It probably would have helped if I had put the accent marks in. I generally know where they go but haven't spent the time to decide the easiest way to put them in as I type. And when I first got to the Dominican Republic having only studied Spanish for 2 months I felt overloaded. I couldn't understand much not even children. But it was children that I managed to learn a lot from because their vocabularies were simpler than the adults. And almost everyone talked so much faster than I could process what they were saying.
Yeah, our teachers outright told us at the end of my Spanish three class that we could only talk sensibly to native speaking fourth graders. THat's a huge blow to the eight grader's ego I have been begging my mother to take me to SPain since I was fourteen, I know myself when it comes to learning, when things don't click, then throw me in the ocean. Survival skills like to pop up
Because you are a sweetie, here is a translation. The wording in English may be a little strange because I tried to use the phrasing that most resembles the Spanish grammar to make it easier for you to do a one to one comparison. Todos de nosotros usamos los regionalismos que nos pertenecen. Algunos, como los de Uruguay, Paraguay, y áreas de Argentina están a punto de tener nuevos idiomas. Cuando ezhos hablan, todo sale tan bezho, y a veshesh me da mucho trabajo entenderlosh. Aunque La Real Academia Española le gusta pensar que tiene control sobre el cambio del idioma, la realidad es que se habla español en un área tan y tan granda (por dios, ¡tenemos un continente!) que el tratar de mantener el idioma estático simplemente es imposible. Idiomas cambian. Hecho y punto. Por eso tenemos la variedad, los miles de idiomas que se usan en todo el mundo. ¡Y que fascinante! ¡Me encanta! Pero, con todo eso dicho, me alegro que los latinos del forum están usando sus voces! Este thread estaba abandonado por tanto tiempo. Y tal como Marcelo, yo también ofrezco mis servicios a cualquier que quiere mejorar su don sobre el idioma mas bello del mundo. Yo trabajo como interprete de español e ingles. También he trabajado como interprete de ruso e ingles. * * * All of us use the regionalisms which pertain to us. Some, like those from Uruguay, Paraguay, and areas of Argentina are at the point of having new languages. Cuando ezhos hablan, todo sale tan bezho, y a veshesh me da mucho trabajo entenderlosh. Even though the Real Academia Espanola likes to think that it has control over change in the language, the reality is that Spanish is spoken over so large an area (good lord, we have a continent!) that trying to maintain the language static is simply impossible. Languages change. Fact and period. For this we have the variety, the thousands of languages that are spoken in the whole world. And how fascinating! I love it! But, with all that said, I am happy that the Latinos of the forum are using their voices! This thread was abandoned for so long. And, like Marcelo, I also offer my services to anyone who wants to improve their mastery of the most beautiful language in the world. I work as a Spanish / English interpreter. I have also worked as a Russian / English interpreter. *The sentence which I left in 'Spanish' is intended to convey the way that the people from the indicated countries speak. Those spellings are completely incorrect, but represent the changes in pronounciation for those speaking regions.*
No they don't use coloquialisms so much that I got lost on a regular basis and sometimes I would ask what sayings would mean but not all the time. Some take a while for them to explain because there is so much culture involved. I actually lived most of the time en El Cibao. I only lived in Santo Domingo for about 2 months. I think I'd end up not listening either if most of the conversations were as convoluted as you have experienced in Puerto Rico. Thankfully in the DR they were not.
She could have said it in a nicer way because if 4th graders can understand you and Spanish speaking parents can understand their 4th graders then that means they can understand you too. I am thinking you know more than your teacher gave you credit for. I too would love to visit Spain. Did your teacher learn Spanish from Spain? From what I understand they say the Z different than most other Spanish speaking countries.
Wrey, I get where you're going with the non-translated sentence, that's something else our teachers point out. My Current teacher (who just told me only THREE students agreed to take SPanish IV)had a different dialect from the one he has to teach, so he sometimes tranlsates to englkish so that he can go back. He uses al lot of the different accents he picked up from youth, but he also talks a lot with his hands... Thank you all for your willingness to help! I'm going to get this down because Spanish is step one in one of my language plans. Language Plan 1. Become fluent in Spanish 2. Become fluent in Japanese 3. Rub it in the ney- sayers, faces Thanks you all again
No, my teacher was born in South America. I just fell in love with Spain at a young age (before 14) I think what they meant was that I could talk to and understand a fourth gradewr, his/her parent would speak either too rapidly or with different vocab from what I learned. Oh, and, I think the people of Spain do have a different accentuated dialect from what I learn in schoool.
Oops! My bad! Here in Puerto Rico we have a very bad habit of oversimplifiying geographic areas. We call the whole of the D.R., Santo Domingo. If you say you come from Florida, everyone will say you come from Miami. If you live anywere on the right-hand side of Puerto Rico, you are from San Juan, anywhere on the left-hand side and people say you are either from Mayaguez or Ponce. *shakes his head* :redface: My people are a strange poeple....
