Saturday, May 27, 2006

How many Spanish words do you know?

At the end of June the staff here is giong to have a ¨summer school¨ for the kisd from the camps, or rather a Vacation Bible School. They will bring in about 70 more kids in addition to the 30 or so we already have. I´m pretty sure it will be a crazy week. In preparation for this they are drawing and painting large pictures to go along with lessons, cutting out letters for signs, preparing crafts. In all of this Stephanie and I are helping in the late mornings, up in the supply room. I´ve been doing a lot of painting of biblical characters lately. The staff also work on these for a little bit after the kids leave. These girls put in long, long days. They are here at 7, worked hard with these kids, and then are here until about 4 or a little after. Brigida, who has the Kinder class, also helps out in the morning.

One day after the kids left we were sitting around upstairs and Stephanie and I didn´t have anything to do, so we sat on the couch and decided to name all the Spanish words we knew. Pretty annoying, and quite amazing to think of all the things we know. Acquiring another language is tricky business, and it surprises me how many words I can actually recite. Of course vocabulary is one thing and proper sentence structure is another. Whenever I´m struggling to come up with a sentence, and I´m doing it one word at a time I do it in the order that the English words are said, which isn´t always right. A shirt I saw in L.A. pretty much sums it up: yo hablo Spanglish. Because the girls who work here understand English you can find us using sentences half in English and half in Spanish.

Cande and I talk a lot about different words in English and Spanish. She is a marvel, a middle age woman who is constantly wanting to learn English. She mentioned yesterday that she was going to clean the phone because it had flour on it. She wanted to know how to say ¨el telefono tiene harina¨ in English, which I translated as ¨the telephone has flour¨. She then she assumed that ¨tiene¨ means ¨has¨, but I had to actually think about it and tell her that one person or thing ¨has¨ something, while one or more persons or things ¨have¨ something. And that the word for a THING is it. And that things in English aren´t male or female... she thought that was pretty funny when I said that, because I don´t know the word for male and female in Spanish. I told her that things in English weren´t a man or a woman. So that seems like preperation for teaching English in Korea... all the crazy exceptions of English.

Also, Cande said ¨mucho vasos¨ and wanted to know how to say it in English. Well, I told her a lot=mucho, and cups=vasos, but really you would say ¨A lot of cups¨. Where does the of come from? Of in Spanish is ¨de¨, and you don´t use it in the Spanish sentence. Translating can get confusing.

Stephanie this week has been pretty sick and so she couldn´t work on Thursday or Friday. She´s feeling much better now. The only thing worse than being sick is being sick away from home. Willibaldo, one of the Kinders was so cute, he kept asking about her, and if she was sick. I´d tell him yes, and then he´d ask me again 20 minutes later.

On Tuesday while we were out walking at the market I mentioned to Brigida an event from last year that I really liked. Saturday nights they have a youth service, which last year I always went to, and one night they had food afterward. Everyone was assigned to bring one thing, and out of all of it we made tostadas (on flat shells). I mentioned to her that I liked that a lot, because it was fun to just stand around with everyone and chat and eat and such. She said ¨okay!¨ and the next night at church she organized it again, so that this Saturday we´re having another tostado night. Just like that. I have such power. :)

Because we have a tv and the video store rentals are mostly English, we´ve rented some more. Unfortunately we can´t read the back of the movies, so we can´t read the blurbs on what the movies are about. We picked up a recent romantic comedy with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, both whom I like a whole lot. It turned out to be ¨Just like Heaven¨ and really stupid. Don´t waste your time on that one.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home