Chipanglish » Spanish

Bilingual School

Peter — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:36:46 +0000

I recently read a news article about a school in which I have been a substitute teacher. For reasons unknown to the general public, the principal and a teacher have been removed from their positions.

This is the only fully Spanish-bilingual school in a district with a high Latino population. Several other schools have bilingual classrooms, but at White Rock, every class is bilingual. In fact, all classroom teachers are required to speak, read, and write Spanish at the fluency of a native speaker.

What bothers me most are the comments from the public that accompany the article such as, (paraphrasing) “Learn to speak English, this is America… stop wasting my tax dollars.”

First, even at the kindergarten level, most students are fluent in spoken English. The students who come from Spanish speaking households are on par with their native English speaking peers in terms of literacy. As a non-Spanish speaking teacher, I have had no linguistic troubles at the school.

Second, though the school is bilingual, many non-Spanish speaking students attend because of diversity.

Third, it is a school. The point of a school is to have a safe place where students can learn. What better place for students new to the country to learn the primary language here?

Finally, studies have shown that many minority families, particularly non-English speaking families, are apprehensive to be involved in their children’s school due to a language barrier. At White Rock, because most staff members speak Spanish, that fear is gone. Parents at White Rock are not afraid to speak to their children’s teachers and become active in education. Isn’t that what all schools strive for? Additionally, it is a powerful for students to see many of their own heritage as positive role models, instead of relying on stereotypes of what societal roles a Mexican immigrant can and cannot do.

While I do not know what is going on with the school, including rumors it may close or be repurposed as an administration building, it is a special place. The staff and students have been nothing but friendly and welcoming to all who pass through their doors.

What’s in a Name? En Español!

Peter — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:47:57 +0000

I came across this article.

Hooray for more paranoia induced ignorant racism!

I suppose this means the next time I visit an tropical island-themed hotel, I should ask Larry to change his name to something more tropical. I mean, it is part of the experience, right?

So I’ve Been Lazy

Yvonne — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 07:10:06 +0000

I haven’t cracked open a non-English book in weeks, including Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook. I haven’t done any practice with my Anki decks either. The truth is, I was on the verge of language burnout, and then I had to work a billion hours to finish my dissertation. Brain fried.

And so I’ve been lazy.

Though this doesn’t mean I haven’t been getting worthy language practice, as it turns out.

My husband and I have been watching Code Geass. Japanese audio, English subtitles. Each episode is a little over 20 minutes long and we finished Episode 20 today. I’ve already noticed some improvement in my Japanese comprehension even with this small amount of semi-immersion.

And then I read How to Learn Spanish for Lazy People on Spanish Only:

5 Reasons Lazy People Are Better Language Learners

They generally don’t worry all too much.

They don’t use textbooks.

Instead, they use native materials.

They have all the time of the world to get massive amounts of input well before ever speaking a word.

When they eventually speak it’s again stress-free, aiming to get their point across (which, miracally often goes without making loads of mistakes and/or pauses).

It made me feel even better about my laziness.

Because to be honest, I hate doing SRS. I hate being glued to my dictionary. I hate being all systematic and angsty about my language progress. And trying to study three different languages every day is a good way to make your brain all ‘splody.

So I’m going to relax. Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook is going on hiatus (and frankly, I was starting to run out of the funny phrases anyways).

For Japanese and Spanish, my new goal is to watch 1000 hours of TV in each language before I attempt any more formal study. For the time being, I’ve decided that subtitles in Japanese are ok, as I’m basically starting from nothing here. If I use subtitles on the Spanish TV, they must be in Spanish.

I’ve already gotten my 1000 hours of native-speed Chinese audio, so I will start reading through the massive collection of children’s books I have. Once I get through all of those (without systematically mining them for vocabulary), I’ll re-evaluate where I am.

Here’s where I am so far, going as far back as my Spanish movie-watching week (during which I also snuck in a viewing of Spirited Away):

Japanese: 9.4/1000 hours

Spanish: 7.8/1000 hours

A Compendium of Useless Spanish Phrases

Yvonne — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:06:21 +0000

In keeping with theme of my last post and Khatzumoto’s immerse-in-fun strategy, I’ve been watching some of my favorite movies with the Spanish language tracks turned on. I do want to learn how to say “launch photon torpedoes” in Japanese someday, but that will have to wait until we have some Japanese movies that aren’t Miyazaki or Kurosawa works.

