American in Spain

Nora’s language ability has veered mildly towards Spanish lately. For a while now she would only converse with me in English, but now she will sometimes switch to Spanish if she doesn’t know how to say the phrase in English, or if she just forgets. I dutifully respond, “You mean, ‘blah blah blah’?” translating what she just said into English, and she repeats it and goes acquiring new English words like this.
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I’ve been focusing lately on Nora’s English, as my readers are more likely to understand her, but I thought I’d post some videos showcasing her Spanish development. One of Nora’s favorite pastimes is talking on the phone with her abuela (Spanish grandmother). There are times when Nora is entertained with some other task and won’t even take the phone, but there are other times where they have spoken for more than an hour, once to the point where Nora got a little hoarse. It’s very much a stream of consciousness sort of conversation, with Nora at the helm, and her abuela interjecting comments here or there to keep up the flow, sticking around long after I would’ve bored of the conversation.
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Today is a local holiday honoring the Virgin of the Good Apparition, a bit of pareidolia that occurred back in 1605 where some light reflecting off a nearby hermitage window reminded someone of the Virgin Mary. Three hundred years later, this particular virgin became the patron saint of the Santander Diocese, and it became a regional holiday. Quite a few people walk the 13 kilometers, mostly uphill, from Colindres to the Bien Aparecida church in Ampuero, and then there are picnics and music and a general festive atmosphere up there…or so I’m told. We’ll have to do the walk one year.
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Nora’s English has been improving by leaps and bounds lately, which is due to many factors, but I think the fact that her American grandparents visited for a week and that her Spanish grandparents haven’t visited for a while made a big difference, by enabling/forcing us to use English primarily at home. Little by little, I have been requiring more of her when she asks for things. When she wants her hands cleaned, she used to get away with just saying “sucio“, but since then we’ve stepped through “sucia mano“, “dirty”, “dirty hand”, and now up to “My hand is dirty.” We’ve climbed a similar ladder for cookie requests, from “más” through “more”, “más cookie”, “more cookie”, “cookie please”, “more cookie please”, “May I have more cookie?”, “May I have more cookie, please?”, to finally, “Daddy, may I have more cookie, please?”
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Last week, Nora was particularly loquacious before lunch, so I set up the video camera on a tripod in case she did something particularly cute during her lunch. As you may have noticed, it’s easier to make interview-style videos with her in her high chair because if she’s on the floor, she’s zooming around the house and it makes for an awkward video. Sure enough, after she’d had her fill of macaroni, she started pointing at the bookcase behind me and saying “Una niña que come patata!“, I assured her that there were no girls eating potatoes on the bookshelf, but she persisted until I finally understood what she meant.
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Last year I was interviewed by a local language teacher, Rodolfo, who is making a lovely series of videos for his English (as a second language, of course) students. My interview was not used in several interim videos, but I do appear in the one published yesterday discussing how we Americans view those bloody blokes with British accents. As usual, the entire video is quite interesting and very well edited. I continue to applaud Rodolfo and his projects at the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas de Laredo. I’d be happy to do another interview with him…but maybe with less sun in my eyes next time.
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As Facebook slowly catches on here in Spain, I’ve been faced with a dilemma: my Spanish friends want to be friends with me on Facebook, but they don’t understand anything I post. And I understand them perfectly. I have some friends that post things in Polish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Greek, and it is a little annoying to be excluded from their communication by my ignorance. Possible solutions to my problem that I see are:
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Nora’s Spanish has taken some leaps and bounds in the past couple weeks, yet her spoken English is lagging behind, and I can’t help but blame myself for it. In the mornings, when I care for her for 3-5 hours depending on when she gets up, I speak only English to her, except when we are around Spaniards in the grocery store. She, however, chooses to speak Spanish to me. There are some exceptions. When she asks for a cookie, she says “Doh-chi!“, and when she wants to get down off of something (e.g. chair, sofa, stroller), she typically says, “Down!”, although she has recently taken to saying “Al suelo!” (to the floor).
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The other day I watched a ninety minute video of a speech by Dr. Lera Boroditsky, of Stanford University, about her work on comparing and contrasting languages across cultures and drawing conclusions on how language affects the way we think. Astute readers may recall my interest in this topic, and specifically in Boroditsky’s work on the subject, from my In Spanish, It’s Not Your Fault post. Today, I just want to point out a few points from her talk that resonated with me and then direct you towards the video itself.
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Nora has understood the “first I talk, then you talk, then I talk again” format of human conversation for several months now. But it wasn’t until just recently that she’s begun forming clear sentences with what are clearly words. Unfortunately none of the words she speaks are in either of the two languages I understand. As you might imagine, it can be very frustrating for both sides of the conversation. It is clear, however, that she is trying to express some concept through speech. And, because the words seem so much like words, only in a foreign language, sometimes I get asked on the street by people that know my origins if she’s speaking English. Perhaps the set of sounds she’s making is what spoken English sounds like to a non-English-speaker?
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