Heatwave

Image courtesy of graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This summer we are experiencing a bit of a heatwave in the UK. It isn't much compared to what people are used to in Spain or other hot countries but it is unusual for a British summer. I was explaining this in a chat with a Chilean friend today, and realised I didn't know the Spanish word for heatwave. Fortunately it is one of those words where my first guess was the right one. I just put together the words for heat (calor) and wave (ola) to get 'ola de calor'. This turned out to be the right word, but I could also have used canícula. This is similar to the French word for heatwave - canicule - which I always remember since it sounds a bit like saying 'I cannae cool down'.

heat - calor
wave (in the sea) - ola
heatwave - ola de calor, canícula
heatwave - ola de calor

Useful website: Fun Learning Spanish

I have just come across a great looking site called Fun Learnin Spanish. I will post a more detailed review when I have explored it more thoroughly but  I wanted to give it a mention straight away. My first impression is that it is a big, fun site that caters to all levels of learners. There are lessons, dual language articles and games. I'm finding the Spanish Verb Space Invaders strangely addictive at the moment. There is clearly a lot to look at on the site and I'm looking forward to doing just that.

¿Que pasa?

This is a Spanish phrase I hear a lot, so is great for sounding more Spanish.

¿Que pasa? means 'What's happening?' and can be used literally or in a casual greeting

¡Eh, tio! ¿que pasa? - Hey man, what's up?

It also works in the past tense

¿Que pasó? - What happened?

Conjugation of the week - 14. Irse - to leave

Having mentioned 'irse' in yesterday's post I thought perhaps it would be a good time to revive the 'Conjugation of the week' posts. This is the first one using the reflexive form which changes the meaning of 'ir' from 'to go' to 'to leave'. By the way, 'irse' is pronounced roughly like 'ear-say'.

irse - to leave

me voy - I leave
te vas - you leave (sing. fam.)
se va - he/she/it leaves, you leave (sing. pol.)
nos vamos - we leave
os vais - you leave (pl. fam.)
se van they leave, you leave (pl. pol.)

Me voy

On Monday I'm leaving Chamonix (in France) and heading back to the UK for a while. Hopefully I'll manage a trip to Spain in the next couple of months. It seems appropriate then to introduce the reflexive form of 'ir' (to go), i.e. 'irse' = to leave. It is similar in use to 'salir' (to go out, to leave) but is more common for leaving and not used in the going for a night out sense.

Hasta luego, ahora me voy - See you later, I'm leaving now.

Pause words

When speaking a language, one way to sound more natural is putting in those little linking words that give you time to think. Words like 'er' and 'um' are often used by English speakers, but there are others like 'well', 'then', 'so', 'okay', 'good' which have meanings but can also be used to some extent to fill a gap.

The same is true in Spanish, and learning these can give you the moment you need to choose the next word, letting you sound that bit more fluent. I've learnt a lot of these from listening to real people but also from podcasts, dialogue in books and TV programmes. Some of these are region specific so try to find out what people say in the version of Spanish you want to learn.


Some examples:-

bueno - good
pues - well
pues nada - well, nothing (used for a longer pause)
bien - well
a ver - let's see
entonces - then
vale - okay (in Spain)
dale - okay (in Argentina)
de acuerdo - okay (everywhere, as far as I know)
venga - come, come on
perfecto - perfect
vale, perfecto - okay, perfect

Translating Headlines - Answers

These are my translations for the headlines I gave in yesterday's post. Obviously there are many ways to translate these, and in some cases I used a knowledge of the context to choose the most appropriate word - e.g. songwriter rather than composer in the last example.

From El Pais -

La policía británica tenía fichados a los autores del atentado de Londres

The British police had records on the perpetrators of the assault in London

The perpetrators of the attacks in  London had police records

Un bebé se salva con una prótesis creada con una impresora 3D
A baby was saved with a prosthesis created with a 3D printer

Los disturbios se extienden en Suecia por cuarto día consecutivo
 The disturbances in Sweden have continued for a fourth successive day

From RTVE

 

David Cameron: "Es una traición al Reino Unido y al Islam"

David Cameron: "It is a betrayal of the United Kingdom and of Islam"

 

Muere a los 79 años el cantante y compositor francés Georges Moustaki

 The French singer and songwriter Georges Moustaki has died at the age of 79

Translating Headlines - Translation Practice

One of the best ways to improve your Spanish is obviously to practise it, and that goes for reading as well as speaking. Reading whole books, magazine articles or newspaper columns can be daunting to start with, so a good place to start is with bite-sized chunks of text like newspaper headlines. Here are a few examples to try and translate. I'll post the English version tomorrow so you can check your answers against mine. The headlines link back to the original websites if you want to see them in context.

