Voices en Español

Today’s post is by guest blogger Graham Stephen. Graham is from Scotland but he lives in Wales and he is a fellow Spanish-language enthusiast like myself. We “met” each other in the Coffee Break Spanish’s online listeners’ forum. You can read more of Graham’s writings about the Spanish language on his co-authored blog, English-Spanish Exchange. Thanks, Graham!

Recently when I was looking for volunteers to provide voice recordings for a study of regional accents I received a few replies from people kindly declining and saying that they would not be suitable for the project as they ‘did not have an accent’ - funny how it is always other people from other places (and never ourselves) who do speak with an accent. Of course, everything is relative.

There are lots of different motivations for studying a new language: business, travel, vacations, relationships, fun, intellectual challenge, even health (recent Canadian research suggests that being bilingual can delay the onset of dementia by over four years), to name a few. But whatever your particular reason for learning Spanish happens to be, one thing that it will give you is an ideal opportunity to challenge your assumptions, to view things from a different perspective.

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Esperando al Santo

Photo of a Guanajuato mummy by cl a ra
This is a cross post from my other blog, Cody’s Cuentos.

In the city of Guanajuato, Mexico there is a museum which is home to more than 100 mummies. The history behind the museum is fascinating. The story goes that back in the 1800s in Guanajuato people had to pay a burial tax. This fee could be paid once or in yearly installments. If after three years the families couldn’t pay the fee or they just simply stopped paying, the corpses were exhumed from their graves to make more room for other deceased. But when the bodies were exhumed, the grave diggers discovered that the corpses had been unintentionally turned into mummies, due to the extremely dry weather and soil conditions in this part of Mexico.

The mummies of Guanajuato became a tourist attraction starting in the late 1800s. Although the practice of exhuming bodies from the local graveyards has ceased, the original mummies found during that time period continue to be on display at El museo de las momias en Guanajuato to this day.

Listen to the legend of a Guanajuato mummy, if you dare. But you may want to listen to this podcast with the lights on.

Next time you want to gripe about the current cost of living, consider that it took more than a day’s salary to buy a chicken 500 years ago. Yeah, I know, you’ve got more pressing matters to think about but it is kind of cool to get new insight on the present by considering the past.

A Spanish history magazine called La Aventura de la Historia did a piece last month about the construction of El Escorial. It was a very interesting article because not only did it talk about the architecture and design of this monumental monastery but also about its costs. There was a fascinating sidebar where the magazine listed items and what their costs were in 16th-century Spain and provided their present-day equivalents.

Unfortunately, the article isn’t available online (Very bizarre. When will magazines realize that they lose readership by not making their content widely available?), so here are some of the key points from the cost of living chart:

Photo by Patrick Lentz. Used with permission.

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“Sorry” comic.

Drawn by Pete Toms

Continuing a post I made last week about apologizing in Spanish, here is the second part — accepting apologies. This entry will be much shorter than the first one.

There are formal and informal ways of accepting an apology in Spanish.

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I used to be a “lo siento” junkie when I first came to Spain. Lo siento when I wanted to leave the Metro, lo siento when I stepped on somebody’s foot, lo siento when I wanted somebody to pass me a plate or a glass. The list goes on. I definitely was using “lo siento” way too much.

But there is more to la disculpa (i.e. apologizing) than lo siento in Spanish. While we learn that “lo siento” is Spanish for “Sorry” or “I’m sorry”, it isn’t always used exactly the same way as its English equivalent. In fact, there are times in which saying “lo siento” can seem rather excessive.

After the jump are some phrases I’ve used to kick my lo siento habit. I’m still in recovery but having a wider arsenal of phrases helps. Consider this a quick and dirty basic guide to navigating the shoals of remorse in Spanish.

Photo: I’m sorry by Jodi C, used with permission

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Here’s Part 2 of my chat with Teresa Córdova from Middlebury College. In this podcast Teresa talks about the ways some American university students have found to work legally in Spain. You can find more info about the Language Assistants program she mentions here. Also, Julie Espinosa, a current language assistant in Madrid, gives advice and general tips about the program on her blog.At the end of this conversation, Teresa gives us a funny phrase for my ongoing “Pongo un circo” segment. This is the part of the interview where we talk about a colloquial expression in Spanish. Teresa’s contribution is estar al loro. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out what it means. I’ll give you a hint…that colorful, bright-eyed dude in the photo has something to do with it.
Photo by tolis*. Used with permission.

Learn Spanish in Spain and you will be soaked in the second-person informal plural pronoun — vosotros. Outside the classroom, on the streets, in the bars, on TV, in the movies, in other words, everywhere you go, you will be exposed to vosotros, the informal plural pronoun that means “you” in Spanish. But if you learn Spanish outside of Europe, especially in the Americas, vosotros typically isn’t on the grammar menu. Yeah, sure, many teachers will tell you about it, but the focus is generally on the formal ustedes pronoun because that is what is commonly used in the Americas.

Luis Pinel, a Spanish teacher from El Salvador who owns a Spanish-language academy in Melbourne, Australia, thinks it’s time for vosotros to have more prominent usage among Spanish speakers. On his blog he recently wrote a rather convincing entry explaining his reasons why:

1. The wealth of a language is mainly judged by the amount of language resources available to it. The pronoun vosotros and its verb structures are integral part of the Spanish language. They contribute to enrich the written as well as the spoken structures of this language.

