Note of the Living Deb

DuoLingo is now trying to teach me about the passive voice.

(The passive voice is where you don't need to worry your pretty little head about what the subject is. For example, "Decisions were made." Who did the deciding? That is not for you to know.)

So, this is super easy in Spanish; you just put the word "se" in front of the verb. At first, DuoLingo was always making me use singular verbs and then suddenly it wasn't, so I had to do research.

It turns out, sometimes you don't need to know the object, either. This is what was happening in the first sentences I saw.

So, what kind of sentence has no subject and no object? Here's a common example:
Spanish - Sí, se puede.
Literal English - Yes, is able. Or Yes, can.

My first pass on translating these sentences is to use "one" as the subject. Because, unlike Spanish, English is addicted to having some sort of subject. DuoLingo also helpfully points out that sometimes we use "people," "they," or "you" as the subject.

Natural English - Yes, one can. Or Yes, you can. Or Yes, people can. Or Yes, they can. Or, during demonstrations, Yes, we can. Or Yes, it can (be done). Or Yes, it's possible. (I definitely feel sorry for English learners trying to guess the best way to deal with passive sentences in English.)

Here's an example from Duo's list of key phrases for talking about customs:

Spanish: No se trabaja ni en las noches ni los fines de semana.
Literal English: Not is worked neither in the nights nor the ends of week.
Natural English: People don't work at night or on weekends.

The sentence doesn't say what you're working on (just when you're working). So there's no object to match, and so that's when you always use the third-person singular.

What fooled me, ahem, confused me, is that although, when a passive sentence has an object, we can use the object to look like the subject, we could instead use these other subjects. For example, here's another common sentence:

Spanish - Aquí se habla español.
English - Spanish is spoken here.

But you could also say People speak Spanish here, or They speak Spanish here. In this case, the word "Spanish" is singular, so the verb is still singular.

Here's an example from DuoLingo of the type of sentence that got me:

Spanish - El treinta y uno de octubre, se regalan dulces.
Literal English - The thirty and one of October, are given sweets.
Natural English - On October 31st, sweets are given. Or, as Duolingo says, On October 31st, people give sweets as gifts. (They add "as gifts" to show which word for "to give" to use--there's also "dar.")

So, even though they're using the people-do-this-custom structure for this sentence, there is an object (sweets) which is plural, and so that's why the verb is plural. Mystery solved!

(Note, "dulces" is usually translated as "candy," which is singular, but I was trying not to confuse you.)

There are many uses for the word "se" in Spanish; in passive sentences with an object, it's called, eloquently enough, the passive "se."

What Duo was trying to teach me was the impersonal "se." And then mixing it up with other types of "se" to make me crazy, ahem, to let me practice telling the difference.

Other note: In addition to the passive "se" and the impersonal "se" are the reflexive "se," the accidental "se," the reciprocal "se," and more. Those are not covered in this post, but Mango Languages has a nice summary of how to use "se" in Spanish.

DuoLingo appears to have dropped the comments, or as they call them, "sentence discussions." You could upvote or downvote the comments, so the best ones rose to the top, and these were often fabulous explanations of new things everyone was confused about. Now I have to go somewhere else to do my research. Waaa.

But that means you get to read about my results. Even if you're not studying Spanish, these posts might be interesting just because they are about how another language does things differently. Also, seeing how things are translated literally from Spanish to English may help you better understand a native Spanish speaker who is still learning English.

So I've already learned that "hace" could mean "ago," even though literally it means "it makes or it does."

Spanish: Yo corrí hace tres horas.
Literal English: I ran it makes three hours.
Natural English: I ran three hours ago.

It barely makes sense to me, but I can imagine someone saying the literal sentence if they're calculating--I ran, hmm, it makes, uh, three hours. Fortunately "hace [amount of time]" rolls off my tongue just as easily as "[amount of time] ago," so I've got it now. Even I can (slowly) get used to things. Yay!

But now we're learning the phrase "hace que" (it makes that) which actually changes the tense of your verb.

Spanish: Hace dos meses que vivo aquí.
Literal English: It makes two months that I live here.
Natural English: I've lived here for two months.

I guess really English is the weird language here. Why do we use "ago" for finished actions but not for continuing actions? Glad I don't have to learn that!

