absurdity of it makes me laugh even more and the funniness somehow renews itself. He's developed this habit of saying, pues, hombre... outloud whenever he's within twenty feet of me. It translates basically into, "well, dude... " and is, according to him, the cornerstone of Spain Spanish. He's pretty much relentlessly made fun of me for my Spain-Spanish accent ever since I returned from Madrid two summers ago. I'm sure I've lost most of that accent by now, yet still, he insists on beginning every other sentence with, pues, hombre... Or, hell, using it as a sentence all unto itself. Pues, hombre. But only around me.

He is fluent in English, and I find that when he talks to me in Spanish (which is 75 percent of the time), I largely respond in... well, English. He spurts out these long tirades of Spanish and I'll reply with, "well, wouldn't it just be better to move it on top of that box?" or "yeah, but what makes you think I'd do that?" or "come on, leave me alone, it's been a long day." It's soooo much easier. But my more-than occasional struggle with conversation really puts it back into perspective. Am I really that low of a speaker? How much DO I know? What exactly do I have to show for nine years of studying this language if I can't even pick the right words half the time?

Halfway through my shift, I mentioned something about The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and my friend from Colombia claimed to have never heard of the story. I waited until I had the complete focus to try telling him in Spanish. I could have summed it up in half the time in English, but I wanted to see if I could step up to the challenge. It went más o menos así ("more or less this way") Spanglish and all:

Okay, here's the story...
Había un chico y algún día
--porque tenía ganas de hacerlo, no sé--
gritó, "LOBO! LOBO!"
Y un hombre vino corriendo, "Qué lobo?! Dónde?!"
Y el chico era como, "Jaja! Es una broma! No hay lobo! Jaja!"
'Cause there wasn't really a wolf there, you know?
He was just pretending.
El chico decidió otra vez causar problemas o algo
y gríto, "LOBO! LOBO!"...
aunque otra vez no había lobo.
Y otra vez el hombre vino corriendo and was like,
"En serio?! Dónde está?!"
Y el chico se rió de él porque todavía era broma,
"Jaja, me creiste? Idiota!"
Okay, so you see where this is going?
Yeah.
So, la tercera vez...
Oh, and I forgot to tell you!
The boy was a... a... ovejas...
Cómo se llama alguien que cuida ovejas?...
Yeah, a shepherd or something...
Entonces, la tercera vez...
porque la primera vez y la segunda vez
no había lobo y el chico gritó que sí...
la tercera vez, sí, había lobo,
y cuando gritó, "LOBO! LOBO!"
Yeah, you got it. The guy didn't believe him.
Nadie lo creyó.
So the moral of the story...
How do you say moral? Oh yeah, that.
... es que... if you are always lying,
no one will believe you when you really need help.

Okay, so it was half in English. It's hard. My friend said I did a very good job telling my story... but he sort of has to say stuff like that 'cause I'm a girl and might cry otherwise.

Here's a real Spanish version of the story. Much more descriptive than mine, I must say, but probably with a less charismatic storyteller.

Testing my Spanish proficiency...

2009-04-19T22:20:00.000-07:00

People ask me all the time if I'm fluent in Spanish. For all that I talk about it, they must assume that I am, even though most of them have never heard me speak. I usually tell them that I'm getting close. But how close am I really? Not surprisingly, I became distracted while re-vamping my resume.

What do I write on my resume?!
Highly proficient in spoken and written Spanish
Comfortably proficient in spoken and written Spanish
Intermediate spoken and written Spanish skills

Well, I just took this online Spanish Proficiency Test, for what it's worth, and they tell me I'm at the Intermediate Level. I scored 140 points out of a possible 150. That's 4 wrong out of 50, or 93%. I would want to be at a higher-sounding level, but, dang, those comprehension questions were really hard!

I'm taking these tests next.

I think I'll just write Intermediate. I think I'm farther from fluent than I think. Sigh.

Podcasts rock my MONDE

2009-04-14T20:53:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to these free, downloadable podcasts to teach me French on my way to and from work. They are amazing and the woman who records them is great. She has a really thick British accent although her first language is **definitely French. I have to say, it has been making my commute so much more educational and enjoyable.

