Ever Forward

Yet another Spanish pronunciation goof.  Imagine that just a week ago you learned the Spanish word for squirrel, which is ardilla.  Now imagine that you are currently walking along the sidewalk or footpath and you – wanting to show off your great Spanish skills – decide to point out one of those nutty little furballs to your novia.  But it’s been a week since you learned how to say ‘squirrel’ in Spanish, and you haven’t used the word all week long.  So your memory is a little cloudy.  Instead of saying, “Mira! una ardilla!”, you blurt out, “Mira! una rodilla!”

Well, that was pretty close, and we’ll give you a B- for trying.  But don’t be surprised if your significant other starts looking at you as if you are a bit, uh… squirrelly.  It could only be worse if some beautiful bombshell of a woman happens to be nearby, in which case, you could get smacked, since now your significant other will be wondering why the hell you’re looking at that other woman’s knees.  After all, rodilla is the Spanish word for knee.  I’ll gloss over the image of the beautiful bombshell having a boyfriend who happens to know Spanish and is big, mean and ugly.  Well, his looks could be a moot point in this case, as he might decide to break your rodillas for you.

So… to keep your rodillas safe and your novia from thinking you belong with the other ardillas, remember that squirrels (ardillas) are ardent little nut-gatherers.  And even though I still think you should have no fear of learning Spanish, you may want to take up jogging or weightlifting… just in case!

Learning Spanish is a lot of fun, but you gotta watch your pronunciation.  This is precisely what keeps some people from trying to learn a foreign language.  They fear they’ll commit a terrible faux pas (which is a fancy word for “screw up”, usually demonstrating poor social skills).  Not me.  I assume I’ll commit faux pas (how the hell do you pluralize ‘faux pas’?), uh social screw-ups, since I really don’t have such great social skills anyway.

Oh yeah, I was saying something about watching your pronunciation when practicing your Spanish.  When you’re a bit fearful, it’s “tengo miedo” NOT “tengo mierda“.  Normally, mierda is what you do when you have mieda.  That is, unless you’re scared mierda-less.  We Americans tend to get sloppy with pronunciation of English, and then we translate our sloppy pronunciation habits into other languages and find it can sometimes faux-pas-lacious.  That’s a new word I just made up.  You know, gotta contribute something back to the linguistic community…

So, anyway…  now you can go boldly where you have thus far feared to tread.  Knowing that I have helped you clear the biggest hurdle – getting over your miedo – you can step out with confidence, knowing that you won’t catch a bunch of mierda for trying to learn Spanish – or any other language, for that matter.