In Google We Trust (Or Used To)

04/24/11

I have been accused in the past of sounding confident and convincing, even when I don’t know what I’m talking about (there are a few examples in a blog I write called “Love, Translated”). But Google has me beat.

(Note to Google, the search engine: Please don’t take this personally and don’t lower my ranking as punishment for the criticism…you know I love you)

Google's translation of a misspelling of 'nonsense'

With its new, ridiculously fast and user-friendly Google Translate app for the iPhone, Google seemed to bring our family into a new era of complete and uninterrupted language learning where the language gaps that I wrote about here and here and here would become a thing of the past.

But would it hurt Google’s standing as the world’s preeminent maker of everything awesome to be humble enough to admit when occasionally it can’t find what you’re looking for?

This past weekend, I was all gung-ho, looking forward to siting down with Gabriel to do real-time translation in Spanish of any book in English he wanted to put in front of me, confident that no rare Alaskan fish, no obscure two-headed dinosaur could escape the boundless reach of Google’s knowledge.

So Gabriel busts out the dinosaur books, and we start off great — all we have to do is speak the name of any critter into the iPhone and before you can say “you’re jamming your elbow into my rib”, we have a Spanish translation for the word, complete with a small speaker icon you can click on to hear the word spoken in a trust-inspiring female voice with a Castilian accent. It was a thing of beauty, until the skeptic lobe of my brain came back online and tempted me to try to stump the app.

I start garbling the words I speak into the app to see what happens, and wouldn’t you know it, Google Translate just goes ahead and says that the translation in Spanish for the made up word is nothing other than the word itself! And when you click on the little speaker icon? The sexy, trustworthy Castilian lady speaks the word back to you with a very convincing Spanish pronunciation that makes you think you’ve subconsciously fed the app a word that actually exists.

The image here is a screenshot of what you get if you misspell “nonsense” and ask to translate it into Spanish. When you click to hear the Spanish word spoken, you hear a very graceful and natural “noneh-senseh,” which to a less-informed Spanish speaker may sound like a viable term to refer to people who were born in the province or country of “Nonesenlandia”.

Of course, I’m not claiming to be so principled that I won’t use the app at all anymore, but the tool has certainly replaced a knowledge gap with a big hole in my confidence in Google.

Google – you already know everything about me. Would it kill you to start being honest with me? I will continue to love you despite your imperfections. Don’t give me that nonesense.

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Juggling

04/20/11

The frequent reader might find a recurring ball theme running through this blog – lots of ball analogies, several mentions of my boys saying the word “ball” only in English initially, not to mention the fact that three out of the four protagonists of these stories are male (the oldest being the most juvenile). And here I go again: Raising bilingual children is a serious juggling act; a joyous challenge of commitment and focus where I nervously try not to drop any balls.

(Not me - I once was that young, though I never developed a square jaw) - Photo by Liam Kearney

Here’s the new ball I’ve been barely keeping in the air these days: In addition to feeling obligated to teach my children each and every one of the 88,431 words logged in Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, plus the blue collar slang I grew up speaking, plus the Colombian equivalents of Mexican terms my kids hear from their teachers during the day, lately I’ve been feeling compelled to teach Gabriel the English words for concepts that strike me as important. So we’ll be talking in Spanish about transcendental ideas like “honesty”, “friendship”, or “Netflix”, and immediately I feel like if I don’t teach him the equivalent words in English, the next time one of those notions comes up, he will have to go through unnecessary and redundant ramp-up with whomever is teaching him that concept in English.

I realize my new compulsion is a tremendous diservice to my boys, but as always, it is not my own will power or common sense that’s helping me break out of this bad habit. It is the children themselves who prove to me, time and time again, how little credit I give their beautiful little minds. Gabriel will start talking about the difference between right and wrong and all I have to do is allow him the occasional English word interspersed with his Spanish dialogue, and marvel at the fact that he obviously has learned things from Mama, Granddad, and the rest of his English-speaking family and is able to transfer that knowledge over to his Spanish vocabulary. Then all I have to do is point out that “robber” in Spanish is “ladrón”, and we’ve had ourselves a meaningful and didactic chat.