The only downside is that I got so good at repeating her when she says, J'habite en Angleterre (I live in England)--and it sounds so pretty--that it will probably slip out instead of the more difficult, more factual J'habite aux Etats Unis (I live in the United States), which I still haven't wrapped my tongue around quite yet.

**I'm only 97.3 percent sure of this. As long as she really is a French woman with a British accent, and not a British person who speaks French really convincingly, I'll be okay with it. I'm already bound to sound like a goofy foreigner in the first place, so last thing I need is to learn to speak French with a British accent that's not even mine.

Every play! You like it!

2009-04-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

One great thing about being in a multilingual environment everyday at work, is that I get the chance to hear English used in much more creative ways. The most satisfying thing, sometimes, is to realize how far my international students have come and that they are, in fact, successful communicators, despite their grammatical setbacks and limited vocabulary. Today for example, one of the fourth graders in my student teaching classroom (an irresistibly cute boy from Iran) popped his head quickly into the room after dismissal to announce to the assistant teacher and I the following message in broken English: That Ms. M wanted us to know not to close the door because she didn't have the room key with her, and we would be locked out.

We didn't need to ask him to repeat himself. His speech was clear, concise, confident, and successfully delivered the intended message. Within five seconds of poking his little head around the door and blurting out the long sentence, he vanished again in the flurry of students rushing down the hall to their buses. The assistant teacher turned to me smiling and said, "I can't believe it. He's speaking in full sentences now! At the beginning of the school year, he didn't know even one word of English, and he was crying all the time."

Is this the same bubbly boy I see everyday that I am in the classroom, talking to his classmates, singing and muttering and counting to himself, flashing me these mischievous looks with his huge brown eyes, and cracking jokes? My god, the sense of humor on this little guy! Can he really be the same kid she was talking about?

Just today, Ms. M announced to the group of students she was working with, "Okay, guys, let's get to work!" To which, aforementioned student burst out with an enthusiastic, "No guys, let's go to PLAY! Every play! You like it!"

What else could I do but laugh? Is his grammar off? Certainly. Is his accent foreign? Definitely. Is his message lost? Absolutely not. His humor carries through, clear as day. He is an effective communicator. I fail to remember that sometimes in my never-ending quest to be a "perfect" language learner. But what does that even mean? Do we remember people for their ability to correctly conjugate verbs and pronounce Rs? Or do we remember their smiles and laughs and dancing eyes, the stories they tell, and the way that they've charmed and befriended us and reeled us in?

Come on, Kristy... as if I even need to answer that.

Went back...

2009-04-07T19:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight I stopped by a weekly conversational Spanish class that I used to go to a few years ago. The instructor told me that I used to speak well back then, but she remembered me being very nervous to open my mouth and try. I do remember that, too, actually, but I guess I never considered that other people could tell. Every time I felt that I might have to answer someone in Spanish, my heart would start pounding in my chest, and I would clam up and get really shy. Basically, my body would enter "fight or flight" mode. That was three years ago. I almost forgot how anxious I used to get!

It's funny how nonchalant I am about it now. I don't even get too bent out of shape when I can't understand someone. I'm not as embarrassed... but, then again, I understand most of what I hear anyway.

I wonder if I will experience a similar reaction to learning a new language. Will I become newly afraid and timid once I get to the cusp of a conversational level? Or will I have already gotten past the jitters once, so I won't have to again?

I remember quite painfully and vividly how awful it felt to realize that I was a basic and boring conversationalist. I wanted to say so much, and I couldn't! It is one of the worst feelings I've ever experienced. Conversely, finally reaching a level of meaningful expression that fosters meaningful relationships with wonderful people... well, that makes it all worth it. The moments in which I have been shockingly aware of my own mouth effortlessly spilling out foreign words in the right order, and of my own brain making instant connections to concepts without first converting to English... those have been some of the best of my life.

But it takes a lot of work and some special circumstances. Will I ever feel that way again? I hope so. It's addicting. Like piercings and tattoos, they say.

Made friends with a gas station attendant from Colombia

2009-04-05T20:05:00.000-07:00

... who says that I barely have an accent when I speak Spanish. I hear this a lot. I fear that continued feedback of this kind might give me a big head, but it certainly is good encouragement to continue. I still practice Spanish daily (it's easy when "studying" doesn't require dictionaries and/or learning software), but the French acquisition remains only a distant wish. Very sad. Very true.

