Me gusta todas las cosas

Buenos días, señores y señoras y señoritas.  Y también chicos y chicas.  

I'm posting a very cute  canción from YouTube today called Me Gustas Tú. I discovered it from a post someone placed on the  Duolingo (an online program for learning Spanish) discussion board.  It's perfect for beginning Spanish learners, because

• It includes subtitles
• It uses very simple (but very useful) vocabulary and grammar
• It has a catchy Latin beat that will have you singing (or at least humming) it all day
• It is very good for getting used to the often difficult construction of  'I like,': Me gusta
• It's repetitive, so it really sticks.
• It's cheerful and life affirming

This, you'll recall, is the way we learned our native language--through listening to others speak, songs, and nursery rhymes.  That's how we mastered our abc's.

At first I really struggled with me gusta, te gustan, nos gusta, etc.   What got me over the hump was paying attention to the very first word in these phrases.  Most of the time they are a clue as to the subject of the sentence.  For example, for me gustan I know that me would translate as 'I.'  Then I'd look at the following verb to see what tense it is in.  In this case, I'd know that me gustan means 'I like [a plural object].  French and Italian have the same sort of construction.  I guess that's one thing about English that's a little easier and more straightforward.  

A pronto...

Elemental, mi querido Watson.

Though learning a new language requires a lot of patience, tenacity, and a certain amount of confidence, every now and then things seem pleasantly easy.  For an example of this in Spanish, let's take the rules of syllable stress in that language.  So many times, the emphasis falls on the next-to-the-last, the penultimate syllable.  And to make it even simpler, when the stress should fall on the ultimate syllable, this is almost always indicated with a written accent.  Yes, there are a few words that deviate from the rules, but they don't seem to be that numerous.

French makes it even easier, since every syllable is stressed equally, though often with a barely susceptible emphasis on the last syllable.  Italian, on the other hand, is not always governed by the strict accent rules.  Though many Italian words are also stressed on the penultimate syllable, there are quite a few that are exceptions.  Those simply must be learned or acquired by continuous use.

So, it's always nice when things are simple.  Spanish seems to have a lot of sensible and easily mastered rules but, like all languages, things can get complicado at the drop of a sombrero :)  It's all a matter of practice, practice, practice.

Hasta pronto...

Here's a totally unrelated Spanish song for good measure today:

El Jarabe Tapatio

Did He Say Bengo or Vengo?

For me the biggest stumbling block to learning how to correctly pronounce Spanish was not the "th" sound for some "c's" in European Spanish (that sound is relatively easy for English speakers to mimic, since it sounds sort of like "lisping" an 's').  Nor is the the dreaded "ñ" with the tilde sound in words like mañana.  The hardest thing for me was distinguishing and producing the correct sounds for 'v' and 'b.'  And I probably still don't have it completely right.



When I first started learning, I could not hear a difference, but now I think I do a little better.  It's sort of like making an English 'v' sound, but slurred a little, and with the mouth held slightly differently.  The sound is taught in many American high school Spanish classes as just plain 'b,' whether it looks like a 'v' or like a 'b' in writing.  Obviously, this may be alright temporarily, so that don't have to stop learning until you master these sounds, but sooner or later, you want to avoid sounding like someone who never bothered to get it right.
This problem is indicative of a lot of the difficulties foreign language learners encounter.  Too often we try to adjust unfamiliar sounds to the way we would utter them in our own language.  Sometimes this is only a minor thing, but other times it could make your conversation completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.  

The only remedy to this, I'd say, is to listen to native speakers over and over.  ¡Escucha!  BTW, I like the way Spanish both begins and ends exclamatory and interrogative sentences with the proper punctuation mark.  It's looks interesting in writing and it alerts you right off the bat how the sentence should be pronounced and interpreted.  Even better than listening is to practice speaking, emphasizing those "v's" and "b's" until speaking correctly becomes second nature for you.  

A presto...

Vamos, alégrame el día

Vamos, alégrame el día!

I swiped the title for today's post from the Transparent word-for-the-day selection, alegrarle el día al alguien (found on the side panel of this blog).  Actually, if you click on the definition, it takes you to the Transparent language site and gives a more detailed definition and an example.  The idiom it provides with this word is 'Vamos, alégrame el día, which means roughly 'Go ahead, make my day.'  As you probably know, this expression gained international notoriety when uttered threateningly by Clint Eastwood in the 1983 film Sudden Impact.


I've never seen the movie (or if I have, I've forgotten), but I think Mr. Eastwood delivers these defiant words during a hold-up in which someone has a gun to a woman's head.  Harry Callahan (Eastwood) doesn't back away from the situation but holds a gun into the robber's face, calmly daring him to shoot the woman, as he suggests that doing so would give him the opportunity to rid the world of one more poor excuse for a human being.

This Spanish equivalent of an English idiomatic expression seems to me a little unusual in that the Spanish version is very similar to the English in structure and use of vocabulary.  According to Google Translate, the infinitive alegrar means to brighten or to liven up.  Vamos is an imperative here meaning 'Let's go!' (sort of 'I'm ready; let's do it!').  And, of course, el día is ,the day,' or a better translation here, 'my day.'  The definite article el here makes the phrase even more powerful, as if to say 'Go ahead, make this specific day, this moment, immortal.'  Maybe the day was not unforgettable, but the phrase itself became a part of American slang, spoken whenever we want to assure someone that we mean business.

This leads me to movie titles.  I'm sometimes amused when English language U. S. movies and TV shows are retitled for international distribution.  Usually it's understandable why the original titles of films need to be changed when distributed to non-English speaking countries.  The title may be extremely idiomatic or may reference some cultural aspect of the U. S. that a non-American would not comprehend.  But often the films are given titles that are radically different.  The movie Grease, for example, becomes Vaseline (presumably, because men used to put petroleum jelly on their hair to slick it back).  But an example that illustrates my point better is the Spanish title for Weekend at Bernie's:  Este Muerto Está Muy Vivo (This Dead Man Is Very Much Alive).  What's wrong with a literal translation of  Weekend at Bernie's?  Seems to me that the Spanish title is a 'spoiler' that gives away too much of the plot.  The Spanish rendition of Hangover is priceless:  ¿Qué Pasó Ayer? 'What happened Yesterday.'  Perfecto!

Hasta mañana...

Note:  Many of the movie titles mentioned in this post were drawn from a site called on-the-couch.com

Primer Post

Muy peligroso?

It's precise and compact.  It's in big demand, especially in the U.S.  It's relative easy for English speakers to learn.  What's not to love?

Though I have a special affection for Italian, I've tried to keep up with my Spanish, because with Mexico just across the Gulf from Florida where I live, I'm more likely to have an opportunity to mingle with the native speakers there, than I am to get to Italy.

So, this is where I'll discuss my progress (or lack thereof) in learning this fine Romance language.  I'll keep this my first post short and sweet--until I've given more thought to how I want to use this blog.  After that, once I get going, I'm hard to shut up :)

Hasta luega...