elk. moose. large...deer. thing.

J ran D&D for us Sunday, and it was awesome. Instead of playing my dynamic duo of Sneaky McStabStab (J created and named him for me eons ago) and the cat-humanoid Fluffy the Disdainful, I am playing my chipper, optimistic, trusting little Gnome Druid, Edda. Druids can cast spells and whatever, but much of their utility on an adventure is an ability to "Wild Shape" into an animal. You keep all your intelligence and abilities, but you stack on the abilities of the animal. The animal takes damage instead of you, so you can be doubling your hit points in a combat.

It's worth going through the Monster Manual to find just the right animal for a situation, and when it came time to fight the Big Bad—some sort of demigod-ish evil tree sorcerer thing—I looked at the map and decided I needed to get there fast, and just be what gaming calls a "tank." Charge in, do a bunch of damage, absorb a bunch of damage.

I turned the page to the Giant Elk.

I have spent basically none of my life learning anything about elk—just a vague understanding of wild-ungulate problems around the world. I had the wrong image of an elk, because the Continental-Germanic word for "moose" (Alces alces, which the Continent has, unlike elk, Cervus canadensis, which it does not) is commonly a variation on "elk" (e.g. Swedish älg). I figured the Europeans who invaded North America said "that's sort of like a moose" and couldn't be fucked to learn anything like the indigenous word for them, wapiti.

But, says Wikipedia, English-speakers didn't really know what moose were:

By the 17th century, Alces alces (called "elk" in Europe) had long been extirpated from the British Isles, and the meaning of the word "elk" to English-speakers became rather vague, acquiring a meaning similar to "large deer".

It occurred to me to look up the French terms, them being the other major invader of North America. They call an elk wapiti. Their word for moose is apparently élan, which also means "momentum, impetus, burst," demonstrating that they were indeed familiar with moose.

Just this once I will cut the colonizers some slack, because if you have a word for "unspecified large deer" available, this is a Very Large Fucking Deer. I had been envisioning the relatively benign and rounded moose antlers, but no, elk antlers will straight-up impale you in a half dozen places.

In D&D, a Giant Elk can move 60' in a combat round, compared to my character's Gnomish 25'. It takes up a 15' square on the map. The horns get there 10' before the rest of it. With a running start, it does extra damage, and can knock the target down on the ground, where they can be conveniently stomped on.

Evil Sorcerer Guy's torso fell off the evil tree onto the ground. Honor's owl-humanoid was able to glide over to my antlers, then get the extra damage attacking from above. Evil Sorcerer Guy exploded, but the Giant Elk form took the damage.

Because Edda can be a Giant Elk for 6 hours at a stretch and only needs an hour to recharge, the fastest and funniest way to get back to town was to have her Giant Elk just...carry everybody. Quickly.

I would be remiss if I did not also suggest reading the verified classic, Dogs In Elk.

De har flera elefanter.

"They have several elephants" is not an obviously useful sentence for Sweden, though it is chock-full of delicious cognates. Lest anyone say the Scandinavian cultures are too hard to tell apart, friends using Duolingo for Norwegian say it gives them sentences like "I am drinking on the floor," which I think we can all agree is in every way less appealing than "She has a bear." It certainly suits the flavor of Norwegian I'm descended from, though.

After years of Spanish, an occasional dalliance with French, and shaking my head from afar at German's die/das/der, I am really appreciating Swedish's lack of linguistic "gender." At some point--I gather pretty recently, as these things go--condensed from having a masculine/feminine/neuter like German, into just having the indefinite articles ("a/an" in English) ett and en: ett äpple, en elefant. That dictates how you form definites ("the"): äpplet, elefanten. And the word "it": det, den. (I don't know which "it" you use when you don't already know what the object is, but I'm sure it's something.)

However it got there, det is actually pronounced sort of like "day," but of course that's the natural pronunciation of de. So instead, de is pronounced..."domm."

Maybe "m" wasn't pulling its weight and they had to give it some extra work to do.

easier than it used to be.

I had a go at the first 4 bars of Bach's Cello Suite #1, and while my teacher was very kind, suggested that I save it for later on down the road.