I did watch a movie in French. I found that I could actually pick quite a lot of words out with my ears while my eyes read the English subtitles. Sweet.

Haven't forgotten about the blog...

2009-03-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

Nope. Not even close. But I have been putting off posting (and also studying French as often, unfortunately) in the pursuit of other, more pressing things at the moment. Please check in during the next few days... I will be updating you reaaaaal soon.

Please also note: On the sidebar, I am keeping track of the hours I spend studying each language (roughly). My dad told me recently that 1,000 hours of practice in anything leads to proficiency. He's testing the theory with piano. I'm testing it with language. Of course, I've been studying Spanish now for nearly ten years, so I think it's pretty safe to say that I'm beyond estimating how much practice that is. As far as French goes, I would say that I have spent no more than 50 hours studying. In both cases, I am resetting the counters to ZERO and seeing where I go from there. I am counting listening to music as practice, so I'm sure to rack up the Spanish hours simply on my ride to work.

I am still debating whether to log "jogging" time on my language counter. My brain usually likes to use the steady, rhythmic pounding of my feet against the cement to drone out life and then repeat phrases and sayings and scenarios in my head. Most of the time while I'm running, I'm whispering to myself in Spanish. I know, it makes me sound like a looney. This week, after practicing, it was French. Repeating language repeatedly, unintentionally in my head... would that be considered practicing it? Hard to say.

Elle est mignonne.

2009-02-28T20:44:00.000-08:00

During this week's French lessons, I found it slightly unnerving that the word for "tiny" that the guy used for the baby sister was mignonne. It sounded exactly the way you pronounce filet mignon. You know, the expensive non-vegetarian stuff people order at restaurants sometimes.

...which made it seem like the guy in the lesson was calling the baby a hunk of meat.

...which was unsettling at best.

And my biggest complaint is that I wish I could practice more.

Encore, je le fais...

2009-02-23T17:28:00.000-08:00

Again, I am doing it. Or, I suppose I could also say, Je le recommence, but I'm pretty much just guessing that. I have no one to tell me, "No, Kristy, your writing is all sorts of wrong."

I just noticed how funny it is that the word "I" in English is capitalized, but nothing else is. What is it about "I" that makes it superior to "you," "he," "she," "we," or "them"? It's just strange, that's what. And speaking of the word "strange" I like being able to see how closely French and English are connected. The word for "foreigner" is étranger or étrangère... which only needs an S transplant, et voilà! it's a word not foreign to our eyes at all!

It's hilarious to me that words like encore and voilà already existed in my "English" vocabulary and I didn't even ever stop to think about how they weren't really English... yet I always knew what they meant.

Qué fracaso...

2009-02-22T16:55:00.000-08:00

This week's French studying was a total bust. I didn't study it at all.

I had a rough week of it. Between being really worried about a friend for a few days and being terrified to write my first definitive lesson plans for student teaching (bursting spontaneously into tears several times at the thought of it, in fact), I didn't let myself do anything even slightly related to the study of language.*

And this is how it comes to be that many people live in this country for several years and never learn English. If they have no real need to learn, if they are in a protective, bubble community of other speakers of their first language (L1), then they can afford to "let life get in the way" as I have, and simply drop the notion of language learning altogether. Life does get in the way. Sometimes we have to fight to make time for things that matter to us.

*Okay, that's a bit of a lie... I read three chapters of Las telarañas de Carlota (Charlotte's Web). Fifth grade reading level, that's right. And I still don't know a lot of the words, but I'm not bothering to look them up this time... just guessing, so I'm sure I'll miss something crucial.

Hasta la próxima, chicos.

Typing with pinyin characters... testing, 1, 2...

2009-02-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

Let's see if this works. I found a site online that claims that I can write the accent marks for the tones with a Mac. I had to enable the "U.S. Extended" keyboard.

Alt+a for the first tone - ā
Alt+e for the second tone - á
Alt+v for the third tone - ǎ
Alt+` for the forth tone - à
To type ü, type Alt+u then u

Zǎo shàng hǎo. Good morning.
Hěn gāoxing rènshi nǐ. Nice to meet you.

