This has precisely nothing to do with learning Spanish, I just hadn’t posted in a while and felt bad (yes, I’ve got something I’m working on, should be up in a few days, I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been busy with other business), and I was going through my analytics data and ended up looking at the various keywords that people used to get here when they come in via a search engine such as Google, and some of them are just really funny and it’s 3 AM and I’m bored so screw it why not–I hope you get some amusement out of these like I did:

what is the 10 words u need to know in spanish

I, too, wish someone would tell me what these 10 magical words are.

i give up at learning spanish

Well damn, I’m sorry.  Keep trying?

a list of every single spanish word

I have spare time–I don’t, however, have that much spare time. Sorry.

Moving on!

not look like a gringo

Don’t wear shorts in Latin America, that will solve 95% of your gringo-ness problem right there.

video of someone saying teaching spanish

What?

Does “fluent” mean perfect?

No.

any advice if you want to learn but you can’t, you don’t have any motivation to learn

Then you’re screwed. Give up.

saint trump pido

What?

trilled r gringo

I can see how this led them here, but I’m still quite confused about what precisely it was they were looking for and what led them to come up with that particular search phrase in the first place.

como pasar a plural that is an interesting painting

WTF….What??!

teaching spanish going food shopping

I’m genuinely confused about what it is you want here.

should i study everyday all day

Yes…and all night…and while you’re on the toilet…and in the shower…and while having sex…upside down…like a bat….and don’t forget to record it and put it on YouTube for us.

what is the word spanish people always say like shit

I don’t know but I’d like to now: what is the word that Spanish people always say like shit? Anyone know? If you do, please indulge the rest of us and leave a comment.

Andrew the odd learn Spanish blog

Holy shit I’m famous!!! (ok, all of 1 person used that phrase, but still…I was excited)

cheesy spanish soap operas with preterite

Well, that’s…specific.

And…the very best for last…

i want to be fluent in spanish already damn it

Well you’ve come to the right place!!! Not only do we get fluent in Spanish here, but we curse, too, damnit!! 😀

I hope you’ve had fun.  I’ll get some proper posts up soon, I promise, also…  If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

Anytime I see a new word I don’t know, I have to look it up and add it to Anki.  For me, looking up a single word in the dictionary can cause a chain reaction that leads to me looking up and adding ten more words.  I do not know this word, “mancha”, what is this? I look it up.  It means…”spot, blotch, stain, blemish, or liver spot”.  This makes no sense: “Canal de la Mancha” = “Canal of the Spot”?  “Canal of the stain”? “Canal of the liver spot”?!

Right, we’re going to sort this out, something funny’s going on here…

I initially think that maybe it refers to “spot” in the sense of a location, which actually is like the 8th definition down for the word “mancha” in my dictionary, so it’s possible, but…further googling turns up the Spanish wikipedia page for the English Channel, and within the very first paragraph I see:

El nombre no es más que una mala traducción del francés, ya que La Manche significa realmente ‘La Manga’, puesto que es la misma palabra que se emplea para designar a la parte de la camisa dentro de la cual se mete el brazo.

Which means:

The name is no more than a bad translation of the French, as La Manche actually means ‘The Sleeve’, since it’s the same word that’s used to designate which part of the shirt you put your arm into.

Ahhhh hahaha!  I look up “manche” in the French dictionary, it means “sleeve”, I look up “manga” in the Spanish dictionary, it means “sleeve”. Ohhh boy. Ok, that explains it.

So what has happened here is that the Spanish heard the word “la manche” from the French when they were referring to the English Channel and then sort of simultaneously borrowed and mangled the French word for it instead of actually translating it (if they knew that it meant “the sleeve” they would’ve ended up with “la manga” in Spanish, but they didn’t know this), thereby ending up with “la mancha” as an adulteration of “la manche”.  In other words, in the phrase “Canal de la Mancha”, the word mancha does not mean “spot, stain etc.”, in fact, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a name–sort of like if you’ve got a dog called “Spot”, in that particular context the word “spot” doesn’t mean “spot”, it doesn’t ‘mean’ anything, it’s just the name of the damned dog.

