Wednesday, June 9, 2010

typical night

Right now I´m supposed to be writing my goodbye article for the Menno Bote describing my time here, but I find myself back in paper writing procrastination mode. So to get those creative thoughts flowing, I´ll write here instead.

Last night after dinner I helped my host parents study for their “parts of the body” test for their English class. I helped them with pronunciations and they taught me some new vocabulary (I know I know how did I get by 10 months without knowing the word “tobillo” – I would just point to my ankle). Some words in castellano just don´t translate exactly. For example, “manco” means without a hand or “tuerto” missing an eye. My host dad acted these words out for me with big gestures but I was sorry to say that English doesn´t have a cool words like that.

After reviewing family vocabulary words like “father in law” or “husband” (or according to papi, what corrie does not have), we got into a huge argument over the definitions of “step-brother” and “half-brother” (my host mom declared that she has 12 half brothers and 5 half sisters, which is true). It was hilarious because mami and I would explain and papi would just yell no no and try to make up his own definition and then confuse himself and not finish his thought. Trying to argue my definition was also way confusing since I just learned those words in Spanish, so I finally just gave up. We were at a stalemate until mami brought out the dictionaries (sounds like an intense night of Scrabble between the aunties and gma) and all was resolved with papi exclaiming claro! (of course!) even though he had been arguing against the dictionary definition.

To end the night right we sang some English worship songs they had learned in class. When I first came here I really struggled with singing in church, but now I know most of the songs and love singing them. Trying to teach my host parents how to say the word “awesome” made me realize how wack the English language is! And now I can´t even speak it that well.

1 comment:

  1. You have to buy them a humungous Spanish English dictionary and underline all the cool words for them!

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