somewhere under the sky

language

i could say a lot on this topic.
first, things i love about spanish. one, having a definite article in front of my name. "la leah" i am and i love it, i feel so personalized. second, the diminuitive. this of course is what i love about a lot of other languages. here in cuenca the diminuitive is used a lot and my favorite is when it is attached to words like "minute." so you have "minutito" which doesn´t really have a translation because "little minute" has no meaning-a minute is always 60 seconds, never more nor less. i love the diminuitive. third, verbs are very useful. you can use the verb "pasar" to say "what´s wrong?" "i swallow" "hé´s coming over here" "i got ran over" "pass me the salt" "i had a good time" etc.
this leads me to other observations-while it might seem that spanish would be easier than english because there are less words, you then have the variety that seems to characterize latin america. for instance, in cuenca alone there are about 5 words that mean "cool" and 6 that mean "ugly" and these words are cuencan slang. so, imagine if you will, how this ONE city has it´s own way of talking and then multiple that by all the cities in latin america minus brazil. and there you have one reason why spanish is difficult.
i have decided that there is no language that is "easy" to learn if you want to be at the native speaker level. the native speaker of a language mumbles, doesn´t pronounce every syllable, contracts words, and knows every connotation a word has. when you learn a language, since there´s so much to learn, most times you only memorize one meaning for each word. which is why spanish for instance is difficult if a word actually has 12 different meanings.
most importantly i want to try to describe a feeling i have and i don´t know if it´ll work out. yesterday a friend of my brother´s came over who is learning english and for his homework he had to do an interview with me. so obviously when i have hung out with him before, we have been speaking spanish and he is soooo difficult to understand because he talks so fast and very cuencano, so i usually have him repeat things or smile and nod (which causes its own problems). anyway, so for the interview we were speaking english and i totally felt like the position of power had shifted over to me. it is a weird feeling. as a non-native speaker, i feel like i am not on an equal level with the person i am speaking with, as if they have some sort of power over me. and now, when i´m speaking english with a non-native speaker, yes, i feel like i have some sort of power over them, but more i can feel exactly what they feel-and that is the feeling of being "lesser" in some way. ah, language.

posted by leah v @ 8:15 AM