SmallMarble.org hits a milestone!

Our global, multilingual phrase-book project just passed an exciting point: 1,000 localized phrases!

And the project is only 2 weeks old!

Our collection includes Spanish from Perú, Chile, Argentina and Spain. We’ve got English from the US, Ireland, and England. We’ve got a whole lot of Brazilian Portuguese.

Today we also added a new language option: Esperanto! And it was Esperanto that pushed us over the 1,000-phrase mark!

Hey!! We need YOUR slang, YOUR voice, YOUR help!! Come on by, and just click to add your way of saying any phrase on the site!

Some SmallMarble.org Favorites

Assorted personal favorites from smallmarble.org that we’ve collected so far.

Friends with benefits

Es un touch-and-go.

While in English, a “touch and go situation” typically means things are uncertain, it’s used a bit more literally in Argentina.

You’re Overreacting

Ya po weon te fuiste en volaa.

Most of the Chileans I know actually talk like this. I can’t wait to get some of these recorded.

What a hottie!

Qué churro!

Helps to know what a churro is. I’ve also heard someone described as “churrisimo!”

Call an ambulance!

快叫救護車!

My Taiwanese friend added some Chinese to the site, and I had him explain this one to me. It translates literally as “hurry – call – save – protect – car!” A save-protect-car is, naturally, an ambulance.

I hadn’t really considered this before, but another nice use is to learn English slang from other countries:

I’m Drunk

I’m langers!

I’m legless!

I’m in the rats!

I’m twisted!

They say some Alaskan tribes have 20 words for “snow.” Just sayin’…

SmallMarble.org is here!

SmallMarble.org is a project to create a free global phrasebook and language learning tool, with country-specific phrases written by people from those countries, and audio recordings of natives speaking the phrases.

It has far more than the boring travel phrases you find in books. We’re collecting local slang, proverbs, how to say everything from I’ve got a mean hangover! to ¿Quieres acompañarme a comprarme alguna cosita? (“Wanna go shopping?” in Chile)

Nice threads!

• ¡Qué buena pilcha!
• ¡Qué fashion!
• ¡Ay! ¡Qué top!

We’re also building a large collection of vocabulary builders: “ A pilot flies airplanes.” → “ Um piloto pilota aviões.” (Brazilian Portuguese)

SmallMarble.org can be used between any two languages. A French person can use it to learn German just as easily as I can use it to learn Spanish.

So far, the site has been up for about one week, and we’ve added around 600 phrases in 5 different languages and from 8 different countries.

It’s all under a Creative Commons License.  It belongs to us all, now and forever.

Take a look:

http://smallmarble.org

When one verb becomes two

Among all the challenges of learning a foreign language, this one is the most interesting to me.

What I’m referring to is the situation where one verb in your language becomes two in a foreign language.

Between English and Spanish there are lots of examples, but the most common must be how the verb “to be” turns into either ser or estar.

Out of all the things that we “are”– strong, tall, healthy, lost, happy, young– which ones are ephemeral (and therefor use estar), and which are more permanent (using ser)? Spanish forces us to confront this question!

There are some great exceptions to the “ephemeral” rule. We know that physical beauty fades, right? Therefor, “you’re beautiful” might best be expressed as “estás bonita“. Yet “eres bonita” is about nine times more common (according to total result counts of those Google links). Perhaps because it doesn’t force the recipient of the compliment to simultaneously confront their mortality!

There are plenty of great examples in the Spanish-to-English direction, too.

Try explaining the difference between “to do” and “to make” to a Spanish speaker, for which they use only hacer. Why do we (as English speakers) need to distinguish between activities that have some end product (to make) and those that don’t (to do)?

Another nice example is how probar in Spanish maps to “to try”, “to sample”, and “to prove”. A common English error among Spanish speakers is “Want to prove the sauce?” while holding out a spoon. Does the Spanish language embrace the scientific method so completely that proving something is the same as trying and sampling? Cool.

Pobre Subjuntivo!

Is anyone else disappointed by the Spanish subjunctive form?

