T Q M (not Total Quality Mangement)

So today I attacked the preterit tense of verbs. This is the tense which indicates "an action done and completed in the past." Like I voted,  voté, as in I done voted and I won't vote no more. The conjugations are relatively straight forward, based largely on whether they are -ar, -er, or -ir verbs. If you don't get that, don't worry. I don't either. It means something to those more fluent than I. And then of course there are the exceptions. Some of the ar er and ir verbs change the stem (the basic verb) depending on what the noun is, the phase of the moon, or the mood your spouse usually is in when they wake up. And you can forget about the verbs to be, to know, or to haber, which doesn't quite translate into English on its own. They are some of the last remnants of the tortures Torquemada used on the ungodly.

But I didn't come here to talk about verbs. Actually, I'm not doing too badly on them. I came to talk about email and texting in Spanish.

Just like in English, Spanish texts (mensajes de texto) have their own abbreviations. Interestingly enough, many of them come from English. For example, for que pasa, (what's going on,) k pasa is used. Or sometimes just k p. TQM is te quiero mucho, I love you very much. And so forth. None of this is terribly important unless you are a 20-something texting a friend in Spanish. I suppose it makes as much sense as English texting, where all you have to do is remove the vowels. This despite the fact that if you are remotely competent at typing, it takes no longer to type ¿Que pasa?

Fortunately I don't get tested on texts.

I have a preposition for you

A Polish instructor once told me that for him, the hardest part of learning a language was mastering prepositions. He wasn't kidding. If you think about it, there are no real rules governing use of prepositions in English. What's the difference between "burn up" and "burn down?" What about going "out the door" or "out of the door." Speaking of doors, there's "the door fell off" and "the door fell down." To those of us who are native English speakers, the difference is pretty obvious, but can we really explain it? Or do we just know what's right after many years of speaking, reading, and writing English?

Well, the same is true in Spanish. You can go por Cuba, or you can go a Cuba. One (por) means towards the destination, the other (a) means.... um.... about the same. How is one to figure out which is which? As my dear friend Neil Bernardo Herrero said, "The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, kid, practice." 

One thing I'll say for Fluencia is that you get as much practice as possible, given the format constraints. But to tell the truth practice is only a part of gaining mastery in a language. You need to hear the language more than anything. It's all well and good to have a vocabulary of 1000 words, but if you can't understand them in the high speed at which Spanish is often spoken, they do you no good. With that in mind, I've started watching the news in Spanish from Univision (which I like better than Telemundo). That, of course, makes sense. But then there's my other new habit. I watch telenovelas.

To the uninitiated (or those who know better,) telenovelas are Latin-American soap operas. The "best" of them seem to come from Mexico, but almost every Latin-American country makes its own. They differ from US soaps mostly because many of them are pretty violent, sexual, and discuss mature topics like teen pregnancy, abortions, and so on. The plots are very convoluted, the actors change frequently, and it takes several days to figure out just what happened on the first day. What's worse is that in the first one I watched, practically everyone was crying because one of the male characters was mysteriously killed. Have you ever tried to understand what someone is saying while they sob their eyes out? Now just imagine that in a language you haven't quite mastered. 

But telenovelas can be addictive. I am searching for the next episode of the one I first watched, the one with the mysteriously dead dude. I want to know how he died. And what will happen to his widow, his pregnant mistress (they always have one,) his kids and his Swiss bank accounts which actually belong to Rico the drug kingpin. I think I better go and find the next episode of whatever telenovela I was watching. Not that I care...

This, that, and the other one.

First experiments with a Latin American keyboard. Please forgive any typos in English or español.

So far everything has been not too difficult. I had a bit of problem with a few verb tenses, but nothing insurmountable so far. Until today: I ran into este/esta,  (this one), ese/esa (that one), and aquello/aquella (that one over there.) There are also plural forms.

They kicked my butt. I didn't think there would be much of a problem. But in Spanish, not only must you figure out whether it's this one, that one, or the other one, you also have to agree in gender and number. And so I got confused (confundido) and barely passed the unit. I suppose I'll have to go back and do it over again just to make sure I have it.

There is a lot of that - gender, number, time, place, and so on - that goes on in Spanish. Of course this necessitates  learning the gender of nouns as well as their plurals. The easy answer to gender is that anything ending in -o or -e  (taco, burrito) is masculine, and anything ending in -a is feminine. There are many exceptions, so just learn the article that goes with the noun.

So with such straightforward (!) rules, one would think that esto would be masculine and esta would be the feminine forms of this.  One would be wrong.

I won't bore you with the rest. Until I get the hang of it, when I visit the local panaderia I'll have to point and grunt rather than say "Quiero ese...no, no, este...no, aquello con chocolate..."

Bienvenidos, mis amigos!

Welcome to A Gringo In The Works (with respect to John Lennon's A Spaniard In The Works). This is the chronicle of the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs in my voyage to fluency in Spanish. Sigueme.