Comments | taylweaver: Of Spanish class and sunsets

taylweaver

Of Spanish class and sunsets

Jul 12, 2007 20:42

So I started my summer Spanish class yesterday. My other class, on language assessment (related to ESL), began on Monday and I am really enjoying it ( Read more... )

linguistics, digital camera, city adventures, spanish, museums, awesome nature, teaching

Comments 10

boroparkpyro July 13 2007, 03:21:57 UTC

whoa, i can't believe no one warned me that Manhattanhenge occurs twice a year! although if i had thought about it i probably shoulda figured it out myself.

bad linguistics hurts my little linguist soul :-P

isn't that new meat restaurant on Cedar Lane in Teaneck a Tex-Mex place?
there's also a kosher Mexican restaurant in the Five Towns that i remember seeing.

taylweaver July 13 2007, 03:43:36 UTC

yeah, I had a feeling that one would make you cringe. I even tried to explain to her that it had nothing to do with the writing, and she just didn't get it!

Oh, and I am definitely going to see what there is in terms of restaurants in Teaneck. I think there was another mexican place that closed.

boroparkpyro July 13 2007, 03:22:37 UTC

oh and i might be interested in hitting up the museum too.

me gusta el español

j00j July 13 2007, 05:55:49 UTC

...because it's written right to left!? Ow, my brain. *twitch* And it's really not helping the people who're having trouble with grammar. She really didn't get writing is a pretty recent invention and people have grammar without it? *shrug* if you really want to try to explain, maybe try concrete examples? I know nothing about word order in Arabic, but I'm pretty sure Yiddish would work as an example of a language written right to left in which the word order for "I like the cat" would be just that-- "I like the cat," rather than "backwards."

taylweaver July 13 2007, 13:39:03 UTC

Your icon just says it all.

I have decided to just give up on explaining it to her. At this point, it is just not worth the effort.

flintknappy July 15 2007, 03:18:42 UTC

That does sound really frustrating. Maybe you should be merciful and offer to explain it to some of your classmates if they need it? I'm having flashbacks to my three years of high school Spanish. Fortunately I had a really good teacher, so I'm not promising anything, but if you need help I'll certainly give it a shot.
I'd be all for the museum thing but I have to work. Let me know how it is.

margavriel July 13 2007, 12:59:36 UTC

Oy.

(Gotta run-- but I'll post a further comment when I have time.)

margavriel July 13 2007, 14:09:40 UTC

Museo del Bario on Tuesday? Sounds interesting.

Bad language teacher who doesn't understand linguistics-- I've had my share of those. The worst was the Arabic professor, who was calling the shadda ("gemination" or "doubling" of a letter, such as the double L in "Allâh") "stress". When I wanted to know which syllable to emphasize in a word, I said: "Which syllable is stressed?" He said: "I told you, NO STRESS [i.e. doubling] in this word." I said: "I mean, which syllable has the accent?" And he said: "Well, we're working on teaching you the Arabic accent."

Or the French teacher who claimed that the difference between the indicative ("regular") and subjuctive moods was that "the subjunctive is more energetic. It's the difference between 'I want' and 'I want'." That is not only unhelpful, but wrong.

mysticengineer July 18 2007, 00:49:13 UTC

"More energetic" is how the difference between binyan kal and binyan pi'el (that's peeayl, phonetically... how the heck am I supposed to spell this?) was explained to me.