Crap... I had to type it first in Word and then cut and paste it in. That's certainly not the fastest way to write. Let's see if the actual Chinese characters that I copied from the phrase page will copy into blogger... 很高兴认识你。

And here is how (supposedly) I would write in Chinese characters if I were to ever need to do that... not that I even know how to write or recognize one word at this point.

Antes de que me duerma...

2009-02-17T20:07:00.000-08:00

Before I fall asleep...

The Spanish Language Meetup Group that I am a part of here is genial (awesome). Monthly, on a Tuesday night, a bunch of hispanohablantes (Spanish speakers) and hispanohablante-wannabees (i.e. gringos) gather together to help the less skilled of us piece together the intricacies of this beautiful language or, at the very least, attempt not to brutally massacre it. For me, anyway, it is interesting to realize the difference in fluidity that occurs within the span of a couple of hours. Upon arrival, the switch-over is anything but seamless. All of a sudden, I'm trying to say things like, "Nice to meet you, but wait, let me hang up my jacket first... " in Spanish, but the words don't come to me in these crucial beginning moments and I stand there saying things like, "Bueno, uh... encantada de conocerte, pero... necesito [gesture towards general coat area]... uh... mi... coat... uh... chaqueta... "

Like charades.

Then, not even a full hour later, I turn to my friend Danilo and tell him in rapid-fire Spanish, "Dude, it's incredible how much easier it is to speak now than it was when I first got here... " To which he replies, "Oh yeah! No kidding!" or something roughly equivalent.

This really fascinates me. I've tried to record a sample audio clip of myself in a monologue before meetup groups and then right after, to compare the speed of the speech that leaves my mouth. The problem with this approach, however, is that I have nothing to talk about when I have no speaking partner, and so I find myself pausing much more for thought and words than I normally do in a fluid conversation. What I really need to do someday, is to do this with a friend's help. Maybe best-case scenario would also include me not practicing any Spanish for an entire week prior. I could then start recording from the beginning of my conversation with this person, record some more in the middle of our conversation, and then, of course, finish off with a sample of the end of it as well. Ideally, I would be speaking with this person for a solid hour or more, so that I would really get into the flow of things.

It would be hard not to alter the data, though, as I would want to try to talk more quickly at the end to prove how much I had improved. It's a well-known fact that anything you observe is altered slightly by the fact that you observe it. That is, the act of observation itself changes what is under the microscope, so to speak.

This experiment could be done just as easily with a study of results obtained before and after an alcoholic beverage. This is the adult language learner's best friend, as it turns out. Excellent word-extraction tool.

I continue to study French. My friend at work today was teaching me some useful sayings and words, and will hopefully continue this tomorrow. This is in addition to the most unexpectedly hilarious of my co-workers always giving me mini Portuguese lessons, my Chinese-speaking co-worker welcoming me with an enthusiastic Zao shang hao! every morning, and a dozen or so Spanish-speakers that I work with who all have their own ways of greeting me with an assault of palabras upon seeing me. I am a lucky woman.

Est-ce que *la voiture... uh, uuuuh, le poisson...

2009-02-14T19:24:00.000-08:00

Reviewing all the Rosetta Stone lessons from long past, so that I can finally move forward. I'll tell you, my favorite part about this is that it drills things, words, sounds so firmly into my head that they stick. The only problem is that I get very used to certain words following each other. For example, when it starts asking me, Est-ce que *la voiture est rouge? I get that pounded so definitively into my head, that every time I go to say something that starts Est-ce que... I start to immediately follow with *la voiture, which means "the car," even if I am looking at a picture of a fish and I am clearly reading, comprehending, and staring straight at Est-ce que le poisson est bleue? It's as if my mouth betrays my eyes, and I'm all of a sudden asking if the car is blue instead of the fish. Curious. I wonder if the speech patterns started by Rosetta Stone will continue to affect my spoken French once I have anything slightly resembling that skill.

*EDIT: It was just pointed out to me that I had written le voiture instead of la voiture in this entry. I've fixed it. Problem solved, merci. (Although I still can't claim to have enough of a feel for the language that le voiture sounds wrong to me yet.) We live, we learn, we make mistakes.