And then there's "desde hace." "Desde" means "since," but "desde hace" means "for." How?

Spanish: Espero desde hace tres horas.
Literal English: I wait since it makes three hours.
Natural English: I've been waiting for three hours.

Now, Spanish already has two words for "for," and figuring out which one to use is a real problem for English speakers. "Para" is more about purpose or destination, and "por" is more about exchange or duration. So I would expect to say "He esperando por tres horas"--I have been waiting for three hours (with "por" meaning "through" or "throughout" the whole three hours). But apparently that means you are done waiting (maybe you are now complaining to the person for whom you were waiting). Whereas using "desde hace" (with the present tense) indicates that the action is still continuing. The poor person above has already been waiting three hours and is still waiting.

I'm reading the book ¡Exacto! A Practical Guide to Spanish Grammar which I like because it goes into more depth on the topics than what I've heard before (even though I feel like a have a pretty good grasp of Spanish grammar). The end of the first chapter (on nouns) had a section on diminutive, augmentative, and pejorative suffixes in Spanish. I'm familiar with at least the diminutives, but it does not appear in the index in my textbook. So there is a lot for me to learn.

First, we do have diminutives in English. When you add -y or -ie to a word to get something like doggie, cutie, or horsie (not to mention Debbie), you can see that it can mean something small or be an endearment. It can also be a way to be more friendly, to talk to kids, and make other subtle changes in meaning. These are much more common in Spanish than English, plus you can add these endings to adjectives, adverbs, and verbs as well as nouns and you can have diminutives of diminutives (to make them extra tiny and cute). Plus there are augmentative suffixes you can use to indicate something is big or undesirable. And sometimes the new word ends up with a whole new meaning.

I really only knew the diminutive ending -ito/-ita, which I liked to translate as "cute little [whatever]." But there is so much more. Rather than write a bunch of this stuff out for you, let me refer you to the Fluent Spanish article, Latch On: 18 Spanish Suffixes You’ll Never Want to Let Go Of (#1-9). It looks like the suffixes starting with -i or -e (or -ue) are diminutive and the ones starting with -o, -a, -u are augmentative and/or pejorative.

I actually don't recognize many of the words I've seen in the examples. But I do recognize some.

Diminutive/endearing/belittling suffixes:
* ahorita (right now, in a second) from ahora (now)
* pañuelo (handkerchief) from paño (cloth)
* juguete (toy) from juego (game)
* tortilla from torta (cake)
* the ever-popular pobrecito (poor thing) from pobre (poor) (when our Spanish teachers caught us complaining)
* and my personal favorite: Venezuela (little Venice)

Augmentative/pejorative suffixes:
* sillón (armchair) from silla (chair)
* ratón (mouse) from rata (rat)
* cinturón (belt) from cintura (waist)
* padrastro, madrastra (stepfather, stepmother) from padre/madre (father/mother)
* um, cajones (apparently also means drawers) from caja (box)

Fun ones I've found:

Diminutive/endearing/belittling suffixes:
* puertito (little door or doggy door) from puerto (door)
* cochecito (baby stroller) from coche (car)
* balancín (seesaw) from balanza (scale, balance)
* caballitos (merry-go-round) from caballo (horse)
* reyezuelo (petty king) from rey (king)

Augmentative/pejorative suffix:
* abogaducho (awful lawyer) from abogado (lawyer)

Other useful ones:

Diminutive/endearing/belittling suffixes:
* momentito (just a moment) from momento (moment)
* segundito (just a second) from segundo (second)
* ratito (in a jiffy) from rato (time)
* mañanita (early morning) from mañana (morning)
* nuevecito (brand new) from nueve (new)
* dolorcito (tiny ache) from dolor (pain)
* mentirita (fib) from mentira (lie)
* manecilla (clock hand) from mano (hand)
* bolsillo (pocket) from bolso (bag)

Augmentative/pejorative suffixes:
* cucharón (ladle) from cuchara (spoon)
* casón (manor house) from casa (house)
* exitazo (great success) from exito (success)
* mirón/mirona (nosy, snoopy) from mirar (to look, to watch)
* apagón (a blackout, a sudden cutoff of electric power) from apagar (to switch off, to turn off)

The guy on Language Transfer talks about how the word "que" in Spanish can mean either "what" or "that." Then he said this isn't the only time in English where changing the starting "w" to a "t" turns a question word into an answer word: where/there, when/then.