Duolingo has been fun for Swedish, so I decided to start in on French as well--only half-jokingly as prep for our eventual emigration to Canada. I'm developing a theory that if you've got a knack for languages, they get easier to learn as you know more of them. Anna, for example, studied Arabic and can often make some sense out of Hebrew (both Semitic languages, though not every speaker is ready to hear that). She's an absurdly gifted language learner--she can have conversations in Arabic, Russian, and Turkish, and describes Arabic as "not that hard"--but even the rest of us can learn to see and hear the connections.

In high school it took a single French class to decide that with my solid Spanish, I would find French classes boring for the first long while. After "Enchantée" I figured I could just learn it whenever I needed it. And indeed French is not wildly different from Spanish, as these things go.

(Growing up, I learned that "the Romance languages" were Spanish, French, Italian, and then Romanian. There are dozens! They're not even all defunct, by a long shot.)

Swedish is getting real now. The thing to know about Duolingo is that there's a lot of different kinds of repetition, and also it is partly auto-generated, leading to some not-quite-sensible sentences. I unlocked Duolingo's Animals vocabulary section, which gave me:

• Det är en älg. - "It is a moose."
• Hon har en björn. - "She has a bear."

Both of which pretty much made my day.

"Älg" is pronounced suspiciously like "elk," which was a fun project:

• Why is it translated as "moose"?
• Are there even moose in Europe?
• What do they call the thing that I call an "elk"?

It's a pretty straightforward case of early Europeans going "hey, that looks vaguely like something I know, I'll just call it that." (Moose: established on every sub-Arctic continent. Elk/wapiti: North America and...Northeast Asia?)

Unlike when I was on a boat tour in Chile and the guide said there was a coipú swimming nearby. My dictionary was no help, but I watched it and thought "pretty sure that's a nutria." The Spanish borrowed the native Mapuche word, because... nutria in Spanish already meant "otter."

Shit like this is why Latin scientific names were immediately so important.

there's an idea.

Yo-Yo Ma did this great NPR Tiny Desk Concert where he plays the first movement of Bach's Cello Suites, and explains that was the first thing he learned on the cello.

"Well," I think. "That's interesting."

I've been learning Swedish using the Duolingo iPhone app.

(Why Swedish, when I'm a quarter Norwegian? It was a Swedish neo-folk song that sent me off learning the violin. Norwegian music has too much accordion. Also, the food is better.)

It's goofy to learn a language without practicing conversation, but for what it is, it seems to be decent. It has you translate stuff back and forth in different ways, and ramps up to listening and vocabulary-building. It's an incremental process. I guess I'll start in on French, to help us emigrate to Canada when the time comes.

(Swedish is awesome, by the way. It helps that I know enough about languages to understand what I'm looking at: instead of a definite article, like English "the" or Spanish la, the noun inflects, so en kvinna is "a woman," but kvinnan is "the woman." Old hat to you poor sods who took Latin, of course, which does this in spades.)

It got me thinking, though, that if 4-year old Yo-Yo Ma could learn Cello Suite #1 a measure at a time, maybe I could too. Bach has always been a favorite of transcriptionists everywhere, and it's not like transposing across the violin family is at all difficult. And those first few lines, if you take some deep breaths, aren't super hard.

One measure at a time.

I like learning things.

As the year cruises to a close, I am fast approaching 100 books for the year. Those are what I finished (that being the only reasonable metric: I read many books at once, so the start date means nothing), and only one book (The Vorrh) that I actually regret reading. The latter is nearly unique; I've read any number of middling-and-below books, but I never really regret the time spent. Except for this one.

I am still reading The Iliad to the boy in small bits, seated on his floor, leaning back on his bed, with my phone in night-mode. I picked up a book titled Understanding Classics: Homer, which is basically a book-length college essay, but has all this great context for the Homeric epics.

As mentioned earlier, I'm also reading Through the Language Glass, wherein we learn that William Gladstone, that remarkable son of British politics, was also a full-bore classicist who wrote the 3-volume Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. Gladstone was a Homer geek, and among more conspicuous observations, he noted that Homer doesn't have a word for "blue," and the colors he does have come from some world-view where "violet" is the flower, the ocean, and sheep. "Green" is twigs, olive wood, and honey. It goes on like that for a while.