As it turns out, my Spanish this week seems to be spiraling down el inodoro ("the toilet"). On the plus side, I now know of a new YouTube show to help me with some listening practice: Aquí no hay quien viva. I'd be lying if I told you I knew exactly what that means. Literal translation leaves us with: "Here there is not one who lives." But from some online forums I discovered, it seems to roughly translate to "Nobody can stand living here," which is a heck of a lot funnier, so that's where my vote goes.

Additionally, their accents are very Spainish. Like, Spain-Spanish. It's marvelous.

And just one more thing...

2009-02-10T19:46:00.000-08:00

This is absolutely terrifying. I should have never looked at it. How many pages of vowel combos is that?! Three? Shudder. Sometimes it's better to be blissfully unaware of what lies ahead.

Disenchanted...

2009-02-10T19:18:00.000-08:00

I can already see that the BBC 12-week language "course" that is free online, will not really give me the tools I need to succeed. Sure, I am developing a good ear for French dialog, and I am learning a few basic words, but I am exceedingly frustrated that I cannot simply click on one single word in the dialog to hear it sound out repeatedly. Sometimes, I just want to hear one word, verify one vowel sound, concentrate on one sound-spelling relationship without the barrage of all of the other words around it. But I can't. I must patiently wait for the rest of the sentences to finish, and then click the button to repeat the whole thing. It's terribly ineffective.

I need a native French speaker to act as my walking dictionary/official word pronouncer. Unfortunately, those are a lot fewer and farther between than Spanish speakers around these parts.

Not that I'm complaining about the abundance of hispanohablantes in this state. You should know by now that that's what I thrive on. It's my air.

Un quiz fatal

2009-02-08T15:19:00.000-08:00

I quite like the word fatal because it happens to exist in both French and Spanish (pronounced "fah-tahl" in the latter). It's perhaps funnier to me because the same word in English, of course, means "deadly" or "resulting in death." This, I think, causes me to use the word quite frequently in Spanish anyway because it produces in me this immense satisfaction that I am expressing something dramatically and in a rather colloquial manner that they don't teach you in school. ¿Cómo te fue la noche? How was your night? ¡Me la pasé fatal! It was awful!

What a fabulous word.

So I call attention now to the terrible quiz mentioned in the title of the entry. I was trying to take an end-of-unit quiz for the French stuff that I am studying on my own as part of the BBC 12 week online lessons (free). But they, for some reason, were asking me to answer using words they had never taught me. And even more interesting is the fact that, where doubt or confusion existed, I turned to Spanish. The quiz attempted to prompt the following answer (in French) from me, "Thank the man [for giving you directions]." To which I immediately replied in my head with, "Gracias, señor... oh crap, that's Spanish... uh, uh... Merci!... Merci, señor... I mean, oh god... monseiur. Merci, monseiur."

This was quickly followed by the word fatal popping into my head as I quietly shook my head in defeat, and went meandering off to find out if fatal or its rough equivalent existed in French. Excitingly enough, it does, although I have no idea how the French say it, and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't pronounce anything past the first A. That's just how they roll.

Apparently, the second language does start replacing the first one as the go-to language for learning the third. This is going to be fun to see how messed up my brain gets and how it sorts itself out.

La Place de la Fontaine

2009-02-07T11:00:00.000-08:00

You know, I think the intro phrases and words that they give you to learn French purposely have lots of Rs. The crafty people who cook up these lessons want to make you have to grapple with them at an early stage. As for me, well... right now I've got the sound alright... I'm just trying to make the right level of sound. So far, it seems to me that I either overdo it and sound like I'm trying to cough something up, or the R is a no show, and leaves just a trace of where it ought to have been.

Also interesting to note, was my momentary difficulty with the word "fountain" (la fontaine). I kept wanting to say "fon-tain" (like, rhyming with "pain" or "rain"), but it actually sounds like "ten" in English. "Font-ten." It's pretty amazing how the mind works and how the spelling of a word (if it breaks conventions already set in the mind from an aquired first or second language) will disable it from correctly processing what it is hearing. When I was thinking "tain," I could tell that the sound I was hearing was different from what I expected it to be, but it wasn't until I closed my eyes and listened to it, that I could say, "oh, that sounds like 'ten'!"

