No todo está perdido

 Todavía estoy estudiando español, pero he estado publicando en mi blog regular en lugar de aquí. Estos son algunos enlaces. Los mensajes más recientes no habrán sido revisados por mi maestro, lo siento.

Una confesión: Confío en gran medida en spanishdict.com para la primera o segunda traducción. En tercer lugar, examino mis frases para ver si podía encontrar mejores palabras y eliminar el sesgo espeluznante hacia los finales masculinos. Estoy seguro de que los errores que quedan son bastante evidentes para un hablante nativo de español. Pero a menudo me deja muy poco tiempo para terminar un ensayo y quiero decir cosas complejas que estarían más allá de mi capacidad de expresar, incluso si me tomó todo el día para hacerlo sin ayuda. También, trato de añadir una lista de vocabulario de las palabras que usé que eran nuevas para mí.

Creo que escribo mejores ensayos en español que en inglés, porque la necesidad de traducir me obliga a ser mucho más conciso. Soy imperfecto y estoy dando un mal ejemplo a otros estudiantes españoles. Que así sea. ¡Tengo la edad suficiente para no preocuparme! Mi escritura no te cuesta más que tiempo, estimado lector, y obtienes lo que pagas.

En Boca Cerrada no Entran Moscas.

Eso/a es un/a de mis [Spanish sayings] favoritos/as. Cuando era en [high school] yo y mi mejor amiga [used to say this, whispering behind our hands] como viejitas [disapproving] despues de caminar cerca de grupos de estudientes ruidosos.

first draft. Note that there are things I think I know in Spanish that could be wrong also, but I wanted to write them down as I thought they were.

Now, what do I learn as I start to improve the sentence? I guessed there would be a word related to proverb but wasn't sure if it was only used in the biblical sense. But it looks like it can be defined as a "short, pithy instructive saying" and I think this fits the bill. BTW, I just discovered an engrossing and entertaining website, http://www.lexipedia.com/spanish/proverbio, while investigating this word. A true word lover's website!

So, we now have:

Eso es uno de mis proverbios favoritos. Cuando éramos en la escuela secundaria....

I looked up "high school" in Google Translate because I know the school system names are different in English and Spanish. I realized I wanted to say "we" rather than I, so I looked up the conjugation of "Ser" in Spanish Dictionary's verb conjugation page, http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/Ser.

yo y mi mejor amiga .....I looked this up in Google Translate just in case I had done something wrong with the little words....nope, it was fine.

"we would say", translated to diríamos in GT, but I didn't trust it so I went to Spanish Dictionary and looked up conjugations of Decir and believe that instead, GT was treating it as a conditional and it should be a habitual action, so decíamos is the word I actually want. Should I have known these conjugations already? Yes, based on what we covered in class, but I didn't feel at all secure about them so I looked them up anyway.

So, now we have:

Eso es uno de mis proverbios favoritos. Cuando éramos en la escuela secundaria, decíamos esto .... cuando caminando cerca do un grupo de estudiantes ruidosos.

I skipped a bit because I was thinking more productively about the last part more clearly than the next at the moment.


"Whispering, behind our hands". I gave up and used GT for this whole phrase, initially the second part  because I wondered if there was some specific phrase for something you say behind your hand. If 
there is, I didn't discover it that way. Anyway, susurrando detrás de nuestras manos.

como viejecitas desaprobandas ... Here I found GT really useful because I wanted to make vieja diminuative and viejitas wasn't correct. GT actually knew what I wanted when I typed in "little old lady". And it helped me with disapproving but I didn't like what it did with the word beyond the basic definition for desaprobar. So I went back to Spanish Dictionary's conjugation page and came up with a gerund, desaprobando, that looked like what I wanted.


So, now we have:

En boca cerrada no entran moscas.

Eso es uno de mis proverbios favoritos. Cuando éramos en la escuela secundaria, decíamos esto, como viejecitas desaprobandas, cuando caminando cerca do un grupo de estudiantes ruidosos.

Oy! That took a lot of time! In addition, since I can't type accent marks, I copy whatever text derived elsewhere that does have them, and blogger copies also the font, the color of the font and the background, and the line spacing, so then I have to clean all those things up. But normally, I should be eventually creating it all elsewhere, on a webpage that does allow typing of accents while writing text, http://spanish.typeit.org/, and it will all be uniform by the time it is entered. While this took a vast amount of time, I was learning, re-learning, solidifying, etc. my Spanish vocabulary and grammar. Hopefully it all adds up as I go along!