It's no fun writing a book about language, in English, without talking about English's long-ago ancestor Indo-European, whose mother language Proto-Indo-European is such a fun illustrative example of comparative linguistics that language geeks just say "P-I-E" for short.

[I say "fun," but I'm actually not 100% sure why it's the go-to case. It may be the breathtaking pre-colonial geographic range, from India to England, or the 3 billion-ish people speaking its daughter languages; it's also highly accessible to we phonemically-impoverished users of Roman script. It's hard for us to see the commonalities between Hebrew and Arabic when they use scripts that might as well be Greek (except that Greek is more familiar), written in a direction we're not used to (right-to-left), leaving out elements we tend to consider vital (vowels), using sounds we probably had no idea existed (what's up, Arabic?).]

Funny enough for a language from 6,000 years ago that was never written down, linguists have  reconstructed about 1,500 words of PIE by exhaustively mapping out the differences between the daughter languages. (Comparative linguistics usually takes authors a couple chapters to explain, which is when you find out that some of its foundational work was done by--and I cannot make this shit up--Jacob Grimm, of Grimm's Fairy Tales.) We have enough words to tell a short story:



(Related: languages generally tend to simplify over time, which is why most of us had no idea those sounds could come out of human mouths.)

The obvious next question is "who were these people?", and the gods only know how many dissertations and even more graduate seminars have lived and died on that question. I don't think it had ever occurred to me to ask, except that one or two ancient-history podcasts mentioned The Horse, the Wheel and Language, a fine book, despite its flaunting of the Oxford comma--though really, what should we expect from Princeton University Press? It's as accessible as a university-press book gets, which means skipping over details only relevant to the dozens of other people on the planet who think the author is absolutely over-extrapolating the dates of Tripolye C(3) from the available horse molars, leading to an error of at least a few hundred years

Computers are sometimes so predictable by comparison.

grrrr rip snarl

You all know very well that I'm not one to accuse people of being too observant. But really, after I've been communicating in good Spanish with you for 5 months, and conspicuously improving, is it really that surprising when I understand the gist of the conversation? Apparently so.

So in addition to not listening to me when I talk, people also seem to assume I don't understand what they're saying. Being dismissed from both ends is pretty rough, and I think this inner tension I feel--and the occasional snapping at people and raising my voice--is the long-forgotten feeling of being past the end of my considerable patience, off the reservation into Irritation, with forays into Anger. Not being heard is a particular raw nerve for me: there are a handful of people at home that I keep at arm's length because they're so wrapped up in the stories in their heads that I can't get enough of a genuine response (to my actions or speech) to feel like we're dealing with the same reality. It's really draining when people don't respond to who you are.

One of my teacher friends was further pushing me by insisting that I play and sing a song on the guitar at some gathering in 10 days. That's something that is hard for me even with a lot of practice, and (at least the way I received it) she not only refused to respect my unwillingness to do it, but she was making it out to be something that a "real friend" would do. She may just have been doing a standard Chilean thing that a Chilean would receive differently, but as I keep having to explain to people, and it should be pretty obvious at this point, I'm not Chilean. Sensing that I was about to raise my voice and get snarly to get my point across--and knowing that while she was pushing pretty hard, she surely wasn't doing anything mean-spirited--I took a breath, smiled, and said I'd see her later.

I'm home right now, writing about this, and listening to some sweet songs by the Wailin' Jennies, and suddenly I can see and feel how hard and spiky and tense I am right now, compared to how I am at home. It turns out that being open, patient, and gentle is completely unsustainable without a safe space to rest, open up, and be heard by other people.

We need each other. Who knew?

I still have patience for my kids: they need that from me, and I feel like they respond more clearly to the person I am, through the language barrier. But I've been shutting out the adults for the past several weeks, because I don't have any energy to meet them where they are, when I'm the only one trying to cover the distance.

This will pass. Everything does.

I shouldn't be surprised

...but I am. Apparently Spanish is finally worming its way into the center of my brain.

Last week I had a dream where I was speaking Spanish. Just the Spanish I know, that I use every day.

Yesterday I went to the dining hall and saw that lunch was charquican stew. I started talking to myself and said, "Hmm, do I quiero charquican for lunch?". (Quiero is "I want.")