And who/tho. Oh, no, I guess not. But we could just make it be a nongendered pronoun.

"Tho" does look kind of like "thou." But our modern second-person pronoun is already nongendered.

And why/thy doesn't quite follow the pattern either. Not to mention "how."

Quote of the Day - I said this on Facebook yesterday: "I just realized that December 15 was the last day to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act and today is the first day we knew for sure that the penalty for not having insurance was going to be $0. It was impossible to make a properly informed decision. I guess you can get out of it by never paying and getting your insurance canceled? But I hope all my readers can afford insurance because you never know what's going to happen and because insurance companies negotiate down your prices for you even if you never reach your deductible."

Exercise update

Wednesday - I walked a short walk. Drove to pay my property taxes, so sad. But recently I saw that there was a sign saying "side walk closed; use other side" on both sides of 51st crossing over I-35. I had decided to walk via 290 instead, after taking a class at the gym. But there's no way I'm risking giving some of those old people my cold or whatever. Also it's been raining. And I really don't like waiting until the last minute, so I just drove. And filled my car with gas. I did feel my core muscles a little rolling the cookie dough, though.

yesterday - I got distracted all day and did no exercise at all. Oops!

Previously I've learned that some Spanish verbs, when conjugated, have vowel changes in the base word (aka "stem" or "radical"). For example, you might expect "I think" (from pensar, to think) to be "penso," but the e changes to ie and so the correct word is "pienso." I learned that these stem-changers are just words we are supposed to memorize, and after a while, the correct form sounds right to us. And also that stem-changers are not considered irregular (unless they are irregular in additional ways) but not why.

The instructor in Language Transfer says that usually when a syllable with an e is stressed, the e is "split" into ie. And because the penultimate syllable is stressed in the present tense, the stem changes in all forms with one-syllable endings. So for example, the word for "we think," "pensamos," does not have the stem change because the accent is elsewhere. And this is why the stem doesn't change for other tenses. For example, "I thought" is "pensé" with the accent on the second syllable.

There are exceptions of course, such as llegar, esperar, and comprender, plus the first-person singular form of verbs with the irregular -go endings such as tengo. Also, I'm noticing that -er words don't have that last e split in words like tener or tenemos.

But this doesn't just happen with verbs. Some examples he gave:
* tiempo - time
* concierto - concert
* noviembre - November
* siempre - always (related to the semper in semper fi)
* bien - well (bene in Italian)

He said a similar thing about o usually splitting into ue under the pressure of being in an accented syllable, with exceptions including "comer" and "tomar." And we can see this split in other words besides verbs, too.
* puerto - port
* fuerza - force
* escuela - school
* cuerpo - body (corpus)
* nuevo - new (related to innovative)
* pueblo - town (related to población, population)
* muerte - death (related to mortgage = death pact)
* bueno - good (bon in Italian)

As of lesson 19, he has not mentioned the other, more rare, stem-changing patterns (e to i, i to ie, and u to ue). But otherwise, it seems like it might have been smarter to learn stem-changing as a pattern and then to learn the exceptions.

I started listening to the Spanish lessons in Language Transfer. This program is sort of like the book Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish because it shows similarities between Spanish and English. And it's sort of like the online course Coffee Break Spanish because you listen to a student and teacher and get to try giving the answers before the other student does. I kind of love it. (They also have other languages, if you're interested.)

A fascinating strategy the instructor recommends for trying to guess a verb in Spanish is to first think whether there is a related -tion noun in English. If so, you can probably guess a Spanish verb by a) converting the English noun to a Spanish noun, then b) changing the -ción to -r.

For example:

Verb you want: create
Related -tion noun: creation
Spanish noun: creación
Spanish verb: crear

Here's a slightly tricky example:

Verb you want: illustrate
Related -tion noun: illustration
Spanish noun: ilustración (no double-l in Spanish for an l sound)
Spanish verb: ilustrar

Here's a less obvious example:

Verb you want: carry on
Related -tion noun: continuation
Spanish noun: continuación
Spanish verb: continuar

Here's a less perfect example:

Verb you want: demonstrate
Related -tion noun: demonstration
Spanish noun: demostración (only one "n")
Spanish verb: demostrar

Apparently, the bulk of English -tion words come from Latin, as do the bulk of all Spanish words. So that's why this works.