Add to the above the fact that if I keep teaching my boys words in English, I start to lose credibility and consistency as the Spanish-only parent. Nothing like fear to keep one’s spirit focused (ever heard of ” The Spanish Inquisition”?).

A few days ago, we were all sitting at the table eating lunch and Gabriel started to tell me about something his Mama had made him for breakfast earlier that week. Towards the end of his charming story, as he prepared to conclude with “that’s what Mama made me for…..”, I could see his eyes begin to wander and could hear him getting tongue-tied – he had forgotten the word “desayuno” (breakfast). After two or three failed attempts, he cleverly said “for the meal that I eat every day before school!”.

I laughed with joy and pride. Those are the moments when I feel like I can let those balls I’ve juggling fall on the ground and we can all just enjoy watching them roll.

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Dinosaurs

02/15/11

Albertosaurus, I can manage. T-Rex, a slam dunk and pretty much the baddest of bad asses. Stegosaurus and Triceratops begin to push it a bit. Quetzalcoatlus? Forget it, I give up.

Photo by PK + Koduri

I postulate (based solely on anecdotal evidence) that childhood obsession with dinosaurs is a quintessentially American thing. To a Colombian parent trying to raise his children bilingually, this obsession makes for hours of educational entertainment, but it’s also a huge linguistical challenge (“Hypsilophodon”, really? cut a guy some slack!).

Not only do I have to read out loud these mouthfuls to my kid about a hundred times a day, but I have to pause and face this ethical dilemma: Do I bother to figure out the Spanish names for these creatures, beyond the obvious and romance-language-friendly “Brontosaurio” and “Tiranosaurio”?

What’s ironic about this hole thing is that (I believe) most dinosaur names are derived from Latin, so (I believe) you can pretty much replace “saurus” with “sauro” and “ph” with “f” and you got yourself a whole catalog of Spanish names for these monsters. But by the time I figure out how to break out 23 syllables to speak the name of one of these, my boys have already turned the page to a meaner-looking reptile with horns on its tail and tongue (and even horns on its horns).

Don’t get me wrong, playing with dinosaur toys, reading dinosaur books, and watching dinosaur videos are great opportunities for discussing nature and science (and for inoculating my boys against the incursion of Creationist ideas) in a fun, interactive way, not to mention I’m actually learning stuff I didn’t learn as a child. But it does exemplify the compromises you have to make in order to have a flowing, natural relationship with your children in the little time you have with them every day. Google on the iPhone have been lifesavers for me when I find myself in a pinch and need to look up how to say “blueberry” in Spanish. But pausing five times on every page to try and translate the names of dinosaurs would be hugely disrupting and it would take the fun out of just learning who was eating whom during the Jurassic period.

Now, if one of my boys chooses to become a paleontology professor in a Latin American university, then perhaps we can sit down together and pour over volume after volume of dinosaur literature in Spanish. Or I can sit paralyzed by anxiety over whether they’ll make enough money to live on and repay their student loans. That’s parenting for ya.

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

When You’re Strange (Faces Come Out of the Rain)

02/13/11

Being weird is cool and fashionable. By the way, I was into pretending I was weird waaaaay before it became cool. Is that weird? Good. The thing is: being stuck between cultures and languages will inevitably make you a bit weird or at least be perceived as such.

Photo by eopath

When I first arrived in the US, one of the several jobs I was hired to do despite lacking qualifications was as a daycare teacher (scary, I know). Such was the exuberance of the mid 90′s. So with my foot fresh off the boat and my English language skills just a notch above adequate, I was put in a position where I needed to exert the confidence and authority that I lacked as an immature individual just learning the cultural and linguistic subtleties of this new land. My interactions with the children I had to care for were often marred by confusion. Case in point: One day I was joshing with one of the girls and in the playful back and forth, she said to me: “You’re late, buster!”. I quickly admonished her with a firm “that is NOT OK!” and ended our game. I spent the rest of the afternoon brooding over having earned so little respect from the kids that a little girl had called me a “bastard” (I had never heard the word “buster” before so obviously, the girl must have been some kind of spoiled American little brat).