Absolutely! They have ceceo. You probably learned either seseo or seceo. Those strange little words relate to how the Z and C are pronounced. Ceceo means that you pronounce those two letter like the TH in the word thing. If you speak seseo, then they are pronounced like S. If you speak seceo, then you kinda' have a half-way way of pronouncing them.
Yeah, I also know of a dialect where you compleely drop a certain consonant when pronouncing a word. It's either C, Z, or S.
Those are very good goals to learn Spanish fluently and then Japanese. I have studied other languages, most on my own. I never took Spanish in school, I took 2 years of German. I know Spanish better than German. However since knowing two languages well I know better what I need to learn and the best way my brain learns and so find it easier now to learn other languages. Yeah, that is part of the problem with learning another language. At first you can't keep up with how fast people speak. I had this same problem too. Some people would purposely slow down their speech for me; but not all of them. I didn't realize the people in Puerto Rico generalized that way. In the Dominican Republic if you tell them you are from the United States they go oh, you're from New York. And one thing about me is that I take things very literally unless I know someone is joking around hence the reason why I clarified where I had lived in the Dominican Republic.
I say the Z with an S sound when I speak Spanish. The C can sound like S or K depending on the word. So which category does that put me in?
This is common to areas of Extremadura and the Guancho people of Las Canarias. Here in Puerto Rico, because of the large representation of Spaniards from that area we do the same thing. Also, because of certain pronunciation rules from West African languages (Puerto Rico has a HUGE African influence) we also have the habit of dropping the terminal D and pretty much all the S's in the middle of words. We don't say presentado, we say presenta'o We don't say esperame, we say e'perame. We don's say madre or padre, we say mai' and pai'
I actually learn through mechanics when the straightforward approach doesn't work. I just like to break things down and build something else I do know peopl that slow down, but some do it sarcastically. One thing I learned quickly was insults and how to respond. I hate when somebody asssumes that you know nothing because you don't understand everything.They're the kind of people that sit in front of you and talk about you masking their words in the tone and assuming you're naive. Imagine their surprise when you're telling them off in the same way? I never liked be considered stupid, never in my life....
Wrey, that I understood! Teachers referred to it as the lisp! I remember it because I imitate it when I'm trying to pick up the accent I love when things click
Prouncing C like K is a spelling rule, and not really part of the ceceo, seseo, seceo phenomenon. All Spanish peoples pronounce the C as K when it falls in front of the letter A or O. You speak seseo. It would be unusual to have the Dominican accent and speak either seceo or ceceo. I guess I speak 'e'eo due to the habit of not pronouncing any S's at all!
Muchisimas gracias, Wreybies. Aprecio su ofrecimiento de su distreza en este tema. Tengo algunas preguntas en cuanto el uso de espanol, las conjugaciones, etc. Voy a escribir en ingles para evitar mas confusion. First, to describe "being" in the past tense for certain things gets a little foggy for me. When saying, for example, "I was a student," would you use the preterite or the imperfect tense? I would assume for the present it would be "Yo soy un estudiante" because this is a fact that does not quickly change. However, would it become "Yo era un estudiante" in the past? Second, how is Ud. used in the Latin American world. I know that it is practically abolished in Spain. In school they teach us the standard use for strangers, elders, people of high position in society, etc. Does this hold true for all (or most) Latin American countries？ I remember a couple of years ago a boy told me his South American friends almost never used "Uds." when referring to one another.
In the past tense (at least here in the Caribbean) era would be used to describe a concept which implies a state of being. In your example, yo era estudiante would be the way I would phrase the sentence because student is something I was, not something I did. In English, of course, we don’t make a distinction in the past tense between state of being and state of doing. If you asked me, in Spanish, who had broken your favorite vase, I would reply, no fui yo! The breaking of the vase was an action, not a state of being. Another example would be the act of cooking, an action. If you were to make use of the auxiliary verb for the past tense to the action, you would say yo estaba cocinando, not yo era cocinando. Don’t know if that was also part of the question, but the form popped into my head and I thought I would mention it. Pero, con todo eso dicho, let me tell you that you will find all kinds of non compliance to this general rule, especially when the logic of the being / doing distinction isn’t so clear. If you ask someone, In Spanish, didn’t I see you at the mall, you have a 50/50 chance of getting, no fui yo and no era yo. Is being at the mall a state of being or a state of doing? Easy to argue either way, hence the fluidity of either form of past tense verb in the response. But more often than not, this non compliance is no different to the twitch-inducing American habit of combining perfective and imperfective verb clauses into one indeterminate clause. For example, I had went to the mall, but I didn’t see Maria because she had left already. *Give me a moment as this seizure passes.* That kind of grammar freaks me out, but it has an unfortunately common usage in everyday speech. Just to let you know how common it has become, my edition of Word did not complain at the combination of had left in that last sentence. And as for the use of usted… depends on your country of origin. Here in Puerto Rico, we most definitely make use it on a very regular basis. As I am sure you are aware, vosotros has almost no use at all in the new world, but in a few countries of South America, vos replaces tu, and either takes its own conjugation or simply borrows the conjugation of the tu form. Depends. Like I mentioned earlier in this thread, La Real Academia Espanola would like to think it has things under control and in a state of homeostasis. This is most decidedly not the case. Spanish is evolving at a beautiful, natural, and quite healthy pace. Sidenote ~ We live in strange times for linguistic change. The advent of mass communication and cheap, easy mass storage of data have imposed new variables to the natural order of linguistic flux. The pronouns are, and have been, in a state of change in Spanish for some time now. In the past, changes like this would (and did) take less then one person’s lifetime to begin, modify, and settle into their new forms. This would seem radical to you and I, but in the past this was the norm. English dropped the few inflected forms that remained within the span of fifty years. From youth to maturity a person could live to see their language change into something quite distinct. Not anymore. Like I said, strange times.