Today the school had Independence Week activities instead of classes, so I chatted with a bunch of students, and with one group, I actually used the Chilean word po to emphasize something, without consciously thinking I needed to--I was very surprised when it came out.

(Spanish is not stressed like English, so if you say something like "Of course it's not happening that way!", that stress on "course" doesn't mean a whole lot to Spanish speakers. Chileans add po to a phrase for emphasis, and for a lot of other things I don't understand, but I haven't been able to use it naturally and I've only just started using it consciously, because otherwise I can't communicate the emphasis I want.)

Finally, during the student dance competition, I was chatting with Jorge the English teacher, and several times I thought something in English, intended to say it in English, and was very surprised to hear myself say it in Spanish.

Job interviews will be interesting when I get back.

I guess that makes sense

Steve, the other volunteer in my house, is a much more diligent student of Spanish than I am--or is trying to be--and has started watching TV, such as The Simpsons (dubbed) or subtitled things like movies, with a notebook to write down things he doesn't understand or has just learned from the subtitles. I haven't been watching anything with Spanish audio unless I'm on a bus or whatever, because it's been too much work to be any fun.

I was pretty startled to discover how much more of the Simpsons dialogue I could understand than five months ago. I'd noticed the same was true of the English Department meeting (which I last attended in April).

Anna says it's cute that I'm surprised.

Spanish and directionality

Alvaro just tapped my shoe and said, "Cuanto calzas?", a mysterious utterance since I know cuanto as "how much?" and I don't know the verb calzar at all. After some negotiating, I realized he was asking my shoe size--calzado is "shoe" in Chile, and the verb calzar apparently means something like "to shoe." He is surprised that it sounds strange to me, and all I could say was that in English, we don't have a verb just to say what size shoe you wear.

I've been thinking about Spanish's different sense of direction. I've written before about the ubiquitous reflexive form ("is used," "is eaten"), which we would translate as the passive voice, but which in Spanish doesn't have the passive voice's, um, passivity. Another good example is the verb faltar, which means (among many things) "to lack," but it's often more like "to be that which is lacked." At the beginning of class, if there I people missing my inclination is to say "Faltamos alguien?": "Are we missing anybody?". However, if we're missing three people, the students say "Faltan tres": "Three are missing." If you can imagine a quality of "missingness," in Spanish it's laid on the thing that's missing.

Similarly, there's a convenience/liquor store in Vina called El Pollo Nuevo [The New Chicken] Premiado. Premiar is "to award," so premiado, the past participle, is "awarded-to." We do happen to have the English "prizewinning" to cover this, but the past participle is more natural in Spanish, and that's how we get my favorite Spanish coinage. Terremoteado: "earthquaked".

notes from today

I did have class with 1-A today, but only 4 kids came to school from 1-J: somehow, along with 1-G, they thought the teacher protest was today instead of next Thursday (which is also what I thought, until two days ago), so only a handful of kids came in from those classes. The poor kids who did show up had to stay the entire day, with no classes. I stayed in the room with them as a favor to Marcela, because, hey, why not, she has at least 40 classroom hours per week, and I had no plans for the afternoon, and I just started reading Siddhartha for the first time.

We did have a nice moment in 1-A. Adding to our dialogue questions, we practiced

1. What do you do for fun?

2. I like _____.

and they fill in the blank with a short list of hobbies we learned: things like tennis, soccer, video games. After some practice, I had them get up in pairs and do it from memory.

Kevin: What do you do for fun?

Ignacio: I like you.

Which was pretty awesome, not just because of their insinuations that someone else is gay--I don't know if Ignacio was being sincere, or allowing himself to be part of mocking someone else, as I often do--but because it highlighted a growing flexibility in the students' use of language. For example, I also had them do the entire 4-question dialogue:

1. What's your name?

2. My name is ______.
1. Where are you from?
2. I am from ______.
1. How old are you?
2. I am _____ years old.
1. What do you do for fun?
2. I like _____.

That's how I intended them to do it. Here's what they did:

1. Where are you from?

2. I am from _____. And you?

Somewhere in their past, they learned to respond to "How are you?" with "I am fine. And you?". And now they have suddenly generalized "And you?" to other sentences! It feels like they're actually speaking English, putting things together in a way beyond what I've taught them.

cold, like snowboarding.

