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Posts from the “Trivial Occurrences” Category

Latin American Strongman

06/06/09

As a still fairly new parent, I’m gradually finding more comfort in the fact that most of my boy’s new little quirks have already been documented, explained, and dealt with by generation after generation of parents before me. (Others will possibly be labeled with 3-letter acronyms an deferred to prescription medications, but that’s a social criticism I’ll undertake if and when the time comes). Example of one of those normal quirks: “Toddler Refusal” My boy’s thing for the last few weeks has been to test the limits of his free will by answering “no” (and in a pretty mean tone, too!) to every question or request, even if it’s something he actually would want to do, such as: Parent: “Hey, kiddo, do you want…

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Big Boy

06/05/09

Like any other decent celebrity, I primarily thank my fans for giving me the energy and the encouragement to keep going. So it is to all of those fans around the world (i.e. my wife and my best friend in Colorado), that I want to offer my apologies for resting on my laurels and not keeping up with the blog. As you know, I’ve been busy raising a child and preparing for another one. But enough about my hiatus from the limelight. Let’s catch up, shall we? My boy keeps growing strong, smart, and handsome and continues to teach me things about myself as a man, as a father, and as a language teacher. He is now 22 months old and his vocabulary in…

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Categories: Questions, Trivial Occurrences




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Transnational Raunchiness

04/14/09

Some times one can find huge coincidences and similarities between otherwise very different cultures and languages. Take for example, the oh-so delightful phenomenon where kids who are learning to speak, pronounce words in ways that make them sounds like profanity. You know, your beautiful child’s mouth innocently (and unwittingly) emitting R-rated epithets, much to the delight of your juvenile friends and YouTube followers. But what is really mind-blowing to me is that such tricky words or concepts be the same in two very different languages. For a couple of days now, I’ve been working with my automotively-obsesed boy to get him to learn the Spanish word for “truck”, which is “camión”. Maybe you see where I’m going with this: Many toddlers seem to have…

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Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences




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Clarity

04/03/09

Trying to raise a bilingual child brings to the surface the many semantic subtleties of language. Yesterday, my boy was excitedly going about his routine of taking as many toys as he could out of their assigned places in his play area, which he does especially diligently when he comes back from daycare because he still likes us and is happy to be home. In the middle of creating this little “toynado” (to borrow a term from a co-worker of mine), he stumbled upon a hairbrush that either I or his mother had absentmindedly left there. With a serious look on his face, he held the hairbrush up for me to see, and because he knows I’m a trained monkey and will react to…

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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…

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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…

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Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences




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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.…

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Ball, Pelota

02/17/09

So I spoke too soon and I need to come to terms with the fact that I’m now somebody’s “old man”, so I can expect going forward to be amazed at the brain abilities that this generation I’m ushering in is developing at the same rate that I’m losing them. Almost as soon as I got done talking about how I need to let my boy pick whatever darn language he chooses to express any given word, he one day comes home pointing at his play area and showing me his “pelota” (ball). “Ball” was his very first word, so it stands to reason (*my* reason) that it would be the most deeply ingrained in his gray matter and neurological circuits, but for whatever…

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Eh-Plame!

02/05/09

My 18-month old son goes to a Spanish-speaking daycare four days a week. The exposure to the language he gets there, combined with the fact that I speak to him exclusively in Spanish, makes Spanish his primary language at the moment (to the extent that an 18-month old can have a primary language). So out of the only-Jesus-knows-how-many words he can say and understand, I would estimate 90% of them are Spanish words (most words he understands in both Spanish and English). But it’s really curious to me why, Spanish being his predominant language, there are words he will only say in English. “Airplane” is one of those words. When he hears an airplane flying overhead, he opens his beautiful brown eyes very wide,…

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