This immediately reminded me of the Stroop Tests that list off a bunch of color words, some of which have the same color as the word and some of which have a different color. Like, it might say "blue," but the word "blue" is actually red in color. So automatic is our ability to read words, that it becomes hard to name the actual color of the word, if the word itself names a different color.

BLUE
GREEN
RED
YELLOW

See what I mean? You have to think a bit first when you have to name the actual color. When you read the words, it's nearly effortless. Give it a try for real with the Interactive Stroop Effect Experiment. It's a website for kids, but it is a perfect example of how powerful our mental connections to literacy can be once we've fostered them. This, of course, would be a much different test if taken by young children who are still struggling to read and sound out simple sight words. They wouldn't have all the written words interfering with their ability to name the color. Wouldn't phase them at all. Could this have something to do with why young children can catch on to new languages so fast? Nothing about their own language has been so solidified that it interferes with their ability to process subtle differences in the second language. Experts are still out to lunch on this one and don't know the answers to the millions of questions about second language acquisition, by the way, but that certainly doesn't stop them or anyone else from having very strong opinions.

Ça va, merci.

2009-02-02T19:06:00.000-08:00

It's going well, thanks.

The French, I mean. It's not like I can say that I'm bad at it, since I just started, and I pretty much have to be bad at it. Can't be good at a language you've never studied, right? I think that comforts me the most right now... that it's not humanly possible to be awful at something you just barely began. Talk to me after several months of plugging away at this daily. If all I can say at that point is How are you, Mr. Fish. Do you drink milk? No, the car is not blue, it's white. Thank you sir, goodnight. then it will be safe to say that I haven't progressed too terribly much, and we can start to contemplate the idea that I should stick to things I know. Like art. And being a procrastinator. I'm good at both of those things.

The French R is going to keep me up at night. I can already tell.

Ooh la la: So, French it is, I guess...

2009-02-01T13:20:00.000-08:00

I have this vague and nagging feeling upon entering these uncharted waters, that I have no freaking idea what I'm getting myself into. After all, haven't I been practicing Spanish for eons now and still feeling like I have a super long way to go? Really. I have. And now it starts all over again. The strange sounds I have to try to create that don't exist in my first (or second) language, new letter-to-sound relationships (i.e. knowing that more or less French orthography does not correspond to what any of the words sound like), trying to pick out individual words in a confusing flurry of melted-together speech as it flows out in one continuous blend of noise... that sound all the same to me, frankly.

Le sigh.

So I watched some YouTube videos that this guy named Remy puts together every so often (link is in the side bar). I like this guy because he has an extremely soothing voice and sort of makes me feel like the task of learning French is totally no big deal. Nothing to be alarmed or worried or hurried about. He talks about simply acquiring little building blocks that you keep adding to as you make a foundation and just practice and practice, build and build. Sounds so lovely, doesn't it? Don't get your hopes up too much if you decide check his lessons out. You'll see that the video runs for a super long time, and you might think that the guy is going to teach a whole lot in that ten minutes, but he usually only gets around to a couple of things that he covers really thoroughly. He just spends a lot of time explaining and informing, which I think is important if you are missing out on being in an actual class where you can ask questions. And, hey, this is totally free, so I ain't complainin'.

In one random posting about things to say to your lover in French, he taught how to say I can't live without you. Which actually was pretty fun to say. All I need now is a French lover. Which should be about as easy to find in this city as a parking spot in Harvard Square. During rush hour. On a Friday evening. For a tractor trailer.

Je ne peux pas vivre sans toi. Sounds so nice.

Comment?

2009-01-28T13:26:00.000-08:00

No, not the English word comment referring to a remark... it's the French word for What? I didn't hear what you said. It, like many French words, looks a whole lot more complicated than it actually sounds. It, in fact, shows off its romance language ties to Spanish, since it is pronounced surprisingly close to ¿Cómo? in Spanish, which means the same thing.

