El coquí

El coqui
Originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

I have copycatted my friend Nancy twice: she started a blog, I started a blog. She had a son; I had a son. She now maintains a blog in Arabic because she is studying that language. I said a while back I wanted to start studying Spanish again; I have been slacking off but I brushed off my Spanish CDs and am listening to them. And I am copycatting her once more: here is my Spanish blog, Yo Soy La Slacker. For those of you in my viewing audience (all 2 of you) who speak Spanish, feel free to peruse my new blog (only 1 entry so far) and let me know what I did wrong. I know like many English speakers trying to learn Spanish I don't have the hang of the difference between para and por, among many deficiencies.

Upon reviewing what I know, I think my biggest deficiencies in the language lie in word order and prepositions (like para and por). I simply don't know how to put together complex sentences. I may catch a few words here and there, but if I don't understand their context within the sentence I can easily confuse what is going on. I mean, something as simple as "te amo" can be easily misconstrued if you don't understand Spanish word order. We say "I love you" and a word-for-word translation in Spanish is (Yo) amo tú which of course is way wrong.

I also think the reason I have not been able to retain any Spanish I've learned is because I simply am reluctant to speak. Hell, I'm reluctant to speak English! But this is the internet world - I enjoy writing so why not write in Spanish? That way I can take my time and do some research on what I'm trying to say. I also have a great deal of resources on the internet for reading.

One nifty thing that I have discovered is closed captioning. We get the HBO latin channel, which will show movies dubbed in Spanish, and the closed captioning is in Spanish as well. I watched part of Revenge of the Sith the other day. Of course, Univisión is freely available as well with Spanish captions. I hope this time I can stick to it and really learn the language, for once.