I know, this blog isn’t about me, so I’ll fast forward to the post-Clinton era:

My boy Gabriel is a very talkative little guy and he loves wordplay in both English and Spanish. But with every new game, we have to go through the necessary adjustment of expectations and clarification of what works in one language and not the other.

The other day, after I put him to bed and told him I loved him, he replied: “Te amo dos” (“I love you two”). Confused, I remained silent for a few seconds, with a disoriented look on my face. “Te amo dos, te amo dos,” he kept saying, until it dawned on me that he expected me to do my part in increasing the number of the “I love yous” from “I love you two” to “I love you three” to “I love you four” and so on, but while that’s a game that he and I might enjoy, it just plain doesn’t work in Spanish (how do you increment “te amo también”?) and I have too much love for Cervantes, for math, and for my boy to try to make that work.

Recently, Gabriel has also become obsessed with rhyming. I believe this started as a game he and my wife played in the car by picking random words and thinking of words that rhyme with it. One day, Gabriel came up to me and said: “Papá – ‘casa…..ratón’”. OK. He reiterated: “Papá – ‘casa…..ratón’”. The mental strain became too much for my 80′s metal-fried brain, so I asked him what he meant. He explained to me that “casa” and “ratón” rhyme and after a few seconds of equally straining reverse-engineering, I figured out that he was telling me that “house” and “mouse” rhyme, after which I proceeded to congratulate him for figuring it out and tried to kindly point out to him that rhyming is not about meaning but about sound, so the words need to sound the same in Spanish also.

To the above, add my wife’s family and many of our non-Spanish-speaking friends looking at our boys befuddled when they don’t understand something the boys say and wondering whether they’re speaking Spanish or English, and you have yourself a beautiful family of weirdos. But what can be cooler than that?

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Enter Number Two

02/10/11

A year and a half ago, a kind nurse placed in my arms a perfect little baby boy who looked uncannily like his older brother. Wiping off tears of joy, I thought: I am a blessed man and my wife’s and my genes appear to combine in one and one way only – we have unwittingly perfected human cloning.

Photo by jucanils

But it only took a few days for this newly minted magical creature named Samuel to begin showing evidence of his individuality: his body appeared to be leaner and longer than that of his brother’s, his eyes larger, his head smaller, his last name the same. Eighteen months later, we have in our home two young brothers whose personalities are each a universe of its own, regularly colliding around the living room. So it is with great pride and sense of wonder that I formally (and finally) introduce my boy Samuel to this blog, now as something beyond a passing reference to a cute, diapered squawking human creature who tumbles around, drooling in the background. In the last few weeks, Samuel has shown signs of a suddenly exploding vocabulary and we as a family enter a new phase of bilingual chaos that no amount of reading about the Flemish and the Walloons in Belgium can prepare us for. But I have already learned some lessons.

The first, cliched lesson: People are different. Gabriel went straight to saying “yes” and “no”, never nodding or even moving his head. Googling “infant stiff neck syndrome” turned up nothing so we didn’t worry. Samuel doesn’t yet speak the words “yes” and “no”, but he nods his head vigorously “yes” and “no” in response to various quotidian questions in both English and Spanish. Gabriel’s language development seemed to come early and develop steadily. Samuel’s seems to have come slightly later but the leaps and bounds feel more dramatic. Gabriel could not be made to say “avión” instead of “airplane”, Samuel cannot be made to say “water” instead of “agua”. And the list goes on. One way in which they’re identical is their early obsession with balls, playing with balls, and saying the word “ball” in English.

The second lesson: Apparently, I don’t control the universe, especially when I don’t even know how the universe works. Last year, I wrote a manic rant about my uncertainty around how my two boys will communicate with each other. Today, I’m even more uncertain, but find myself pleasantly surprised at seeing Gabriel address his brother in Spanish if I am the dominant parental figure in the interaction taking place, or in English if the dominant figure is my wife. Once Samuel moves beyond nodding and starts being more verbally interactive, who knows what will happen (theory: they’ll develop code words for ‘our parents really need to take a chill pill with this language thing’).