It also expresses how I feel in diving back into French again. It's not even so much of a diving in, as a testing of the water with a toe. Awhile back, and a couple of times at that, I waded about knee-high into Rosetta Stone, splashed around for a bit and then came right back out. I'm not going to lie; the thought of trying to articulate those guttural "r"s in the back of my throat makes me shirk away in fear. What if I just simply cannot do them justice?

What if an obnoxiously Americanized manner of curling my tongue prevails? ... or if I keep rolling them like a Spanish speaker? ... or if I try to make the sound and it comes out too strong? ... or... or what if, after all is said and done, no "r" exists? What if I try and it doesn't come out? Perhaps, it will make no sound at all. Just a little escaping air, a little shaky breath of uncertainty...

Maybe I'll just be really bad at it.

And maybe I won't.

And should I keep myself from trying to learn an entire language for fear of mispronouncing a letter in its alphabet? It seems that I already have.

By the way, what do French pirates say? Aaaarrrrrrrrrrr...

I don't know. Juh-nuh say pah.

Un tío brasilero

2009-01-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

So I went to this Spanish language meetup group that happens once a month and, wouldn't you know it, I had the oddest experience ever. As I wrote to my friend in an excited email afterwards, Hablaba dos horas con un tío brasilero que me hablaba solamente en portugues mientras le hablaba solamente en español, y nos entendimos!!! (I talked for two hours with a Brazilian dude that spoke to me only in Portuguese while I spoke to him only in Spanish, and we understood each other!!!)

The only lie there, is that I only spoke to the tío brasilero for, like, one hora and not two... but sometimes I wind up messing up the simplest parts of a sentence (like the truth, facts, my name, etc.) while I concentrate really hard on not screwing up the rest of it.

But the real good news here is that I, by some miracle, understood some Portuguese. It sounded like what might happen if someone learned Spanish by reading lips only... and then proceeded, without ever hearing it spoken, to try and put their own sound system to it.

I'M DONE: The first book I've ever read cover-to-cover in Spanish...

2009-01-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

... and I still don't know what it's about. Well, I do, but I'm still trying to tie it all together. All morning, I've been looking up literature reviews so that I can see other people's viewpoints on how all of these stories contribute to a greater lesson somehow.

On a less searching, and more superficial level, I really really enjoyed a couple of things about this chapter (and it's really hard not to like this first one):

Ahohándose en el mare mágnum de fórmulas abstractas que durante dos siglos constituyeron la justificación moral del poderío de la familia, la Mamá Grande emitió un sonoro eructo, y expiró. (Drowning in the great sea of abstract formulas, that during two centuries constituted the moral justification of the family's power, the Grand Matriarch emitted a loud burp, and died.) Classic. Pure poetry.

Then, the fact that el blablablá histórico is an acceptable Spanish way of writing "historical mumbo-jumbo" is pretty awesome. Or, at least, it's acceptable according to Señor Gabriel García Márquez, the writer. Blah blah blah.

This is some interesting new vocabulary from this last chapter making a slow entrance into my lexicon (very, very slow, some of it):

racimo=bunch, cluster
muchedumbre=crowd
alborotado=agitated, excited, rowdy
padecer=to suffer from
yacer=to lie, be lying (physically, not verbally)
espumoso=(beer) frothy, (wine) sparkling
rugir=to roar; rugido=roar
rechoncho,-a=chubby, tubby, dumpy
asunto=matter

And a fun one from a past chapter:
acribillar=to riddle (with bullets, questions)

And from my friend Tanja this morning:
pachucha=gloomy

And, what the heck, a couple from online sources, too:
mero,-a=mere
garciamarquiano,-a=is an actual adjective describing anything pertaining to the author, Gabriel García Márquez

At any rate, I think I'm going to have to start trying my hand at Mandarin, since the woman at work insistantly greets me with Zao shang hao every morning, and smacks me on the arm if I don't answer back. It makes me nervous.

For real now. I'm finishing this crazy book.

2009-01-17T20:17:00.000-08:00

Thirteen pages. It sounds so harmless, but it's not. I've put away all the clothes in my room, even got rid of some piles of junk, and there's just not any other way to procrastinate it further. So here I go.

Ten pages left.

Eight pages left.

Seven.