From El Pais -

La policía británica tenía fichados a los autores del atentado de Londres

Un bebé se salva con una prótesis creada con una impresora 3D

Los disturbios se extienden en Suecia por cuarto día consecutivo

 

From RTVE

 

David Cameron: "Es una traición al Reino Unido y al Islam"

Muere a los 79 años el cantante y compositor francés Georges Moustaki

 

Relax - It's okay to make mistakes

I find that when reading or speaking in a foreign language it is easy to get hung up on the meaning of every word and end up going far to slowly. When speaking this might mean speaking more correctly but it also might make you sound unnaturally slow. It can often be better to just let your tongue run away with you and make the odd mistake in grammar or pronunciation. The person you are speaking to can always ask you to repeat something if they did not understand first time. This might depend a little bit on the circumstances and you probably do not want to talk to friends in the same way you might speak at a business meeting.

Similarly, when reading it can be slow and tedious if you pause to consider the meaning of every word. This is even more true if you overuse the dictionary. If you can learn to 'gist read' the text to get the meaning of it without every single word you will find that books become much more enjoyable.

Compund words

Sometimes Spanish words are similar enough to English words that they can be guessed at. Others bear little resemblance to their English equivalents. One class of words I like is those (in either language) that can be broken into shorter words that are direct translations, for example:

honeymoon = luna de miel
honey = miel
moon = luna

abrebotellas = bottle opener
abre = he/she/it opens
botellas = bottles

I like these words where the meaning of a longer word can be deduced from the meaning of simpler words.

Other examples include bookmark = marcalibros; deathbed = lecho de muerte or treehouse = casa del arbol.

Some Free Short Stories in Spanish - Website Review

My Favourite writer (in any language) is Carlos Ruiz Zafón, author of La Sombra del Viento, or The Shadow of the Wind amongst other novels. His website, www.carlosruizzafon.com is a great resource with plenty of free stuff to download in the 'Descargas' section, including first chapters of all his novels. My favourite part is 'Relatos' where you can download a selection of unpublished short stories featuring the trademarks of Zafón's longer works - dark plots and Gothic settings in his native Barcelona.

Also available to download are wallpapers, videos and music. As expected the site also hosts a lot of information about the author and his books, including a mini site for each of his novels.

Back in Andorra

This summer I showed myself how hard it is to stay motivated to keep my Spanish moving forwards while I was in France. I didn't abandon Spanish completely, but I did put a lot less energy into it. I also did the obvious thing and tried to learn some more French while I was there. This blog was an obvious casualty of all this, as can be seen by the fact that this is the first post since late July.

So, here are the things I kept doing -

Watching Telediario en 4 minutos a couple of mornings a week on the RTVE website.
Speaking to Spanish speakers on the few occasions when I had the chance.
Watching El Aguila Roja (also on the RTVE website).
Visiting a couple of favourite Spanish websites.
Cooking dishes from my Spanish recipe book (in Spanish).

And things I should have done but didn't -

More of all of the above
Writing this blog
Reading Don Quijote
Looking for other Spanish websites
Reading Spanish newspapers
Looking for other Spanish sites


Back in Andorra it is time to 'poner las pilas' and get a bit more motivated, now that there are a few more people to speak Spanish to.

Useful website for Spanish and recipes

I am always on the look out for Spanish and Latin American recipes to try, and I have just seen a great one for Cuban Arroz con Pollo (Chicken with rice) at Learning Spanish is Fun which is a great Spanish blog and resource. I think cooking dishes and learning the words for different foods and ingredients is a great way to learn about a culture. The recipe is well written and illustrated with a really mouth watering photograph - you can tell that the blog's author, Sabrina, really has a passion for her subject matter. I'm really looking forward to trying out the recipe if I can track down some of the ingredients.

The weather

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Sitting and watching torrents of rain beating against the windows, it seems a good time to get out the dictionary and revise some weather words. Like in English there are nouns (the rain) and verbs (to rain / it is raining). In English we also use a lot of adjectives to describe the weather - 'it is cold / hot / windy', whereas in Spanish nouns are also used for these. It is like saying 'there is wind' or 'it makes heat today'.