At our favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, one lady often says, "¡Que tenga buen día!" as we're leaving. I get that she's saying something like "Have a nice day!" so I reply "¡Usted, tambien!" (you, too), but I don't really get the construction. So finally I looked it up.

The commenter zzigzzag at this Lonely Planet forum explained it perfectly:

This is an example of a subjunctive clause where the main verb is implied rather than stated explicitly:
[Espero] que tengas un buen día.
[I hope that you] have a good day.

"That" can be omitted in English whereas in Spanish "que" cannot.

Ah, I love perfect explanations!

SpanishDict shows a probably better reply: "¡Igualmente!" Literally that means "equally." Really it means something like "the same to you," only I think without any bad connotations. We were actually taught this word during our lesson on introductions as an appropriate response to "Pleased to meet you." So I'm going to try switching to this new response next time!

Short answer: No. I am not a fluent Spanish speaker.

My friend Amy from undergrad said they did work, so maybe my undergrad was better than the local community college, where I took my Spanish classes. And that could be, if the classes were smaller and they did a lot of talking and the students kept up with the work. I took two other languages there, however, (though not for as many semesters), and I'm going to say that their classes were not better.

My Spanish IV classmate who has learned many languages said that he found taking classes to be the worst way he has tried to learn a language. (And yes, he was one of the better students.) He prefers to jump in and interact with people who know the language. He is a cool and amazing dude and very, very different from me!

So, on to the long answer.

Reading

I still can't read the ¡Ahora Sí! newspaper without looking up a bunch of words. In fact, I don't feel any better at this than I did before I took these classes (after having taken three years of Spanish in high school and doing additional self-study after that).

One exception: My grammar knowledge is much better, and I do understand verbs better than before. I pretty much always know what tense they are, which is very, very nice. And in books that are mostly English but have some Spanish in them, I almost always understand the Spanish now.

Listening

I still cannot understand Spanish spoken in the wild except for the occasional word or phrase. And sometimes entire sentences (generally spoken by or to three-year-olds). That includes the Spanish spoken in mostly English movies. But I am much better at understanding the simple and clearly spoken Spanish on DuoLingo because I now know most of the words well enough to understand where most of the word separations are.

Speaking

Talking is much easier than listening because I can use only vocabulary that I actually know. And I now have enough vocabulary that I can often figure out ways to say things I want to say to people. For example, I wanted to ask "Is there a post office nearby?" I don't know how to say "nearby" but I do know how to say "near here" and "around here." I wanted to ask, "Do you know a good place around here to buy stamps?" But instead I settled for, "Can I buy stamps around here?"

But sometimes talking takes a while. Example: Here's what happens when I want to say "The children were six years old."
Head: The children = Los niños
Mouth: "Los niños"
Head: are = ser or estar? No, wait, we say "had six years" instead of "were six years old" in Spanish. Which past tense, though? Having six years is still happening, so tenía. No, it's plural, so that's tenían.
Mouth: "tenian"
Head: six years = seis años
Mouth: seis años.

Nevertheless, I now have to guts to try to speak Spanish to Spanish-speaking restaurant workers. This is big! There is one lady in particular who is often at our favorite restaurant. She will talk for ages with other people in my class who we have dragged to the restaurant, but I can also have a short conversation with her involving a few halting sentences.

Writing

I am very good at spelling and writing things in Spanish, once I figure out how to say them. Spelling is so much easier than in English. It really is almost perfectly phonetic, though there can be more than one way to spell a certain sound.

What's next?

I need a lot more vocabulary. And I really only do well with flashcards and by finding patterns (for the latter, see, for example, my blog posts on agent nouns, reflexive verbs, and compound words).

After that, I will also need to learn a lot more about how to make phrases, for example, how to choose the right preposition. I think this will be most easily learned from broad reading and watching movies. But meanwhile, I think I could also benefit from more crutches such as Zen Language, a system compared to DuoLingo.