Díos, this book is too heavy (content-wise, not physical weight). I must read the rest another night. Crap, and I thought I'd finish, too. Casi. Almost.

Little vozitas in my head.

2009-01-16T21:13:00.000-08:00

I notice this happening a lot, and I always wonder what the brain is doing, how the brain benefits from all of this. "This" being, as I got my dinner out of the fridge tonight, I became acutely aware of a little voice inside my head, creating Spanish phrases while I scarcely paid attention. Today it was:

... a mi, a mi, a mi, a mi me encantaría decirte una cosa.
... I, I, I, I would love to tell you something.

At least it made sense. Sometimes it makes syntactic sense (word order, right parts of speech, etc.) and not actual semantic sense.

The frequency with which this happens correlates to how much Spanish I've been using/hearing. The more I practice, the more vocal my brain becomes when I'm silent.

Finally finishing? And then what?

2009-01-15T13:48:00.000-08:00

I can't explain to you how very much I have put off finishing a book in Spanish lent to me by my friend in Madrid. I could drone on and on about all of the things I've had to do that get in the way, but what it really comes down to is this: I'm scared. I'm scared of the work it takes to understand what I'm reading. I'm intimidated by the fact that--although I've studied Spanish formally for 5 years and informally for 4 more, and I've spent a grand total of four and a half months of my life linguistically immersed in Spanish speaking countries--there is still an enormously great deal that I don't know. It's scary, a little depressing, slightly daunting, and maybe embarrassing even.

I watched the film The Motorcycle Diaries last night (Diarios de motocicleta), and although I lamented the fact that there was not a way to (1) turn off the subtitles or (2) change them from English to Spanish (yes, sometimes Spanish movies have Spanish subtitles for the hearing-impaired), it was probably all for the best since I never can understand movies in Spanish anyways. Telenovelas (Spanish soap operas), yes. News broadcasts, yes. Bad game shows and talk shows, mostly yes. But never movies. I can only hear what I know I should be hearing. I may give an example of this later, but anyway, this is a tangent on the frustration I feel in the reading of this book, and akin to needing training wheels to ride a bicycle, but only on really bumpy driveways. My eyes serve as a fail-safe for my ears. Does this make any sense?

And back to the book: It is called Los funerales de la Mamá Grande and is escrito por Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose house I saw this summer in Cartagena, Colombia. I will now explain how 9 years of studying Spanish can make for such a lousy understanding of quality literature. Sentences like this. Words unfamiliar to me are in bold:

En el profundo corredor central, con garfios en las paredes donde en otro tiempo se colgaron cerdos desollados y se desangraban venados en los soñolientos domingos de agosto, los peones dormían amontonados sobre sacos de sal y útiles de labranza, esperando la orden de ensillar las bestias para divulgar la mala noticia en el ámbito de la hacienda desmedida.

Rather than try to wow you with my extraordinary reading skills, I will honestly tell you what this paragraph looks like to me upon a first once-over, without looking up any of the words. The words in parentheses are my best educated guesses:

In the deep/long central corridor, with plural noun in the walls where in another time they hung adjective pigs and verb (bled?) plural noun in the adjective Sundays of August, the plural noun (peonies?) slept verb (amassed?) on sacks of salt and tools of noun, waiting the order to verb (something about sitting?) the plural noun in order to verb (divulge?) the bad news in the noun of location of the adjective ranch.

So, you can see how this might hinder a good understanding of the general story.

Really, this is what it says once I spend ten minutes looking up the unknown words (yes, ten minutes, one paragraph.):

In the deep/long central corridor, with hooks in the walls where in another time they hung skinned pigs and bled deer in the drowsy Sundays of August, the farm workers slept piled up together on sacks of salt and farming tools, waiting the order to saddle-up the beasts/animals in order to divulge the bad news in the sphere/scope/range of the excessive/disproportionate ranch.

Now you understand where I'm coming from and why it has taken nearly two years to finish this book. It's scary, ¿a que sí? Wouldn't you agree?

¡Aquí empezamos!

2009-01-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

Here we start. I have decided to blog my adventures through the bumpy waters of multilingualism. So far, I am only bilingual. I am hoping to expand upon that number. From here, the only way to go is up. ¡Vamos ya!