Practico mi espanol (cuantos hago the squigley thing en una computdora?) porque necesito ayuda con mi espanol. Hola! Como estas? Tu necesitas hablar cuanta typo puntuacion.
Em! Welcome to the class! First, luv. Cuantos means how many (take off the s and make it cuanto when you want to say how much.) The word you want is como, which means how. But I must give you props for remembering the H in the word hago. Forgeting it is a very common mistake. And as for how I get the squiggly over the N and all the other accent marks? I have my Word for Windows set up for both English and Spanish. When it recognizes my words as Spanish, it automaticaly adds the accents and squigglies (tildes.) I then just copy/paste into the forum from there. I'm a horrible speller in English, so I always copy paste from Word into the forum. :redface:
Oh, okay. I always get my question words mixed up. (I need to start a running list of them) So. Now I don't really know what to say. Ha And as for my spelling, I'm a spelling prick in english, so I thought it was only fair to make absolutely sure I spell my spanish words right. A decision that is costing me now since we're learning all the different descents from different countries.
Cómo estan? Yo estoy bien. Quiero hacer algunas preguntas para que podamos conocer el uno al otro mejor mientras que usamos el Espanol. Me gusta leer libros y mirar peliculas de fantasia y science fiction (no recuerdo como escribir science fiction en Espanol). Cuando escribo cuentos escribo mas fantasia que science fiction porque me viene mas facil la fantasia. Siempre me he gustado elves, dragons, y magica. A que te gustas leer y mirar? En que genre's (no se genre en Espanol) escribes? Mi autor favorito de libros de fantasia es Anne McCaffrey. Me encanta sus libros de los dragon riders of Pern. Mi autor favorito de libros de science fiction es Robert A Heinlein. Cual es tu autor o autores favoritos? Algunos de los peliculas que me gusta mucho son: Lord of the Rings, Eragon, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Cuales son tus peliculas favoritos?
Los libros de Anne McCaffrey fueron unos de los primos libros de fantasía que yo leí en my niñez. A mi también me encanta la ciencia ficción. Casi nunca salgo de ese genero. Mi autor favorito es una mujer, Octavia Butler. Ella escribe desde el punto de vista del antropólogo, no tanto de tecnología, sino más de lo que posible adentro del ser humano. Y en sus libros yo me encontré. Significó que ella, distinto a casi todo que yo he leído en la ciencia ficción, incluye a todos: negros, blancos, latinos, asiaticos, hombres, mujeres, gay y straight. Y no solo que usaba diversidad en sus protagonistas, sino que los protagonistas son personas como usted y yo. Si no has leído los libros de Octavia Butler, le sugiero que son, pues, no tienen comparación.
Voy a mirar los libros de Octavia Butler la proxima vez que estoy en una librería. De verdad, estoy buscando otro seria de libros para leer ya que tengo casi todos los de los dragon riders of Pern y tabien quiero leer libros escrito por otros autores para poder ver mejor los diferentes estilos. Compré un libro de fantasía hace un mes o más y solo leí 60 o 70 páginas y lo dejé. Lo que me gusta más de la ciencia ficción es cuando se trata de viajar por el tiempo o el espacio o cuando exploran planetas nuevas. Mientras que no tengo estoy leyendo el primer libro de los dragon riders of Pern analizando cómo Anne McCaffrey desaroyó su cuento.
De Octavia Butler le sugiero Dawn, Imago, y Adulthood Rights. Los tres libros se pueden encontrar en un compendio llamado Xenogenesis o Lilith’s Brood, dependiendo cuando se publicó. También Wildseed es fantástico.
