At least now I know how to talk about monkey brains in Spanish

Midlife Sentence | Language Learning, Spanish

Whenever somebody says something in Spanish and any member of my immediate family is with me in earshot, I’m usually quizzed about what was said.

I’ve been engaged in a very casual study of the language for years, and folks around here have way more confidence in my ability than they should. I think it would be generous to say I can comprehend about as much Spanish as can be taught a moderately intelligent Labrador retriever. You know: most basic commands and some stuff relating to food.

Twelve years ago I spent four weeks in Argentina as part of an exchange program. To prepare, I took months of Spanish classes with a native speaker and spent every waking moment trying to read short stories and magazines in Spanish, watching telenovelas and Spanish Sesame Street, and listening to tutorial CDs in my car. As anyone who has tried to upload an entire language into her grey matter in this amount of time can tell you, this was not enough to become anything close to fluent. But I tried.

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“Winging it” sounds the same in any language

Yes, I know he's not Danish. He's also not really speaking Swedish. That's not the point.
Yes, I know he’s not Danish. He’s also not really speaking Swedish. That’s not the point. Art by Max Geiger.

In Danish, the phrase “Good morning, how did you sleep,” looks like this:

God morgen, hvordan har du sover?

It sounds like:

G’morn, vordenardusowah?

As in any language, in Danish, phonetics often have little to do with how words look on paper. While this particular phrase (which Jack needs to learn, along with a short introduction speech by the end of the month), may not be too difficult, there are sounds in that language that don’t even exist in English. Not to mention letters, like: æ, ø, and å.

But when I reminded him last week about putting together his speech, he was unconcerned. He said he’d just use the handy, new Danish dictionary he got for Christmas, and whip out a few phrases.

Oh, honey. Please (er, ahem: vær så venlig).

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