Reasons to study a foreign language

And on a slightly different note, there are a lot of lists out there on reasons to study a foreign language. They mostly go on about how it will help you in your career in international business. Here are the benefits I would list (besides being able to interact with more people and media).

* learn a cool accent
* increase sympathy for non-native speakers of your own language
* learn specific strategies on how to help non-native speakers; ones I've learned include:
--- speak more slowly
--- pause between words; word breaks are not obvious
--- try different ways of saying things instead of saying the same thing over and over
--- use more hand gestures
* learn better grammar
* increase your vocabulary in your native language (for English, this especially true for Germanic and Latin languages)

We had a section in our text about Spanish names, but it's described very well and somewhat amusingly in a few paragraphs in James Michener's Iberia so I'll give you that quote below. (I'm adding more paragraph breaks to make it easier to read.)

A word about Spanish names. To explain the tradition fully would require many pages, for it is unbelievably complicated, but ideally every Spaniard, male or female, has two surnames [last names], the first and more important being the father's and the second the mother's. Thus Pedro Pérez Montilla can properly be referred to as Señor Pérez Montilla or simply as Señor Pérez, but to refer to him as Señor Montilla would be a real gaffe.

Spanish also has the handy little words Don and Doña, which have no equivalent in English and cannot be translated; they are used only preceding a given name [first name], allowing one to refer to a man or woman by the given name with no presumption of intimacy. Thus our friend can be called Don Pedro or Señor Don Pedro Pérez Montilla.

When he [our friend] married, let us say to Leocadia Blanco Alvarez, his wife did not surrender her surnames but merely added his, preceded by the preposition de (of), so that her name became Señora Leocadia Blanco Alvarez de Pérez Montilla, and she may properly be addressed as Doña Leocadia, or as Señora Blanco, or as Señora Blanco Alvarez, or as Señora Blanco Alvarez de Pérez Montilla, or as Señora de Pérez Montilla.

Frequently the paternal and maternal surnames are joined by either a hyphen or an y (and), which means that Don Pedro’s son could be named Antonio Pérez Blanco, or Antonio Pérez-Blanco, or Antonio Pérez y Blanco, although in recent years the last has become less frequent.

Many Spaniards today, in common usage, simply omit the maternal surname entirely or abbreviate it to a single letter. On the other hand, if Don Pedro and Doña Leocadia belong to the nobility or the aristocracy (or if they want to put on airs) the son will adopt the name Señor Don Antonio Pérez Montilla y Blanco Alvarez.

The problem is further complicated when a man has a family name which is unusually common and a maternal name which is less so, for then he becomes known by the more distinctive of his two names, which is only sensible. The five most common Spanish surnames, in order of frequency, are García, Fernández, López, González and Rodríguez, and just as the Englishman named Smith or Jones is accustomed to adding a hyphenated second name, such as Smith-Robertson, so the Spaniard becomes García Montilla, sometimes with the hyphen.

It is in conformity with this custom that the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca is so often referred to simply by his maternal name. Anglo-Saxon readers encounter difficulties with the names of such historical figures as Spain’s two cardinals who exercised political leadership, Mendoza and Cisneros; in history books you will find many pages about them, and they were at least as famous as Richelieu in France and Wolsey in England, yet if you try to look them up in a Spanish encyclopedia you will find nothing unless you happen to know that the former was born Pedro González de Mendoza and the latter Gonzalo Jiménez de Cisneros. In each of these instances, however, the distinctive name is not maternal but merely a place name added in hopes of making a common name distinctive.

So far I have discussed only the simple cases; the complicated ones I had better skip.

In a small Spanish city to which a friend had sent me a postal money order I had a rueful introduction to this problem of names. My friend had assured me by phone that the money had been sent, and the post office had advised me that it had arrived and that upon presentation of my passport it would be paid. Accordingly, I went to the post office, but before telling the clerk my name, handed him my passport. He studied it, consulted his file of incoming money orders and said, ’Nothing here.’ I explained that I knew it was in hand, so with much politeness he searched his papers again and said, ’Nothing here.’ This time I noticed that he was looking at the A file, so I suggested, ’Perhaps if you look in the ...’

'Please, Señor Albert,’ he said. ’I know my business.’

