Can you smell something burning?
Trip Start
Jul 09, 2008
1
11
14
Trip End
Ongoing
Santiago,
Chile
Friday, July 25, 2008
I wonder how many people actually remember all that stuff from primary school. Verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, possessive pronouns, prepositions, irregular verbs , conjugation blah, blah, blah. I think I really should have had a few English lessons again before learning Spanish. The teachers seemed to expect us to know what they all were. At one point she was talking about infinitives and spent quite a few minutes talking about how to use them in Spanish. I have no idea what she was saying. I just sat there in a daze wondering what an infitive could be and why I didn't listen more in 3rd grade.
First day we learnt the word for "I am". Ok, so first of all there are 5 different ways to say that. In English we have I am, you are, we are, they are.... So 2 different words - am and are. In Spanish each one is different so there are 5 ways to say it depending on who you are talking about. I, you, we, they and... yous (meaning you'all). That's good old aussie slang there. "Whatta yous doin this arve?" It brought back memories of my grandmother constantly telling me "Yous is not a word in the English language. Please don't say that." If she was still alive I'd enjoy telling her that it is in fact a word in the Spanish language.
Bellavista during lunch hour
:-)So anyway, Yep that's all cool, got that.
Second day...sometimes we don't use those 5 words that we learnt yesterday, sometimes we use these other 5 words. And there's a bunch of rules about when to use which one. Right... kinda got that.
Third day...sometimes we don't use any of those 10 we learnt so far, sometimes we use these other 5 words. Or was it another 12 words. I don't really know, it was a lot of words. Hmmmm getting confused.
Fourth day... CONFUSED!!!
Fifth day ... still confused, brain is fried but it's starting to make a little bit of sense now. I think.
It is so exciting though when we actually put together a sentence. The problem is that we have to think about it for so long. We've been going out to lunch everyday and each day we construct better and better ways to talk to the waiter. As long as they don't ask anything back, we're fine.
Today our teacher told us that Chile is supposed to be the most difficult Spanish to understand because they speak fast and their pronunciation is quite bad. So she assured us that if we can listen and speak here, we can go to any Spanish speaking country. That's great news, but doesn't really help us right now.
We've confirmed how ridiculous the English language can be and I'm just grateful that I'm not learning that as a second language. I have a whole new respect for people learning English. I will never again be impatient or get frustrated with someone trying to speak English.
Kids playing drums mounted on their backs
Mark has managed to learn a few swear words already. He even worked one into his homework one day. Our teachers were really fantastic. We had a lady called Piedad in the afternoon and she always seemed a bit grumpy when she came in but we always managed to get her laughing with our stupid jokes through the afternoon. We had 4other people in our class as well who were all uni students here on an exchange program.
We also learnt another swear word by accident. Yes, this is language slip up number 2. The local drink here is called the pisco sour. Pisco is an alcohol made from grapes and they mix it with lemon juice to make the pisco sour. Problem is they say it so fast that it almost sounds like pico sour. So during the week I started ordering a pico sour at the pub. During our class we had to say something that we liked in Spanish. So I proceeded to tell the teacher that I like pico sour. She looked at me and said.. Pardon?? Then she proceeded to tell me that in Chile, the word pico is a swear word for the male penis. Great... all week I'd been asking the bar man for a sour dick!
They have a guy who organizes weekend excursions and stuff like that. We had a big group lunch one day and spent most of the time chatting to him about Chile. It is such a fantastic country. It's 4000 km of coast line starts in the most arid desert in the world and travels down to the coldest continent in the world, antarctica. In between there is Patagonia with some of the best hiking, skiing and white water rafting in the world. I can't wait to star t getting around this country a bit, there's so much to do. Speaking of which, we are heading to La Serena tomorrow with Ivan and Carmen. It's a resort with largest man made pool in the world. It's 2 km long.
Ok, well I think I might go do some times tables or something. I need some maths to balance out my brain. :-)