Whether it was because Anna was there or because Student X was missing, the little bastards in 1-B were fantastic today. Also, last time she was here they chanted "UN BESO! UN BESO!" and this time it was "ONE KISS! ONE KISS!". Not something I taught them, but hey, I'll take it.

They did call me out for lying to them last time about whether Anna was my girlfriend. I wish I knew how to say, in Spanish, "It's because I knew you little ******s would waste ten shouting minutes of class time on sexual innuendo and trying to get me to kiss her, just like you're doing now," but I had to settle for something simple and polite. Which they didn't listen to, because hey, it's just a teacher talking, it can't be that important.

Anna took some video, which I'll upload soon, and pointed out a lot of cool things about how much better I am at teaching and how much the kids have learned, and how much more comfortable they are when pronouncing English. As she put it, "They seem to understand that there are English sounds to make English words, instead of using Spanish sounds." On the videos I also get to see more of their reactions than I can when I'm teaching. Verdict: I'm pretty funny and they like my class.

We had a near-injury during a game of Slap. I put two chairs in the middle of the room, and one student from each team takes a turn. I say a word, and they run up and hit the picture on the board. While I am often awed by the destructive power of Chilean teenagers, today we had the smaller girl hit the larger girl with a full-on body check to keep her from reaching the board first. The larger girl bounced off the wall onto the floor, tripping the smaller girl so they both ended up in a laughing pile on the ground. We, uh, lost focus for a few minutes. (No major injuries. Smaller girl has a sore knee and a scrape on her leg.)

One of the words they learned was "snowboarding" (we did Hobbies), which I'd pointed out to them is a lot like "snowing," which we learned last time. At the end of class, with a mixed English-Spanish discussion about who Anna was, someone asked if we were in love. I translated and and Anna said, "No, I don't like you." I made my sad face.

(During the whole "ONE KISS!" nonsense, Anna had been talking to Juan next to her, who was pulling out everything he'd learned to have a conversation with her: "Where are you from?" "How old are you?". When I said Anna didn't like me, he alarmedly leaned over to her and said "False?". SO CUTE.)

Raquel, one of the girls who often Will Not Shut Up, but who likes English and is more willing to talk than most, said, "Teacher! You two...no sentimiento [warm feeling]...you, uh, cold! Like snowboarding."

memory lane: cultural sensitivity

Anna countdown: 4 days.

I'm still cranky, and still recovering my strength: staying home from school today, which turns out to be just as well, since Marcela is giving a test. Status quo.

I've been watching the firestorm of protest about the Muslim community center a couple blocks from Ground Zero in New York City, which is a pretty sickening debate for someone who holds the First Amendment as a principle rather than a hidden instruction from the Framers that schools need to teach creationism. It's an obvious step for the GOP: I've said for years that the party's pillars are racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and they've recently been losing on the latter two. A recent CNN/Time poll (pdf) claims that 49% of Americans think gays "have a constitutional right to get married and have their marriage recognized by law as valid," while 68% oppose the mosque.

(Does anyone else remember when (1) men piercing our ears was a big deal, and (2) you couldn't get your right ear pierced because that meant you were gay, and (3) that was bad?)

Anyway, the relevant story.

At Danger, my team named our software releases after drinks, in alphabetical order: Absinthe, Bellini, Cosmopolitan, Daiquiri, Everclear. (I didn't say they were good drinks, and we did pay the price, since the named drink was the primary beverage at the release party .) We got to K, and the logical name was Kamikaze, a potent and tasty get-drunk-fast choice of college students everywhere.

The suits on the third floor heard about it, and sent a rare dictum downstairs that we had to change the name. Why? Danger's hardware was made by the Japanese company Sharp, and kamikaze in Japanese is not a drink.

No one likes mandates from the suits (because they're almost always wrong), and in Danger's autonomous engineering department, this produced a lot of grumbling. I had the unpopular (and disagreed-with) opinion that it was actually a fine decision. The suits' job was to manage our partner relationships, and Japan, to put it generously, is still processing its World War 2 experience. As Americans, full of indelible arrogance and optimism and living in the world's most powerful nation, it's often hard for us to imagine a long-running, deeply-held sore spot, especially now that no one claims we could have won in Vietnam if only we'd tried harder.