Rain

la lluvia = the rain
llover = to rain
llueva = it rains / it is raining
está lloviendo = it is raining (right now)
va a llover = it is going to rain
lloverá = it will rain
llovió = it rained
ha llovido = it has rained
llovía = it was raining

Snow

la nieve = the snow
nevar = to snow
nieva = it snows
esta nevando = it is snowing (right now)
va a neva = it is going to snow

Wind

el viento = the wind
hace viento = it is windy (lit. it makes wind)

Temperature

hace calor = it is hot (it makes heat)
hace frío = it is cold (it makes cold)

Sun

el sol = the sun
hace sol = it is sunny (it makes sun)
soleado =sunny

Cloud

los nubes = the clouds
nublado = cloudy
la niebla = the mist

The Spanish Civil War - Guerra Civil Española

75 years ago this week, on the 18th July 1936, the Spanish Civil War began, entering Spain into four years of war and forty of facist rule under General Franco. Although in Europe and worldwide, World War II still casts a long shadow, the Spanish Civil war probably cast an even longer shadow over that country. The Spanish had to wait until the mid 1970s before they had a vote again. Their war was particularly nasty in that it pitted neighbour against neighbour, and even family members against each other. The depth of feeling the war and the Franco era still evoke can be seen by the number of comments on this newspaper article - http://www.publico.es/espana/387587/una-sombra-larga-que-se-proyecta-hasta-el-presente.

It is easy in hindsight to paint one side as the bad guys, but the truth is that both groups did some pretty bad stuff before and during the war, and that either side could probably have averted the war if they had wanted to pursue a diplomatic solution. Wikipedia has a good article covering the causes and events of the war in a lot of detail - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War

Notes on the simple past

Yesterday's conjugation of the simple past gives a way to express the past. Harder than learning the verb forms though, is learning when to use it. The good news is that if you use the wrong past tense you will nearly always be understood, in the same way that a foreign person speaking English will often make mistakes but still be understood. The simple past is used to represent a single event, a point in the past, never for something that is ongoing.

Therefore 'tiré' can translate 'I threw', but never 'I was throwing' or 'I used to throw'  which would be translated using the imperfect tense - more on that in future posts. However, 'I threw' is not necesarily translated as 'tiré'. 'I threw a ball every day' would also be translated using the imperfect tense because it refers to a repeating, ongoing event. Practise of reading and listening is the best way to learn when Spanish people would use each tense.

There are another couple of points which are important to note. Firstly the pronuncuation - it is important to stress the accented sylable, otherwise the words will be heard as the present tense. The stress in the simple past falls nearer to the end of the word in most cases.

Secondly, the first person plural ('tiramos' / 'we throw') is the same in the present and simple past tenses, so the context has to be relied on to indicate which is meant.

Conjugation of the week - 13. Tirar - to throw, simple past

This week it is back to the regular -ar verbs with the simplest of the many past tenses in Spanish. The simple past tense is also known as the past historic tense or the preterite tense. It is similar to the simple past tense in English, but is perhaps used less. It refers to a specific event in the past, that is now finished. See previous posts in this series for more about conjugations.

Tirar - to throw, simple past tense

tiré = I threw
tiraste = you threw (sing. fam.)
tiró = he/she/it/ you (sing. pol.) threw
tiramos = we threw
tirasteis = you threw (pl. fam.)
tiraron = they/you (pl. pol.) threw

Telediario en 4 minutos

I have mentioned RTVE's four minute online news bulletin before. I find it is a great way to keep my Spanish from getting too rusty if I am not using it, as well as keeping up with events in the Spanish speaking world. I thought it was worth mentioning again here as I have just discovered that I can now watch it on my Android phone. I don't know whether it is down to a change on the site, or an Android browser update, but when I tried previously I could not view the video.

I have no idea if it works with other phones. The site uses Flash to show video, so I suspect iPhone users will be out of luck. I should mention that this is not a mobile site and is therefore quite bandwidth intensive. You will need to use wifi to view it unless you have a really good data plan. I guess you need an up-to-date version of Android with Flash enabled as well. Even so, I find it is great to watch over breakfast without having to drag a laptop to the table.

Pedido - order/ordered

I was halfway through a sentence on the phone today when I realised that I didn't know the word for an order. I knew the verb 'to order' ('pedir') and hence how to say 'I have ordered' ('he pedido') but the noun escaped me. It turns out, after a quick check on Word Reference, that it is 'pedido' - a word I could perhaps have guessed at but didn't. I am not sure if there is any advice to avoid that situation when it happens, although usually it will be possible to think of another way to say something. When asking a more complicated question it is often worth mentally rehearsing it in your head, but it is impossible to do this in a conversation if you want to sound fluent.

Despedirse - to dismiss oneself

Reading the Spanish news coverage (above on www.rtve.es) of the recent demise of the News Of The World, an interesting phrase I came across was 'News Of The World se despide'. This is a good opportunity to mention reflexive verbs, as well as the verb 'despedir', which has a few related meanings.

Basically 'despedir' means 'to dismiss'. Depending on the context this can mean anything from 'to say goodbye' to 'to sack/fire somebody'. A 'fiesta de despedido' is a leaving party for example. Used reflexively (when the verb refers to itself - me despido, se despide etc.) it means to dismiss oneself. Usually this means to quit, leave or resign. In this case of course it means the newspaper is closing itself down.