Español

I'm on a juggernaut of a mission to learn the major languages on Earth before dementia makes me forget them. I also seem to be hell-bent on filling up this forgotten blog all in a sudden since I started it in 2004.

Interestingly enough, 2004 is when I realized wanted to learn Spanish. I never did much on the subject, though, until May of this blessed 2008, Anno Domini. So, I bought, цифром и словом: two/2 books on grammar--one/1 pocket-edition, one/1 very-much-bigger--a dictionary of the dead-tree persuasion, two/2 digital ones, several (¡5!) books, and started.

Now, Spanish is a very interesting language. It is at the same time very regular and very weird. On the one hand, its grammar is a lot more regular than that of English. On the other, the preponderance of all those little tiny words makes understanding spoken language very challenging, to say the least. By way of example, this sounds like gibberish to untrained ears:

yo ya no te doy más de esto

Many of those tiny words may alter the meaning of the sentence completely. Also, there are lots more interjections than in English. Then there are the grammatical genders, and of course the moods, which have almost disappeared in English, but which, in the form of the subjunctive, are all over the place in Spanish. In fact, the subjunctive is used a lot more in Spanish than it is in French. Thank providence Spanish at least does not have cases. This is not the first time I'd have seen genders, complex tenses, moods, and weird interjections, because my native language is riddled with them, but, still, it doesn't make it any easier. In years past, I had found German, for example, easier than Spanish, even though German has 4 cases as well as grammatical moods, and genders.

There just are some things in Spanish which are pretty confusing. I've recently realized that part of the confusion is because Spanish uses more verb framing, and English uses more satellite framing. In other words, Spanish verbs encode not just the action, but the path of the action, whereas English uses prepositions to express the direction of the action. English has a lot of verb-framed verbs as well, but practically all of them come from Latin. For example: enter and come in. The latter is satellite-framed, because it uses a preposition to encode the direction of the action, whereas the former is verb-framed, because the direction (outside-->in) is itself encoded in the verb. I realized that Spanish has a lot more of those than English does, and they are used a lot more often as well.

There are other things too, but I'm falling asleep.

Anyways. I'm actually pretty proud of myself. In less than 6 months, I understand almost everything I hear. I've read two full books--stuttering on a 3rd one. I listen regularly to Spanish TV and radio channels, and I can actually understand WTF they are all talking about.

So, I'm gonna start posting on occasion in semi-English, semi-Spanish, semi-whatever comes to mind, with the intent that these postings will converge to literary Spanish as time goes on.