But the sign at the border going from Chile into Argentina says "The Falklands are Argentine!", and Bolivia is still pissed at Chile for leaving Bolivia landlocked after their war 125 years ago.

At any rate, I was sad to not call it "Kamikaze," but it seemed like a fine choice to change it. Unlike Muslims in New York City, we don't actually have a First Amendment right to name our software releases whatever we want.

what is it that changes?

Isn't it funny? The lengths we'll go to, the adventures and challenges we'll launch ourselves into, because we think we'll magically discover something different. But when I got here, and I started meeting those challenges, I discovered I was just me, doing something different. As the book says, the only Zen you find at the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring with you. We meet the events of each moment with exactly the person we were the moment before.

Then, through doing something different, the definition of "me" changes. We discover we can respond differently, some of our abilities grow, others shorten, others just change.

Specifics?

Every culture has its acceptable social lies: we say "I love your sweater" and "Thanks for stopping by" when we think "You paid money for that?" and "I didn't need to see you again, ever." Chile's map of social dishonesty is different from ours: they'll be honest and say "You're gaining weight," but something like "Sure, I'll do that this week" might be honest or might be a way of saying "No."

No matter where you are, you only create a lot of suffering by assuming people are jerking you around, even if it feels that way.

I don't know that I'm more patient or tolerant or anything (especially these days, when I'm fried on the experience). I guess I must be? I have a broader and deeper knowledge of the world and its people. It feels a little like Outward Bound did, where yes, things were hard, and yes, I went past what I thought my limits were...but I did it in a way that was pretty much what I expected. Is it really a limit when it's just something you've never tried? When have I tried something I thought I would actually fail at? Or genuinely scared of?

I think I'm being selective about my memory here. Teaching was terrifying, and there's still an aversion, trying to protect myself from its rawness and exposure. There's still that crisis moment when my kids walking through the door, and no matter how I feel about being here, or whether the day's lesson is any good, there are students in my classroom and it's time to step up and teach as best I can, and I do.

It's possible I'm judging myself with a habitually over-high standard, to minimize myself.

you guys are braver than me

Yesterday morning, I rather sharply insisted to the assembled grandparents that no, I'd already had bread for breakfast, no, I'm not hungry, no, I don't want any fish. (Saying "I don't want any food" here doesn't carry the weight it does back home.)

I looked back over the past 24 hours and realized I'd also used my Spanish to smooth out classroom flow, help with classroom management, kill some time at the end of class by chatting with the kids, discover my early class was canceled due to a student protest (no one would have told me), and keep from having to eat too much food.

I can barely imagine how annoying this experience must be if you don't speak the language.

teaching, learning, failing

This week has seen a lot of failed lessons, but not in a bad way. It's good for me to remember the kind of quiet that falls over a classroom where students have no idea what's going on. The advantage of being in a sort of low burnout period is that I'm feeling extremely mellow and communicative about classroom flow. To the kids who were bugging me today, I said in Spanish, "Look, I'm telling you to be quiet, and you're not. Today I have no patience," and then promptly put them a couple notches closer to being kicked out of class. Easy-peasy.

I've been doing a names exercise at the beginning too, and it's really nice to know their names, even if I only remember for that class. I also have lots of time to use up, both with Marcela's randomizing the class length, and the not-quite-good lesson I'm working on.

I'm trying to do "Family" stuff with them, and while they have no problem with "Do you have any brothers or sisters?", even being able to say something like "I have three brothers and five sisters," the failure comes with questions about a family tree like "Who is Rosa's wife?". The possessive is screwing them up, notwithstanding that they "learned" it in Marcela's class. In every class I take a shot at explaining it, watched them drift off the way they do when Marcela explains things, then punt and move on to the quiz game for reviewing last semester's stuff. I'll have a stab at figuring out an interactive way to do it.

On a related note, Oscar asked today if I had time to work with some remedial students from another English teacher, who haven't had any English and as a result are doing even worse than the rest of the class. I said:

"I might have time, yeah. The thing is, the problem with English instruction here is that it's not tailored to the level of the students, so in terms of actually using the language, a student with no English is at roughly the same level as a student with two or four years of English. The stuff that I teach, or to be honest, that I know how to teach, is basic and doesn't really mesh with the school's material."

