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Already Mocking Me…

03/30/09

If you live in the USA and your native language is not English, you’ve probably experienced this: You take a phone call or have a conversation with another person in your native language, in front of a third person who doesn’t speak it. After you’re done, you look at that third person’s face and notice an awkward smirk of utter perplexity and they tell you: “All I heard was ‘glahhhrahh-glahhhrahh-glahhhrahh-glahhhrahh-glahhhrahh’”. I’ve experienced this many times and I think it’s endearing. And if the person hearing the “glahhhrahh-glahhhrahh-glahhhrahh” is respectful, it makes me feel special to posses the key to a code that other people find mysterious and fascinating (or annoying). But I never expected to run into this situation in the sanctity of my…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Chaos Theory

03/24/09

With all the earnestness of a loving and proud father, I took my boy for a walk around the lake this weekend so we could take some fresh air, get some exercise, and spend some quality “boy time”. In a particularly tranquil moment when we were both taking in the bluish expanse of the frozen water, I kissed my boy’s forehead and told him: “Te amo” (“I love you”, in Spanish), to which he briskly responded:”I wouh you!” (“Te amo”, in gosh-darn English). Three simple words from a very tiny person encapsulate the excitingly frustrating universe-in-development that is the process of multiple-language acquisition. If my creationist friends out there will excuse me the metaphor, I imagine my boy’s little brain undergoing a micro Big-Bang…

Categories: Reflections

Little Fatty

03/19/09

I used to call my boy “Gordito”, which in Spanish means “Little Fatty”. It wasn’t an underhanded homage to his healthy roundness, chubby cheeks, double-chin, and thighs (which as far as I’m concerned are desirable in a baby). It was simply an endearing nickname I gave him out of love and based on tradition (it would be a very common thing to call a child in Colombia, even if they’re not chubby). My Colombian friends wouldn’t even bat an eye when I used the appellative in front of them, but in front of an “Anglo” audience, I would almost invariable be asked what the name meant and they would react to the answer with awkward giggles. For a long time, I forced myself to…

Categories: Reflections

The World Is Not Enough

03/15/09

I have nothing but respect and appreciation for people, businesses, and institutions that take the effort to translate their signs into Spanish. Whether they do it out of respect, appreciation, or just business savvy, I can’t help but feel somewhat flattered. But every once in a while, you run into translations that are such a disaster, they bring to mind the scene from the movie “The Mexican” where Brad Pitt asks a crew of Mexican laborers: “take me in your el truck-o to the next el town-o”. We ran into one such botched translation today at the Children’s Museum. In the newly unveiled Clifford the Dog room, I ran into exhibit A shown in the picture below on the left. My humble translation of…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

How Do You Say “Blueberry”?

03/14/09

Imagine: It’s a bright Saturday morning, the birds chirp outside as if auguring the beginning of Spring, and our happy little bilingual family is placidly gathered at the large, dark wooden dinning room table to eat breakfast. I enthusiastically begin to mix blueberries into my son’s yogurt and as the purple swirls form patters against the white background, I describe in Spanish each of my actions to my little boy but I stumble when I get to the part where I say: “…look at the purple juice coming out of the………[how the heck do you say blueberry in Spanish??…]…hmmm….FRUITs!” How sad is that? My wife laughs and my son is left with an irreparable gap in what could have otherwise been an instructive experience.…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

The Small Divide

03/06/09

During the three years my wife and I have been together, she has learned a lot of Spanish, but she doesn’t speak it fluently. We both understand and take seriously the need for her to be comfortable with Spanish if we want to be effective as we can be at raising our children bilingual. But life is busy, and having an 18-month old boy and another one on the way leaves hardly any time to keep up with laundry, let alone commit to the major undertaking that is learning a new language as an adult. So we worry a little bit. We certainly haven’t abandoned our plans to help her learn the language as fully as she can, but day after day, we seem…

Categories: Questions, Reflections