In the meantime, you can probably guess what I watched today from this list:

¡Inconcebible! Sigue usando esa palabra. No creo que significa lo que cree que significa.
¡No soy zurdo! ¡No tampoco zurdo!
el Pantano de Fuego
Buenas noches, Westley, buen trabajo, probablemente te mate en la mañana.
¡Hasta la muerte! ¡No, hasta el dolor!
¿Qué tal? Mi nombre es Iñigo Montoya. Mataste a mi padre. Prepárate para morir.

I can’t quite make out what the Spanish for Rodents of Unusual Sizes is. The subtitles say Roedores de Tamaño Extraordinario, but that definitely doesn’t match the dialogue.

Chipanglish: Compiling impractical phrases in multiple languages since 2009.

Yes, I did happen to learn quite a bit of useful Spanish too, though I’m guessing the frequency of people yelling “¡Corre(n)!” in the movie world is a lot higher than in real life. “¡No comas eso!”, my personal Waterloo from months back, made an early appearance in Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban.

Retroactive Interference in Action

Yvonne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:41:24 +0000

So I finally busted out some Spanish in the comments of my previous post.

I’ve been volunteering at the Children’s Museum of Houston where maybe half of the visitors speak Spanish. I’d like to get to the point where I’m confident enough in my Spanish to at least mix it in with English in teaching these kids, especially since some of them don’t speak English yet.

My brain is not cooperating. I can switch off easily between English and Chinese as I’ve been doing that my whole life. However, my brain has grouped Spanish and Japanese together in a category apparently named “Languages I Speak Brokenly.”

We were doing a slime demonstration at the museum last week. One of the kids started to eat the slime. I racked my brain for “Don’t eat!” in Spanish and this is what happened.

English-speaking brain: I need “Don’t eat!” in Spanish!
Broken languages brain: “No tabetes!”
English-speaking brain: That…makes no sense in any language!
Broken languages brain: @#$#%^$!!!
English-speaking brain: You’re taking too long! I give up! “DON’T EAT THAT!”

食べる (taberu) is Japanese for “to eat”. “No tabetes” is apparently wrongly-conjugated Japanish. Classic retroactive interference.

After the slime-eating danger had passed, my broken languages brain finally came up with “¡No come!” Which I’m pretty sure is right, but the actual Spanish speakers in the audience will have to weigh in on that.

About Me, About the Blog

Yvonne — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:43:48 +0000

The first complete English sentence I could speak was, “I am big, you are small.” The perils of letting your child learn the language of your adopted country via Sesame Street.

In the nearly three decades that have passed since I first proudly uttered those words, English has become, by far, my dominant language. The switch took place when I was around seven years old, much to my parents’ chagrin.

I remember being a small child on the playground, struggling to find an English retort to some bullies. Now I can sling English wisecracks like any native speaker, but my repertoire of Mandarin insults is sadly limited to pig, turtle, and various types of bad eggs. 笨蛋!—ben4 dan4!—stupid egg.

This blog is about my journey to re-claim my Mandarin proficiency and hopefully achieve native fluency. My spoken fluency is intermediate, I’d guess either 2+ or 3 on the ILR scale, but with native pronunciation. I can recognize several dozen Chinese characters and write even fewer, making me functionally illiterate.

This blog is also about my journey to learn Japanese. I married into a Japanese family and would like to communicate with my in-laws, beyond こんにちわ (konnichiwa—hello), ありがとうございます (arigato gozaimasu—thank you very much), 結婚式 (kekkonshiki—wedding), and 編み物 (amimono—knitting).

I’d like to take this moment to thank the computer for auto-converting romaji to hiragana to kanji and making me look way more advanced than I actually am (unless it did it wrong, in which case I’d like to thank it for helping me to get over the hump of the first Unintentional Multilingual Self-Humiliation). I can write/sound-out hiragana and katakana, but it’s pretty slow and painstaking.

And if I have time, I’ll even dust off my rusty ol’ Spanish! I’m better at speaking Spanish than speaking Japanese and reading Spanish than reading Chinese, which is to say that after six years of coursework and more years to forget, my Spanish is really, really lousy.

I hope that eventually I’ll be able to write entire non-English posts and mostly make sense. Hope you’ll come along for the ride!

Chipanglish » Spanish

Bilingual School

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