Speak It, Girl!
Like, Literally
by Charlie Geer
One of the nice things about dating a Spanish woman is that, unless she has been watching a lot of American reality TV, her English won’t be pocked all to hell with the word “like.” Like, problems with, like, subject-verb agreement are, like, way easier on the, like, ear than, like, a diarrheal deluge of, like, “like”s. (All that faux-figurative language can be hard on a literary chap: so many similes, so little time.) Nor is a Spaniard liable to throw the word “literally” around as clumsily as native-English speakers tend to do these days. A Spanish ESL speaker normally won’t say something like this, for example: I literally died when I saw my final grade. If you literally died, you are, um, dead. One might hope all the faux-literal language is offsetting all the faux-figurative “like” language, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Charlie Geer,
New Literature Online,
Spain
Como Se Dice Angelic?
Getting Awkward In the Bilingual Boudoir
by Charlie Geer
They say that if you didn’t learn a given language in the cradle, the next best way to learn it is in the sack. If you really want to learn Polish, for example, date a Pole. Be this as it may, the conjugal bed should not be considered a language lab. It is first and foremost a conjugal bed, and there are much more interesting things to do in a conjugal bed than conjugate verbs.
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Charlie Geer,
Spain
Oink, Buubuu, Groin
Plahf
by Charlie Geer
In high-school language classes we learn that barnyard animals, like people, speak different languages throughout the world. Take the common pig, for example. While an American pig will oink oink, a Japanese pig will buubuu. French swine converse with a brusque groin groin, whereas Chinese swine favor a more melodious hu-lu hu-lu. For fun with the whole menagerie, check out these international animal sounds.
Curiously enough — and mercifully for undergraduate American piglets looking to satisfy core language requirements — here in Spain pigs speak with a familiar oink oink. Whether the oink originated in Spain, the United Kingdom, or the United States is a matter of dispute: no sooner does one group take credit for coining the oink than the other two denounce oinking as yet another alarming example of globalization gone wild. In any case, British and American pigs vacationing in Spain find it easy enough to communicate with their Spanish hosts, even if the same cannot always be said for their human counterparts.
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Animal Noises,
Charlie Geer,
Spain
She Hits Everybody
by Charlie Geer
It may pain a writer and confirmed word-nerd to say so, but reading English — as opposed to hearing it, say on TV — will sometimes put a beginning ESL student at a disadvantage, at least when it comes to pronunciation. If it is read more often than it is heard, the word juice might be pronounced “joo-ees,” the word Tuesday might be pronounced “twes-day”; the word built, “bwilt”; the word team, “tee-ahm.” These are honest mistakes. (They may even recall the mnemonic devices you used for spelling tests in grade school.) The student is simply pronouncing the word according to the way it looks.
Just the reverse used to happen in Freshman Comp back home. In Freshman Comp my students would frequently spell words according to how they had heard them. To offer just a few memorable examples from a batch of Othello essays:
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Charlie Geer,
She Hits Everybody,
Spain
