by Eileen | Oct 21, 2013 | chile, language, spanish
Must write about language. Again. When first learning a language, you start to notice the expressions or words that you use all the time in your native language that you can’t find in the second one. In Chile, I struggled with “afford,” as in...
by Eileen | Sep 28, 2013 | chile, language, meta
In my last post, I posted an audioclip of a man pretending to speak English. Several people I know, and even some I don’t told me how much they enjoyed it. So far, it’s going strong at 269 listens, which is a lot of people listening to someone speaking...
by Eileen | Sep 15, 2013 | chile, language
There’s this thing that happens quite a lot in Chile, when people hear an English speaker speaking Spanish, they respond, usually among their group, not to the foreigner in question, by exaggerating an English/American/gringo accent in Spanish. You know, the one...
by Eileen | Jul 30, 2013 | chile, language
I was recently describing someone I know to a friend of mine, and used the expression “she’s an odd duck,” an English expression that is kind of playful, like, she’s peculiar, but not a bad person. I like her, but she’s not precisely what...
by Eileen | Jul 4, 2013 | chile, language
Nosotros. You learn it early on in Spanish class, the first person plural, what happens when you add someone to your self. I plus you is we. Right? Not so fast. As you may or may not know, I just got back from Paraguay. So, Paraguay. There are many reasons why...
by Eileen | Jun 10, 2013 | bicycle, chile, feria, food, language, travel
Sometimes you will be walking around in the feria, and you will see bags of pale green something in a bag. it will be double-knotted on top, and flattened into a squared-off brick inside its bag, as though you were going to make sandbags out of it to stem an...