2. Using these structures gives more precision and clarity to language usage. Why using the form for the third person plural to mean the second person? The pronoun vosotros and its verb structures already exist in the language and from a purely linguistic point of view there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be used by all native speakers.

I couldn’t agree with him more. One of the cool things about Spanish is that having these different forms of the pronoun “you” enables the speaker to create distinctions and establish hierarchy or closeness just through the use of a simple pronoun. To me it is jarring to hear “ustedes” used with children and among family members. It just seems…odd. I know that it is totally normal, but after living in Spain it still gets my attention whenever I hear the ustedes form used in informal situations that are familial or friendly.

While I like Luis’ idea, having it come to pass (vosotros being used globally) will be hard because Spain represents only about 10% of Spanish speakers globally. There are more native Spanish speakers living outside of Spain than within its borders and their tendency is to use only the ustedes form. Therefore, Spanish speakers in the Americas have the upper hand. Majority rules. Unless it suddenly becomes fashionable to use the vosotros form, ustedes has got nothing to worry about.

What’s your take on this subject? Do use vosotros or ustedes? Would you like there to be more widespread use of vosotros?

Today’s episode of Spanish Pronunciation 101 is about Spanish consonant sounds that don’t come naturally to most English speakers. Martin Ventola, our Spanish instructor from Buenos Aires, has written a detailed post on his blog about the subject but here is a summary of today’s topic:

There are five Spanish consonant sounds that sometimes throw a wrench into an English-speaker’s Spanish pronunciation. They are:

The b sound in words like voy, vamos, había.

The d sound in words like hada, ciudad.

The g sound in ego, agua, agujero.

The j sound, like in ajo, jota, reloj.

The “aspirated s” sound in mosca, espacio.

A surprise, at least for me, that came out of this lesson was that the aspirated s sound is probably one of the most difficult for English speakers learning Spanish, according to Martín. He writes:

“This sound is tricky. If you’ve just started learning Spanish, you probably think we do not say the “s” in those words, but we do! It is hard. I’d say it’s even harder than the “r”. English speakers have a similar sound, the /h/ of words like behave. But, the /h/ never happens at the end of a word or syllable (I dare you come up with a word finishing with that sound). The “aspirated s” never occurs at the beginning of a word or syllable, it’s just air expelled almost without any tongue movement. Don’t worry about it if you’re going to Spain, over there they only have one /s/, pretty much the same as the English.

If you missed it, go back and check out the previous episode in this series about English consonant sounds that don’t really exist in Spanish. And if you want to be sure to catch all future episodes of the Spanish Pronuniciation 101 series, please subscribe to the RSS feed. (This feed is different from the iTunes feed.)

What’s a RSS feed? Click here.

I got an email this week from Doug Shivers, a language teacher who lives in Portland, Oregon. He’s got a program called “Teachers Learn Spanish,” where he organizes summer trips to Guatemala for teachers, social workers and students interested in studying Spanish and learning about Guatemalan culture.

There will be two sessions, one in June and the other in July. Each participant will receive 3 1/2 hours daily of private, one-on-one Spanish classes and get to live with a local Guatemalan family. There will also be planned excursions to Tikal, the Mayan temple ruins, and Lake Atitlán. The total cost of the program is $1550, not including airfare. For an extra fee, participants can get five hours of graduate credit from Portland State University.

Here’s what Doug says about the program:

This will be the fourth year that I have been doing the Teachers Learn Spanish program to Guatemala. Each year we have had between 15-20 participants. This has been a very good number, so I am limiting it to 20 students in each group. The absolute deadline is May 15 in order to leave enough time to orient the participants and inform the language school in Antigua.

We have had people on the program who have not spoken any Spanish at all as well as advanced speakers. Since each participant has his/her own private teacher, the lessons can be tailored to the needs of each person. We have also had children of participants from age 7 through high school and they have all had a great time and have learned Spanish quickly. There are teachers at the language school that are very good at teaching young children.

All of the U.S. teachers that have participated in the past have said that they have had so many new ideas for their own classrooms. Many of them have also said that after the Spanish classes they were able to converse with immigrant children in their classrooms and with the parents.

You can find more information on the Teachers Learn Spanish web site. If you’ve never been to Gautemala, I highly recommend it. I went there three years ago to work on a volunteer project and found the people very warm and welcoming and the landscapes beautiful.

Tikal ruins photo from travelblog.org

Going overseas or leaving one’s country to study is a common desire of many university students. In fact, some academic advisers don’t consider a college education complete unless a student has spent some time in another country studying a foreign language or learning about a different culture. According to the Institute of International Education, higher education study abroad programs are growing in popularity, with approximately 220,000 U.S. college students, an almost 9% increase from the year before, seeking out these kinds of programs.

The most popular destinations for U.S. students are, in the following order, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain. In 2007 there were roughly 21,000 Americans who came to Spain to study in university programs. Latin America also attracts a significant number of students as well.

Teresa Cordova, a coordinator for Middlebury College’s program in Spain is the featured speaker in today’s podcast. Teresa, a puertorriqueña, talks about the benefits and the challenges of taking a semester or an academic year to study in a Spanish university.

Personally, I think that study abroad programs should be a part of any undergraduate education. I realize that not everyone can afford it and for some majors, perhaps it may not seem particularly relevant, but for students who are majoring in the humanities, business or social sciences, a semester spent abroad can be an invaluable and illuminating experience.