Spanish day 451

 Today had so much Spanish.

Radio: We have three local Spanish stations. Today the talk radio was loud with sound effects and arguing. The music  radio was slow songs. So I just had to listen to Spanish to rule out listening to them this morning.

English class: We had our end of semester celebration, a lunch. I put up an atmospheric video on the big screen of beautiful scenery, silenced, with reggaeton in another tab, and they talked while they ate, including about the video. They asked me what "that animal" is in English. It's alpaca in both but I really didn't want to get it wrong so I googled "llama or alpaca" and they taught me to say llama like, djyama.  It seemed like I was parsing less of what they said to each other than usual. I usually try not to listen because they are not talking to me, (or they would be using English) but today I considered that we were all basically conversing together. One of my seatmates was happy as always to speak English to me, and the other less so. After an hour they asked me what we were doing next. I literally had a powerpoint for them that we ran out of semester to do, but I thought that wasn't what they were asking for. We did an art activity mostly without words- drawing a soccer ball and placing it on an op-art background. I was very skeptical for some reason of the word for background, "fondo." I guess it seems like it would have a lot of meanings, like "foundation" which is probably its cognate. I was holding up the backgrounds in my hands, they were looking at them sort of blankly or confused and when I said "fondo" they were immediately ready to choose the one they wanted, so they must have known then what it was for. I had my printed out screen grab of google translate that I show so we can crowdsource comprehension but no one needed it.

Teachers lounge: the Spanish teacher has an ESL class and they learned parts of the body today, and they were complaining that fingers and toes is two different words. I agree but it's still faster because Spanish does distinguish between the types of dedos but just by explaining what they are of. Also we do have one word for both: digits. But that doesn't get you out of learning "fingers" and "toes."

Then he said,

"What is the name of the girl the size of a thumb?"

"Thumbelina."

"Oh, yes, Pulgarcita."

This is the ugliest Spanish word I have heard so far. I can't think of a second ugly Spanish word except pulgar.

Forever Skies: I have this set to Spanish, and then when I get stuck I change it back. I like reading the word dust, polvo, like pulverized. My favorite word of today is "invernadero" which is a greenhouse but is not transliterated from green house. It is the winter something.

There is a mini game which I happened to be playing in English because it came up while the game was in English and I am so glad. You have to filter out a particle by selecting everything it's not. It took me four tries in English before I realized that selecting what it is wasn't working, and then two more tries. Besides invernadero, the other new words were kind of annoying. Muestras (keep forgetting it's "samples"), "falta" (keep forgetting it's "missing"), "ballesta" ("crossbow," I do not need this), "ralentizara" ("will slow you," I do not know my -izara endings yet) "la occurencia de robar andamnios de los vecinos de abajo para amplizar y asegurar so propio apartamento" I know these words except for "andamnios" which is scaffolding and "vecinos" which is neighbors, but, because this is fanciful I still couldn't parse it. 

World Cup Mexico v. South Korea: I really liked this! It was very restrained. I don't think the announcers had time to do different volumes and trills. I am proud that I knew what "bicicleta" is, which was in the subtitles. It is like if you were riding a bicycle lying on your back in midair in order to kick the ball. So it doesn't come up a lot for me. However, I only saw this in the subtitles. I did not see this kick on the screen and I did not hear the announcers say it. I also could tell when they were saying Korea. I guess it's exactly as complicated to refer to Korea in English but you just don't think about it: Corea, Corea del Sur, and La Republica de Corea. They said pelota, balon, and gol a lot (this stands to reason except that the game was hours long with one goal) and they said both kinds of back: "espalda" and "atras."