Oscar nodded, but we agreed we can look at the materials and see if I could be helpful.

This would put me in the fascinating position of teaching Chilean students how to succeed in Chilean English classes, which is completely different from teaching them English. I'd be helping them attain the same mechanistic lack of usage that their peers have. I'm on the fence: in the sense it would help them in school, it would be good for them. For me, I think it might be a little painful.

Mendoza, Argentina

I'm starting to understand why Mexicans and Spaniards would think I was from South America when I spoke Spanish: the continent is like a grab-bag of funky dialects. The Argentine dialect, like the Chilean, has to be heard to be believed.

I made friends at breakfast with the 5 adorable Argentine girls I was sharing a room with: Luz, Pachi, Jessica, Chela, and Isharmina. Except "Jessica" is pronounced "Shessica", and as I discovered from the backpack that I rushed to make sure they didn't leave without, "Isharmina" is actually spelled "Guillermina". Didn't see that coming, even though I'd asked her earlier how it was spelled.

(And "Chela" is short for "Mariela," doing nothing to alleviate my complete confusion over the source of Spanish-language nicknames.)

They were very nice, road-tripping in a shockingly nice extended-cab pickup truck. They should be sending me the picture of the 6 of us in front of the hostel, so I'll put it up here.

And I haven't even heard the lexical differences yet. I'm still too taken aback by the use of vos instead of tu' for the second-person familiar, and the appearance of "sh" in every word, when Chileans can't distinguish "sh" and "ch".

• desayuno -> "desashuno"
• llamas -> "shamas"

It's easier than Chilean, by far, but still takes some getting used to. Every time

From the next country over, it's a bit easier to see the fabled Chilean seriousness, however diluted it's become in the past few decades: Argentines seem to be more smiley and open and relaxed in everyday encounters.

I miss Chile, though. On this trip I'm learning about travel fatigue, and how I feel about visiting another country without any research or prep work (hint: never doing it that way again). I'm currently scheduled to leave on Friday morning, but I'm going to look into leaving early, to give myself some downtime before school starts, especially since I'm on the Volunteer Panel for the July WorldTeach volunteers in Santiago on Saturday.

Meantime, though: coffee and steak!

at least I amuse myself

For our upcoming newsletter, Heather just asked me what my favorite chilenismos are. Since I'm bad at lists, I came up short, except for this:

• al tiro - "right away," "sometime in the coming 5 minutes," or "I'm saying 'al tiro' to humor you but it would be rude to say so explicitly".

I think I'm way funnier than any of the volunteer material I saw before I came here.

it's a big world

I had English Workshop today, which gets to be less of a train wreck every week. Beyond not knowing what to do with a small group of motivated learners (remember, I'm using all my mental resources to deal with teaching large, mostly disinterested classes), two of them can carry on a conversation, and two of them can't, which makes designing an activity challenging at best.

I do explain some stuff in Spanish instead of forcing the whole time to be English-only, and when I discovered that the students and I think the color "chestnut" are two very different things--they think it's a dark color in between brown and black--I explained to them how color perception is completely determined by culture. This is sort of abstract, but then I pulled out the reliable example of the Japanese color word that includes both blue and green.

Any day you can make teenagers' eyes go wide with astonishment is a good day.

how could you not notice?

I'm watching James Clavell's Shogun, which is an excellent book, though I've not yet seen the miniseries. As I remembered, a huge chunk of it is in un-subtitled Japanese, to give the flavor of what Blackthorne is experiencing with not knowing what's going on. Of course, the parts that are in English are dubbed in Spanish. But right now I'm not missing much.

(Reading tip: Blackthorne is based on the Englishman William Adams. Giles Milton's Samurai William is the fun book about him.)

It occurs to me as I watch this that I am constantly shocked that people act as though I speak their language, even when I tell them I don't, or when clearly I don't understand. This happens all the time:

Chris: [carefully enunciated, mid-speed Spanish]
Chilean: [blur of 50 words at high speed] mi hermano. ([something] my brother.)
Chris: Mas lento, por favor? No entiendo. (Slower, please? I don't understand.)
Chilean: HER-MA-NO. Entiendes "hermano"?

Yeah, thanks, the one word you took more than 4 milliseconds to say, the one I learned my third month in Spanish class, the one at the end of the sentence? I understood that one.

