Jose Manuel

Jose Manuel and I spend a lot of time together just talking bilingually. Thank god for Google. Sometimes we just sit for hours side-by-side with our MacBooks googling definitions, pictures, and Wikipedia articles and occasionally going to Google Translate when we don't believe each others' pronunciation or definition. We have more vowel sounds in English than in Spanish, so sometimes I just repeat words over and over so he can learn the sounds. ("Mall, mole, mall, mole, mall mall mall, mole mole mole.")

There are a few things that we've started to notice that are really just common sense if you know both Spanish and English, but we had never really considered before. For example, the formation of questions, and the importance of context vs. verb conjugations.

In English we have more question words. We have "who?" "what?" "when?" and "where?" and they have them, too, (Quien? Que? Cuando? Donde?) but there are some instances where the difference between a question and a statement is purely intonation. In English we say, "Is the TV turned off?" or "The TV is turned off." In Spanish they say, "La tele esta apagado?" or "La tele esta apagado." If you don't have the right intonation you may end up leaving your appliances on!

In English, the conjugation of a verb isn't as important as it is in Spanish, for two reasons. The first reason is that our concepts of time (past, present, future) are more contextual. For example, if I said "Where is Niels?" and our exchange student Eric said, "He goes to the store." I would understand him just about as clearly as if Eric had said, "He went to the store." In Spanish if Maryte asked me, "Donde esta Cristobal?" and I said, "Va a la tienda." she would probably understand, but it would be a little more difficult.

The second reason is that we always use articles.

In English, our verb conjugations look like this:

I -- go

you -- go

he/she -- goes

we -- go

they -- go

Whereas in Spanish is looks more like this:

yo (I) -- voy

tu (you) -- vas

el/ella (he/she) -- va

nosotros (we) -- vamos

ellos (they) -- van

In English, you have to say who is doing the action but in Spanish you don't. This means that a mis-conjugation like, "He go to the store." isn't as big an offense as if I said, "Voy a la tienda." but am referring to Cristobal. For this reason, when Jose Manuel makes conjugation mistakes I hardly notice them, but when I mis-conjugate, JM has to correct me.

When I'm struggling to express myself in Spanish he gets this knowing smile that is somehow both friendly and reassuring, but makes me feel like I'm doing it wrong. To be fair, I use the same smile when he's speaking English. Every other sentence out of his mouth is, "Why are you smiling?"