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!

Starting my Resource Collection

Empezando mi colección de recursos. But I still don't trust my ability to write in Spanish.

Pero todavia necesito contar en Google Translate. nope, GT says:

Pero todavía tengo que contar con Google Translate.

See what I mean? Maybe my unaided version was readable, but the GT version certainly makes sense and seems to be correct now that I've seen it. Awkward is one thing, misleading is another. Sigh.....

All that to say this, which will, one day, be translated into Spanish, I swear!

There are several different "word a day" resources out there, but I really like the sentence examples of Spanish Dictionary's Word of the Day, 

http://www.spanishdict.com/wordoftheday

The sentences are simple, use few unusual words, and are in present, preterit, imperfect tenses, maybe more.  I'm gradually pasting them into a Flashcard Machine study list, 

http://www.flashcardmachine.com/machine/?read_only=3360440&p=7tg7. 

The goal is not really to memorize all of the words, but what it is doing is letting me read a lot of simple sentences, over and over.  I would like to do my own practice by changing tenses of these sentences, maybe putting them into dependent clauses, something where I can repeat the same thing over and over, with variations. I'm hoping things will become more instinctive this way. So much of language study seems to involve sample sentences that you struggle to make sense of and then never see again.

OK, so right now this is becoming a blog in English about studying Spanish. So be it, at least for now.  I actually love reading language study blogs, so maybe this wouldn't be so bad long term, but it's not my goal to only speak ABOUT Spanish.  I am wondering if greater reading/sentence creating ability will eventually translate into greater speaking ability. Again, we shall see. 

I'm wondering if becoming interactive with vocabulary lists, in the way I'm considering above, or some other way, is going to be helpful in language learning. I'm wondering, over all, just what IS most effective in language learning. And I imagine that, whether or not the method is the most effective, hypothetically, anything that gets us into daily contact with the new language is more helpful than not.  Well, yeah, obviously.....

La Pena: Initial Notes in English, Sorry....

I'm writing sort of an essay on Carlos Fuentes' short story, "La Pena", and I'm thinking about the role that negative emotions play in our lives. When you make a mistake, do or think something that you later feel shame for, the sting of the negative emotion has a purpose to serve. The subject of the story is so ashamed of his actions some years earlier that he wishes an invisible "narrator" to recount them to the world while he keeps his back turned.

Unhappiness sucks....when you realize you've misjudged a situation and behaved inappropriately, the moment of realization can feel like a slap in the face. It hurts to be so wrong, to know that we are the bad guy in a particular exchange. But there is a purpose in that pain, it's telling us we made a mistake, just like touching a hot stove, and it behooves us to find a way not to repeat the experience if we don't want to feel that same pain again. Well, humans being humans, what causes us shame may also provide some benefit (money?social recognition among people we are trying to impress?) and once the sting has subsided we wade back in and are up to our same old tricks. Rinse and repeat, until, perhaps, the sting of shame is muffled by our forward impulse and our lives are governed by avoidance of what we should be facing.

The protagonist in this story is frozen in place by his shame and, while it seems unlikely that he has repeated his mistakes, the shame of past errors remains over his head like a cloud, and he has not been moving forward, that is, learning from his mistakes and trying a new approach to life. However, it seems he had learned something about himself, and others, by first telling his story privately to the narrator. In the very last line of the story he allows himself to turn to us....the world, his audience, those who are judging him based on this story, because he has learned compassion....both for the other people in this period of his life, and, as important, for himself.

Now, to translate all these deep thoughts into Spanish!