The third lesson: Samuel will not be irreparably damaged by not being the center of the universe. The frequent reader might glean from my early posts the degree to which my obsession with language acquisition led me to dedicating whole posts to dissecting Gabriel’s pronunciation of the word “poop” (I’m exaggerating). But heck, even on this current post I’m all like: “oh, they both say ‘ball’, oh my god, get out of town!” But believe it or not, I’ve cooled down quite a bit. Parenting two young boys leaves little time and energy for my former, obsessive charting and recording of my children’s language and overall brain development, and gives way to giving them room to just be. Sam, the poor, neglected, non-center of the universe one, is thriving and growing into a charismatic, outgoing, and crazy little boy, obsessed with books that portray skunks, and by virtue of simply being around parents and a brother that love him and speak to him, he can point tens of objects and animals in both English and Spanish in a book or around the house.

So stay tuned for this linguistic saga, at the center of which is me, grinning happy and exhausted, not knowing what hit me.

Categories: Reflections

Improv

01/05/11

This blog update is not part of a new year’s resolution to revive my withering blog (though can I claim in retrospect that it was a new year’s resolution and that I followed through for once? ). It simply occurred to me that I should share with you this lovely moment with my boy Gabriel as an example of the double-fun of bilingual parenting: Add to the magic of watching your children flourish and develop into the most fascinating people in the world, your constant awe at their ability to do it in two languages.

My wife and I rotate bedtimes with each of our two boys. Sam is still a bit too young for a formal bedtime story, but with Gabriel, we read a couple of books and in recent months, we top it with a totally improvised story. You should hear some of the trippy stories I’ve made up while in the tired trance of a post-10-hour-work-day! But here is one from a few months ago that illustrates the unexpected fun of this kind of thing. Letting the boy take over the narrative is both hilarious and an amazing tool to get him to talk to his heart’s content in the language of our Conquistador oppressors.

Enjoy!

Photo by Angelina

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Big ‘Farma’

10/12/10

Heard about the recent US State Department apology to Guatemala for medical experiments done on their people in the 1940′s? Good, because such sordid topics are beyond the scope of this goofy blog.

“Farma” = Female Farmer

A while ago I wrote about the rarely comical, rarely cute practice in the English-speaking world to invent Spanish words by taking English words and adding an “o” at the end of them.

Because we’re talking about my boy Gabriel here, I will deem the following trivial anecdote an example of a super advanced and actually cute variation on that practice (adding an “a” at the end to create the feminine version of a noun):

Gabriel was intrigued by the picture on the tub of sour cream we had on the table, showing a woman milking a cow . You could see his young eyeballs looking up, in the direction of the brain lobe in charge of making stuff up (“a boy is a ‘farmer’…but what about a girl farmer?…”), and he informs my wife:

“There is a girl, milking a cow” he says, “she is a farma.”

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Growing Up, Reaching Back

10/02/10

Carrie, from Tiki Tiki Blog interviewed me and other Latino parents for her great article in Café Magazine.

Café Media

Read the article at the Café Magazine website.

And go to Tiki Tiki Blog (www.tikitikiblog.com) to see Carrie and team’s online magazine about Latino/bilingual lifestyle.

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Car Talk

09/30/10

Every car you see on the road is like a small, semi-private universe where people’s lives unfold, in motion. Some times that universe is not so small (if you drive a 25 ft tall SUV to haul firewood from the sequoias growing in your backyard) and some times not so private (if you’re someone who likes your radio’s bass cranked all the way to 11 and then need to roll down the windows so they don’t shatter in your face after your head explodes), but most Americans spend so much time in their cars that this Colombian-American feels obliged to make the most out of the experience.

Photo by feastoffun.com

Now that I’ve changed my work schedule so I can leave work earlier, beat traffic, and pick up my kids before they undergo one of their sporadic five o’clock meltdowns, we can actually talk on the way home (instead of competing for who can whine loudest and drawn out everybody else’s cries with their own.)

Those daily car rides have become precious to me. I have two boys strapped to their seats and under the drowsing spell of a moving landscape. In other words: a captive audience.

So we do a lot of chatting in the car–the usual how was your day, what did you do, and so on. And not that I don’t love the company of my beautiful bride and mother of my children, but not having her in the car makes my vehicle a nice, motorized “Spanish-only” zone (somewhere in Arizona, a sherif or a lawmaker is getting their heart broken.)

We get into some pretty intense discussion about everything ranging from the Batman toy some kid brought to daycare to deep existential questions about the very nature of reality. The latter is something every parent is familiar with:

“Papá, what is that man doing”? -> “He’s cutting the grass, nené” / “Why”? -> “Oh, because he wants his lawn to look nice” / “Why”? -> “Oh, because people usually like things neat and pleasant” / “Why”? -> “Uhh, it appeals to a deeply rooted desire to control our environment and suppress chaos” / “Why”? -> “Agghhhh, well, it depends on whether your’re a Freudian or a Jungian….hey, look, a scooter!!”

Like any parent, some days I have less patience or energy for the endless back and forth, but I remind myself that every minute my kids are engaged with me in conversation (Spanish conversation no less,) is precious. The day will likely come when they don’t feel like talking to me, when they don’t feel like speaking Spanish any more, or when all their questions about the connection between lawns and human desires are answered, so I’ll suck it up and talk to them as much and as meaningfully as I can.

And for those days when my brain is fried, we have music!

(Latin) Music has been another fantastic tool to liven our rides and introduce many new words and topics of conversation. But music too can be a double-edged sword, especially if you’re like me and you find most “children’s music” unbearable. So while it is great to have reached a point where my son Gabriel has his favorite tunes and asks me to play them for him as soon as he gets in the car, it can also be tough when he starts dissecting the lyrics.

One of his favorite songs, “Jardín Encantado” has a line that says: “Voy a pelear por nuestro pan de cada día” (“I will fight for our daily bread”)

“Papá, why is he going to fight?”

“Uh, nené, he is saying ‘fight’ but what he’s trying to say is that he’ll work really really hard”

(the boy may be telling himself: “hm, I don’t understand figurative language yet, so next time I fight with one of my friends, I’ll tell papá I’m just working really hard…”)

Another song, “Corazón Espinado” says: “Mi corazón aplastado, molido y abandonado” (“My crushed, shredded and abandoned heart”)

“Papá, why is his heart crushed?”

“Uh, nené, because the woman he likes doesn’t like him”

“Why not”

“Uh, I’m not sure”

“Why????”

“Uh…[in my mind: maybe she is mean and superficial and doesn't like him because he's short and poor like papá was years ago when he had to endure the indifference of stupid, stuck-up chicks who didn't realize how good he was..] ”

Apologies, audience. But that was cathartic.

Anywho, commonsense conclusion here — any parent raising bilingual children will be well-advised to prepare and develop the mental endurance for as much chatter as they can possibly muster. The beauty of this necessity is that it builds language skills but at the same time, and more than anything, it builds closeness. Just be more careful than I have been and screen your lyrics, or be prepared to tackle some thorny topics.

Categories: Reflections, Tips, Trivial Occurrences

American Limbo

09/08/10

Poster from Showtime

When I finally get around to posting something new, it’s not something originally mine, but this story is really touching and super relevant to everyone who has ever felt stuck between two worlds, two cultures, or two languages. I hope I don’t get in trouble with Ira Glass or Chicago Public Radio for posting this, though I wouldn’t mind getting a personal call from Ira Glass where I would let him know that he is awesome and that I contribute monetarily to the show.

Click on the title below to listen. And don’t get depressed – there is a happy ending:

This_American_Life-American_Limbo.mp3

And of course, subscribe to the This American Life podcast and contribute tons of cash to the show because a show this important must continue to exist and thrive.

Categories: Reflections