I wonder what causes the disconnect. And what do they see when I don't understand? Someone who's just not very bright? It's like they think I need repetition in order to understand them, rather than slower speech or simpler words. I don't get it.

notes on language

I've been here about 7 weeks. When educated Chileans are speaking at normal speed, I can catch about 25-30% of the conversation. That goes down significantly for lower socioeconomic classes.

We say "Chil-AY-an," but that's apparently limited to North America. Chileans and British or British-esque speakers say "CHILian". No one knows why. The British put accents in all sorts of wrong places, but I don't know why Chileans picked it up.

I'm not americano in Latin America, because (depending on location) either people resent the United States claiming the name of the continent for its nationality (Mexico), or they're in South America and of course you have to disambiguate what americano means. So in Mexico I was norteamericano, and here I'm either gringo (an inoffensive word in South America) or the delightfully stones-skipping-on-water estadounidense (after Estados Unidos, the United States).

The hottie dojo girl in Santiago said that when Chileans talk about their language, they sometimes call themselves los rotos, "the broken ones". This matches with what Allyson and Rad were on about, occasionally saying that these words Chileans use "aren't even Spanish". It's weird for me because that presupposes that there's some ideal that you can call "Spanish" and use as a metric for comparison, and that's not true of any language. There are just dialects, and usually some dialect becomes culturally privileged and declared to be "Standard". So we have Standard English (with American and British Commonwealth variations), Standard Spanish (spoken in Spain), Standard German. But the English spoken by urban blacks and rural Southerners is still English, in a somewhat circular definition that English is whatever is spoken by native speakers. Chile is very obviously a Spanish-speaking country: if everyone slows down and reverts to simple enough vocabulary, there's no more trouble establishing communication than there is between Americans and British or Australians. So whatever Chileans speak is recognizably Spanish, no matter how many unusual words or usages they have.

Most Chileans also say they speak castellano, which is the Spanish of Castile, around Madrid, in Spain--they don't name the language espa~nol like everyone else. Castilian is the Standard Spanish, what we learn in school. They absolutely do not speak it here. I do not know what they're talking about.

Many words have different meanings. I haven't found a non-gringo place for Mexican food, so I don't know how they work with the following:

• tortilla - an enchilada.
  
• fajita - a tortilla.
• taco - a traffic jam. (I'm not making this up.)
  

Though there's not universal agreement on this.

Other common words:

• ocupar - usually "to occupy/keep busy with", means "to use".
• tratar de - what we all learned for "to try", but unused here. It's intentar, which is also "to intend," or pretender, which is also "to pretend".
• weyón - also huevón or hueyón. comes from using huevo ("egg") for "testicle", and has a usage roughly the same as cabrón in northern Latin America.
  

Reflexivity

Spanish can make verbs "reflexive," which often means that either the speaker is doing the action to themselves, or is having it done to them. In the uninflected verb form (the infinitive, which doesn't exist in English because we barely inflect our verbs), you add se to the end: lavar "to wash" becomes lavarse "to wash oneself." Quitó la televisión "he took the TV" becomes se quitó la televisión "the TV was taken." Easy!

Okay, so I want to say "I stop myself": naturally I reach for pararse, the reflexive form of parar "to stop." Oops! Pararse means "to stand up." And there's a lot of those.

It's also an opportunity to recognize that speakers of other languages hear something different than we do when we hear the translation. In English, (even if we slept through writing class and we're not sure why, the passive construction "the TV was taken" sounds weak to us, and we wouldn't use it in conversation anyway: we'd say "someone took the TV". But the analogous Spanish construction isn't weak. And "someone took the TV" probably isn't what a native Spanish speaker would say.

For example, Obama's campaign slogan was "Yes We Can!". This is a rousing English sentence, full of vigor and confidence and open-ended possibility.

His campaign posters in Spanish, though, said "Sí Se Puede!", which uses the reflexive and literally translates as "Yes, It Can Be Done!", or "Yes, It's Possible!". To us, that doesn't sound like much, but in Spanish, not only does it recall the same slogan used by César Chavez way back when, but it just hits the Spanish-speaking ear in a different way. The weakness that we feel in a passive construction just isn't there.