Yes, I was amused by this, thank you, I realize you may not be.  Just remember, you can never get that 5 minutes of your life back it took you to read that.  I hope that was interesting, let me know what you think in the comments (and would like me to write about in the future), also…

  If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

1. When you’re looking for a book on Amazon about a language that you’re currently interested in and you check out the ”Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section and realize that you own almost every single book in those 10-15 pages :/

2. When people ask you what language you want to learn and the answer goes something like, “Well, right now I’m working mainly on German and French while maintaining my Spanish – it’s probably around C1 but my German is B1 while my French is A2 at best (you are familiar with the CEFR scale, right?) – but I’d really like to get started on Italian soon and then Russian before the year is out.  I’d say Japanese is after Russian but I’d really like to learn Czech some day even though it doesn’t have a ton of native speakers.”

They stare at you like you’ve got a dick growing out of your forehead.

3. You listen to music in the language you’re learning that you would otherwise hate and never listen to.  Japanese teeny-bopper pop music? Yes, please!

4. While taking notes or writing something you switch in and out of different languages.

5. You decide not to hang out with your friends so you can be there when the mailman delivers that “teach yourself Hungarian” book you ordered a week ago.

6. You stalk native speakers having conversations through the store that you’re in.

7. You teach your dogs commands in different languages–saying “Sit!” in either English, Spanish, German, or Korean will all result in the same thing.

8. You enjoy finding people in public with tattoos in fake Asian characters that are essentially meaningless…and then pointing this out to them.  Or, even better, the tattoo says something silly that the person wearing it almost certainly didn’t intend, like “I like cheeseburgers”, or “White people poop a lot”.

9. You get irritated when an English-language Hollywood movie has a character speaking in a foreign language you know and the subtitles are either totally inaccurate or a gross oversimplification of what they actually said.  You will then alert everyone in the near vicinity of this travesty.  This scene below from Snatch is one that always gets me, the translation of

14. When you read the warranty paper for the electronic device you just bought in all 7 languages that it’s printed in.

15. You use foreign grammar in your native language…and then make a “WTF did I just say?!” face 2 seconds later while everyone looks at you like you’re an alien.

16. When the first thing you think of when hearing “Panini” is Sanskrit, not sandwich.

17. When your parents get you language materials for your birthday for a new language and you have to tell them that you most unfortunately already speak that language.

18. When one of the first things that you do with a new computer is add all the keyboard layouts you’ll need…and some of those keyboards that you “need” are actually for languages you don’t even speak, but really you never know when the urge to learn it will hit you, so you’d like to be prepared.

19. When you discover, much to your delight, that your new dietary supplements are labeled not only in English but also in German and Spanish, at which point you eagerly begin to increase your vocabulary by learning new words through comparison of the texts.

20. When you answer calls from telemarketers using a language that you’re reasonably certain they won’t understand–so far this trick has always thrown them for a loop to the point where they hang up on me within 10 seconds 😀

21. When you just can’t understand how people make it to adulthood without knowing that they speak Portuguese in Brazil, not Spanish.

And finally, one that I have personally done:

22. Going to use or pick up an object around the house you try to think of the word for it in a language you’re learning. It’s on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t think of it for some reason. You should know this, you’ve learned it before.You will stand there, staring at the thing in question (refrigerator, car keys, milk, chair, whatever), refusing to allow yourself to pick it up or do whatever it is you were going to do with it until you can think of the correct word for it in the language that you’re trying to think in. You will stand there for however long this takes, perhaps finally giving in and going to look it up in the dictionary before coming back and proceeding as you were until it happens again :DI have stood in the shower staring at the soap, refusing to pick it up, getting angry at myself, while trying to think of the word for “soap” in Spanish for about 5 minutes before I finally gave up (I looked it up immediately after getting out of the shower, still wet, dripping water all over my bedroom floor as I went to fetch my Spanish dictionary).

Splish-splash, splish-splash…Cursing…

Papers rustling, flipping of pages…

“Jabón!!! I knew it! Damnit, why couldn’t I remember that?!”

Splish-splash, splish-splash back to the bathroom…

I hope you enjoyed all of those, to give credit where it’s due some of them came from or were inspired by a similar thread over at HTLAL where, if you really want to, you can read through (currently–it gets bigger every day) 136 pages of this stuff: You know you’re a language nerd when…

Edit: One more!

I just read Jennie’s post about how she has actually started to forget how to pronounce words in her own language, and thought “Damn, you know if that isn’t a sign that you are a serious, hard-core language nerd I don’t know what is!” Ha ha!

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew