Spanish, which I am attempting to learn.
Sep. 17th, 2020 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI took Spanish in high school. My dad has a beach house in Mexico. (Not on the beach but you can see the beach from the house.) In the US, probably Spanish is the most useful language to learn. And so I am learning Spanish on my phone via Duolingo. It's OK, drills the verb tenses and stuff. I'm going along with it (something like 250 days in a row now) and chugging away at things like "Tu no respondiste mis cartas" and "No lo viste?". And that's fine. I kind of remember some stuff from high school and two semesters of college Spanish. Not tons, but some.
One of the things Duolingo isn't very good at is all of the "traffic sign" words in the language. Like when you are reading along, words like "however" or "in spite of" or "anyway" or "but" or "until" give you some idea of the writer's train of thought. Duolingo is not great about introducing these words and they are super-helpful for fucking reading.
And yeah, I'm working at reading. I like to read. In English I've been reading for more than forty years. Reading is a thing I do. So, I'm working on reading in Spanish. I can't read grown-up books for adults, but I can totally work through simpler chapter books for middle schoolers and stuff, especially with Google to help on difficult words. (Duolingo is pretty good with hotels and passports and suitcases but not so good on vulture, assassination, irony...)
I'm reading (laboriously) La Ciudad de las Bestias, which is a Latin-American-Spanish book written for young adult types. Our hero is 15. And I can kinda read it. (I'm going in cold, without the wikipedia summary, so that I try harder to understand it. Also, friend Lala pointed out that doing HP & the Philsopher's Stone wasn't really fair because I was pretty familiar with the story so how did I know if I was really for real reading or just picking out a few words-I-recognized and "remembering" the story that I already knew how went. Fine. I have not read La Ciudad de las Bestias.)
We have a young hero, Alex. He has two younger sisters and a mom and dad and they live in a small coastal California town. His mom is sick with cancer and she and his dad have to go to some chemo specialist in Texas for her treatment. While this is happening, the two girls will stay with one grandma but Alex has to stay with the other grandma (his dad's mom) in New York. She's named Kate and she's... odd. World traveler, explorer, that sort of thing. Not a lot of cookie-baking going on with her, but she does throw down some snark that has to be pretty damned snarky if I can get it through a language barrier.
Alex gets to the airport and his grandma doesn't meet him. He tries to call her on the phone but gets the machine. So he leaves the airport to go look for her. He knows her address, which is a start. He meets some street kid Morgana, who scams him for bus fare and then steals his backpack & flute, but eventually he gets to his grandma's house. She allows as how if he couldn't get from the airport to her apartment, he surely wouldn't be any damn good in the Amazon, so it's good he made it. (They are going to the Amazon jungle to look for the Latin American equivalent of Bigfoot or the Yeti.) She also gives him her ex-husband's flute (he was a musician, a famous one) to replace the one that the street girl stole.
They fly to Brazil, get off the plane, and wind up on a boat sailing up the river tothe Heart of Darkness (sorry, different story, wrong continent) Santa Maria de la Lluvia, which is the endpoint of civilization as far as this book goes (el ultimo enclave de la civilizacion, according to the boat captain). They are traveling with a Jackass White Male Explorer (Leblanc), a nice rural doctora looking to vaccinate los indios (Torres), two photographers (Bruce & Gonzalez), a pair of Mormon missionaries, two soldiers, and the crew of the boat.
We've just landed at Santa Maria de la Lluvia, a burg of about twenty houses, a barn(?) that sometimes serves as a hotel, another smaller barn(?) that acts as a hospital attended to by two nuns, a pair of small warehouses, a catholic church, and an exercise barracks. "Los soldados controlaban la frontera y el trafico entre Venezuela y Brasil. De acuerdo a la ley, tambien debian proteger a los indigenas de los abusos de colonos y aventureros pero en la practica no lo hacian. Los forasteros iban ocupando la region sin que nadie se lo impidiera, empujando a los indios mas y mas hacia las zonas inexpugnables o matandolos con impunidad." (The soldiers controlled the border and the traffic between Venezuela and Brazil. According to the law, they also should protect the indigenous peoples against abuse by colonials and adventurers but in practice they didn't do it. The outsiders were occupying the region without anyone impeding them, pushing the natives more and more towards the impregnable parts (of the forest) or killing them with impunity.)
I mean, I'm not FAST at this, but I'm doing better than half the words.
I've bolded the words I had to look up. Some things take more looking up. Here's Alex meeting Cesar's daughter Nadia, who definitely gets a "main character" description with lots of words I didn't know...
"Alex calculo que la chica tenia la edad de su hermana Andrea, unos doce or trece anos. Tenia el cabello crespo y alborotado, destenido por el sol, los ojos y la piel color miel; vestia shorts, camiseta, y unas chancletas de plastico. Llevaba varias tiras de colores atadas en las munecas, un flor amarilla sobre una oreja y una larga pluma verde atravesada en el lobulo de la otra. Alex penso que si Andrea viera esos adornos, los copiaria den inmediato, y que si Nicole, su hermana menor, viera el monito negro que la chica llevaba sentado sobre un hombro, se morira de envida"
Alex figured that the girl was the age of his sister Andrea, some twelve or thirteen years. She had curly hair, unruly and sun-faded. Her eyes and skin were the color of honey. She wore shorts, a shirt, and plastic flipflops. She had colored strips of cloth around her wrists, a yellow flower over one ear, and a long brilliant green feather stuck through the lobe of the other. Alex thought that if Andrea could see these adornments, she'd copy them immediately. And if Nicole, his little sister, saw the little black monkey she had sitting on her shoulder, she would die of envy.
Again, the stuff I don't know is bolded. But yeah, I can kinda read. Kinda.
One of the things Duolingo isn't very good at is all of the "traffic sign" words in the language. Like when you are reading along, words like "however" or "in spite of" or "anyway" or "but" or "until" give you some idea of the writer's train of thought. Duolingo is not great about introducing these words and they are super-helpful for fucking reading.
And yeah, I'm working at reading. I like to read. In English I've been reading for more than forty years. Reading is a thing I do. So, I'm working on reading in Spanish. I can't read grown-up books for adults, but I can totally work through simpler chapter books for middle schoolers and stuff, especially with Google to help on difficult words. (Duolingo is pretty good with hotels and passports and suitcases but not so good on vulture, assassination, irony...)
I'm reading (laboriously) La Ciudad de las Bestias, which is a Latin-American-Spanish book written for young adult types. Our hero is 15. And I can kinda read it. (I'm going in cold, without the wikipedia summary, so that I try harder to understand it. Also, friend Lala pointed out that doing HP & the Philsopher's Stone wasn't really fair because I was pretty familiar with the story so how did I know if I was really for real reading or just picking out a few words-I-recognized and "remembering" the story that I already knew how went. Fine. I have not read La Ciudad de las Bestias.)
We have a young hero, Alex. He has two younger sisters and a mom and dad and they live in a small coastal California town. His mom is sick with cancer and she and his dad have to go to some chemo specialist in Texas for her treatment. While this is happening, the two girls will stay with one grandma but Alex has to stay with the other grandma (his dad's mom) in New York. She's named Kate and she's... odd. World traveler, explorer, that sort of thing. Not a lot of cookie-baking going on with her, but she does throw down some snark that has to be pretty damned snarky if I can get it through a language barrier.
Alex gets to the airport and his grandma doesn't meet him. He tries to call her on the phone but gets the machine. So he leaves the airport to go look for her. He knows her address, which is a start. He meets some street kid Morgana, who scams him for bus fare and then steals his backpack & flute, but eventually he gets to his grandma's house. She allows as how if he couldn't get from the airport to her apartment, he surely wouldn't be any damn good in the Amazon, so it's good he made it. (They are going to the Amazon jungle to look for the Latin American equivalent of Bigfoot or the Yeti.) She also gives him her ex-husband's flute (he was a musician, a famous one) to replace the one that the street girl stole.
They fly to Brazil, get off the plane, and wind up on a boat sailing up the river to
We've just landed at Santa Maria de la Lluvia, a burg of about twenty houses, a barn(?) that sometimes serves as a hotel, another smaller barn(?) that acts as a hospital attended to by two nuns, a pair of small warehouses, a catholic church, and an exercise barracks. "Los soldados controlaban la frontera y el trafico entre Venezuela y Brasil. De acuerdo a la ley, tambien debian proteger a los indigenas de los abusos de colonos y aventureros pero en la practica no lo hacian. Los forasteros iban ocupando la region sin que nadie se lo impidiera, empujando a los indios mas y mas hacia las zonas inexpugnables o matandolos con impunidad." (The soldiers controlled the border and the traffic between Venezuela and Brazil. According to the law, they also should protect the indigenous peoples against abuse by colonials and adventurers but in practice they didn't do it. The outsiders were occupying the region without anyone impeding them, pushing the natives more and more towards the impregnable parts (of the forest) or killing them with impunity.)
I mean, I'm not FAST at this, but I'm doing better than half the words.
I've bolded the words I had to look up. Some things take more looking up. Here's Alex meeting Cesar's daughter Nadia, who definitely gets a "main character" description with lots of words I didn't know...
"Alex calculo que la chica tenia la edad de su hermana Andrea, unos doce or trece anos. Tenia el cabello crespo y alborotado, destenido por el sol, los ojos y la piel color miel; vestia shorts, camiseta, y unas chancletas de plastico. Llevaba varias tiras de colores atadas en las munecas, un flor amarilla sobre una oreja y una larga pluma verde atravesada en el lobulo de la otra. Alex penso que si Andrea viera esos adornos, los copiaria den inmediato, y que si Nicole, su hermana menor, viera el monito negro que la chica llevaba sentado sobre un hombro, se morira de envida"
Alex figured that the girl was the age of his sister Andrea, some twelve or thirteen years. She had curly hair, unruly and sun-faded. Her eyes and skin were the color of honey. She wore shorts, a shirt, and plastic flipflops. She had colored strips of cloth around her wrists, a yellow flower over one ear, and a long brilliant green feather stuck through the lobe of the other. Alex thought that if Andrea could see these adornments, she'd copy them immediately. And if Nicole, his little sister, saw the little black monkey she had sitting on her shoulder, she would die of envy.
Again, the stuff I don't know is bolded. But yeah, I can kinda read. Kinda.