In my passport he had seen that my name was James Albert Michener and he was smart enough to know from that who I was, and he had no cash for any Señor Albert. When I tried to explain what my name really was he became angry, and I was not able to get my money until Spanish friends came from the hotel to the post office and explained who I was. When the money was paid, the clerk took my passport again, studied my name and shook his head. When he handed back my papers he said, ’I am sorry for your inconvenience, Señor Albert.’

--Michener, James A. Iberia: Spanish Travels and Reflections. (1968) Random House: New York, pp. 41-42.

Our text describes many countries rather than just Spain and was published in 2012. It says the the double-surname tradition is practiced in many, but not all, Latin-American countries. The way this is described does not perfectly match what Michener wrote.

For example, "When a woman marries in a country where two last names are used, legally she retains her two maiden surnames. However, socially she may take her husband's paternal surname in place of her inherited maternal surname. For example, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, wife of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, might use the names Mercedes Barcha García or Mercedes Barcha de García in social situations. ... Adopting a husband's last name for social purposes, though widespread, is only legally recognized in Ecuador and Peru." - Blanco, José A. and Philip Redwine Donley, Late. Vistas: Introducción a la Lengua Española (4th ed.) (2012) Vistas higher Learning: p. 86.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs, 6/4/16) says that in Spain, "gender equality law has allowed surname transposition since 1999, subject to the condition that every sibling must bear the same surname order recorded in the Registro Civil (civil registry), but there have been legal exceptions." And then "In an English-speaking environment, Spanish-named people sometimes hyphenate their surnames to avoid Anglophone confusion or to fill in forms with only one space provided for last name."

The article also says they might have a first and middle name like we do (and go by either informally), though that would be called having a composite (vs. simple) forename rather than two names. "Legislation in Spain under Franco legally limited cultural naming customs to only Christian (Jesus, Mary, saints) and typical Spanish names (Álvaro, Jimena, et al.)." But now "the only naming limitation is the dignity of the child, who cannot be given an insulting name. Similar limitations applied against diminutive, familiar, and colloquial variants not recognized as names proper, and 'those that lead to confusion regarding sex." Wow. But "[a]lthough the first part of a composite forename generally reflects the gender of the child, the second personal name need not (e.g. José María Aznar)" and they can go by either name, so maybe their second name can be gender neutral.

Another interesting thing in the article is that -ez endings can mean "son of" (Hernández = son of Hernando, Sánchez = son of Sancho), implying things were done differently in the past.

My Spanish teacher and then one of my classmates recommended the movie "Valentín".

It's set in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1960s. And it's about a boy who lives with his grandmother and dreams of becoming an astronaut, in spite of his bad vision, cross-eyes, and Argentinian citizenship. (Why, yes, that was foreshadowing in my last post.) And he doesn't just dream. He studies, he builds rockets, he practices wearing space boots, he practices holding his breath as long as possible.

He is also fascinated with romantic relationships and asks everybody questions about how they work. He's charming, honest, and makes friends easily. So it's fun hanging with him throughout the movie.

The movie is about him being assertive. He makes friends with the musician across the street even though his grandma is suspicious. He tells his dad's new girlfriend the truth when he decides he likes her too much to lie. Later, he tracks her down when he wants to confront her. He looks for a way to get medical care for his grandma when she needs it. He looks for a way to have a home of his own when his grandma can't take care of him anymore.

The movie reminds me a little bit of "About a Boy" because it's also about figuring out about how to live life. And it reminds me a little of "Dead Poet's Society" because it's about taking action to get what you want, only it works out better in this movie. In the end he says you try things and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Fortunately, they mostly do work for him.

This movie is in Spanish, available with English subtitles. Many Argentinians have an Italian background, so I've heard their accent sounds a little like Italian, and I did notice that at times.

The subtitles were missing in some parts. From what I could tell, those parts weren't essential to the story, but I would like to watch this again when I know more Spanish. I could understand the boy's accent pretty well, though I had trouble with Grandma's.

I recommend this movie and give it 4 stars out of 5, maybe more.

(Three posts in one night? This can happen when you try to sleep with a stomach reminding you that you've eating too much chocolate babka in one day and a brain reminding you that you've experienced a lot of interesting media recently.)