After three years of living in Argentina, after finally feeling comfortable hearing and using the subjunctive form, I have come to the conclusion that it is completely useless as a language feature.

It adds no subtlety, no flavor. It is simply a rule to follow. Is there is a single sentence in which the use of the subjunctive is optional, where the speaker is actually conveying something by using it or not? If so, I haven’t noticed it yet.

It’s too bad, too, because I was really looking forward to understanding the subtlety that an optional subjunctive could add to a language.

The subjunctive exists in English, too, but its use has mostly died out. The last few uses, such as “If I were you…” instead of “If I was you…”, are becoming so widely misused that I imagine that some day both will be considered equally correct. And wouldn’t that be a good thing? Isn’t having fewer rules better, making a language easier to learn and use correctly? Especially when the rules only add complexity for complexity’s sake.

El subjuntivo… que se muera…

Useful tip for decoding many Spanish verb conjugations

This tip will improve your Spanish listening and reading comprehension. All that’s needed is the ability to conjugate the common verbs such as ‘tener’ and ‘poner’.

Example of how it works: You hear “mantengo”, which doesn’t seem to have anything in common with English. But you know that “tengo” is a form of “tener”, so you can un-conjugate the verb to “mantener”, and suddenly it’s a lot more recognizable (it means “to maintain”).

It’s quite common that a conjugated verb has little resemblance to English while the infinitive form is recognizable, so look for endings that you know to be conjugations of common Spanish verbs.

For whatever reason, based on how the two languages evolved, I suppose, this works for a lot of verbs:

Examples with Tener

• contener, contain
• detener, detain
• mantener, maintain
• obtener, obtain
• retener, retain

Examples with Poner

• descomponer, decompose
• imponer, impose
• posponer, postpone
• proponer, propose
• suponer, suppose
• componer, compose

Examples with Venir

• convenir, convene
• prevenir, prevent

It also works for the past participle tense. For example, if you know that “puesto” is the past participle of “poner” then you can figure out what “compuesto” means using the same trick: compuesto => componer => compose, the past participle of which is “composed”, which is in fact what “compuesto” means.

Pronouncing English words in Spanish

Back when I lived in the United States, I dated a lovely woman of Dominican descent who was equally fluent in English and Spanish.

She had one habit that irked me at the time: when speaking English, she would often pronounce words of Spanish language origin, such as burrito, with a Spanish accent. A silly thing to be bothered by, for sure, but for me it seemed just a bit elitist, as if she were demonstrating that she knew how to pronounce a word better than everyone else.

I would point out that burrito was is in fact an English word. It exists in English dictionaries, complete with an English pronunciation.

I would point out that the English language is full of these borrowed words. Should we pronounce all words using the accent of their original language? Should we pronounce résumé with a French accent and kindergarten with a German accent? One could easily switch accents five times in a single sentence, and I don’t imagine anyone would consider that a good idea.

This question of pronunciation has resurfaced in my life, this time from the other direction. Now I live in Argentina, and here there are a handful of English words used in every-day life. For example, shopping means mall. Yes, in Argentina, the word shopping is a noun. It is used as in “They went to the shopping.”

And I must admit: now I understand why my girlfriend was so against pronunouncing burrito in an English accent. It is hard to butcher words from your own language! It really feels funny.

And, ironically, these borrowed words are among the hardest for me to pronounce correctly in Spanish. While real Spanish is beautifully consistent in its pronunciation (if you read a word you can pronounce it, and if you hear a word you can spell it), these borrowed words are not at all consistent. They are typically pronounced about half way between English and Spanish accents.

A new blog for language learners

This blog is for sharing my experiences as a native English speaker learning Spanish in South America.

Making things a little more picante, I’m also a software designer and developer, and have applied those skills to the world of language learning, producing some new Free Software applications to help language learners everywhere. More on these soon.

What’s more, something big is coming. A global project, in the spirit of Wikipedia, harnessing Free Software and Creative Commons licenses, that promises to speed up the process of language self-teaching worldwide by several fold. More on this soon.