Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

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thevagrant88
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Sun Jul 18, 2021 12:18 pm

I mean it's certainly possible, but I wouldn't know what they are. It's difficult for me because for the past 5ish years, I studied Spanish almost obsessively and I'm not a monolith; I have other interests I'd like to pursue and the idea of devoting most of my "sitting time" to language study just doesn't really sound appealing to me anymore. Obviously, if I seriously want to learn another language I'm going to have to sit down with it, but for right now I just don't think I got it in me.
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Mon Jul 19, 2021 8:29 pm

Watching Pan’s Labyrinth for the first time since learning Spanish was really interesting. Something that is completely lost in translation is the way Pan himself addresses the main character Ofelia. He addresses her exclusively with “vos” and “eis/ais” verb conjugations, something this is suuuuuupper formal and something I’ve only seen in medieval style literature. For example, in Game of Thrones or Final Fantasy, this is how people would speak when addressing royalty or nobility. Very cool.
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Sat Jul 31, 2021 2:49 am

I just started reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and man, this is a tough one. At the very beginning it seemed straightforward enough, maybe some higher level literary vocab to trip me up, and then I get to this section that is essentially a single run-on sentence lasting many pages without any paragraph breaks and the only punctuation being commas. Some of my favorite books in English are things like The Sound and the Fury or Gravity's Rainbow so it's kind of exciting, if not daunting, to be reading a genuine piece of Spanish language literature cut from the same cloth. Let's see if I have the endurance to make it to the end :lol:
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Sun Aug 29, 2021 6:00 pm

Remember all that complaining about Japanese I was doing? Well lately I’ve been wanting to check out Georgian or Russian.

I need a new hobbie.
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Wed Sep 01, 2021 2:51 am

I’m casually watching a video on Arabic grammar and I’m starting to get a better understanding as to what makes it one of the tougher languages. Stuff like ‘idafa’ and how many words in English correspond to suffixes in Arabic are just some examples of the wacky syntactical stuff that makes learning these ultra hard languages so much fun.
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Fri Oct 29, 2021 11:32 am

A buddy of mine texted me the other day asking if I'd be interested in taking a trip to Japan in the spring. So much for not learning anymore Japanese :lol:

Spanish: I finished El Túnel and began listening to the audiobook, shadowing along as well. This makes it the sixth novel I've read in its entirety, in addition to many hundreds of pages of other material. I'm happy about this and all, but I really need to start speaking and doing so regularly. I had a man come up to me the other day asking me a question in Spanish and I was so unprepared that my brain just didn't "receive" the Spanish, if that makes sense. Speaking with strangers has always been one of my biggest challenges, especially with Puerto Ricans. Every time I've ever struck up conversations with Mexicans it always went much smoother, probably in part because by pure chance I happened to struck up those conversations. The other major reason is probably that, in my humble opinion of studying Spanish for six years, Puerto Rican Spanish is far and away the most difficult for me to understand. I know that Chilean Spanish has a reputation, but for me PR is worse and I have a very simple reason why.

Across the board, from all languages, societies, cultures, etc, people from a low socio-economic background speak much differently than "text" speech. This is obviously true in the Spanish world as well, regardless if they are Mexican, Spanish, Argentinian, etc. In this one aspect, Chilean Spanish is indeed, to put it mildly, rough. BUT I have listened to many, many Chileans speak with no difficulty at all because the more educated tend to speak much more clearly, given the setting of course. With PR Spanish, this is not the case. Many of the peculiarities of PR Spanish are ubiquitous and although lessened somewhat the higher you go up the socio-economic scale, it is still always present.

I'd encourage anybody reading this to read about the "jíbaros" and their distinct accent. They are basically the poor farmers of Puerto Rico and their accent is so damn hard to understand. Instead of a voiced trill for their 'r's, it will either be unvoiced or straight up am unvoiced uvular fricative, like are harsher, breather version of a French 'r', or maybe like an extra hard 'jota' like how Spaniards tend to speak. For example, the only difference between how jíbaros pronounce the words 'ajo' and 'arróz' is the placement of the stress. Words that end in -ado,-edo, or -odo drop the -d. So something like 'intentado' becomes 'intentao', 'todo' becomes a long vowel as 'to'o', etc. A single 'r' before a consonent or at the end of a world becomes an 'L' so 'perdon' becomes 'peldon', amor becomes 'amol', and so on. Final 's' just don't exist, words are smashed together, slang abounds, blah blah blah. In fact, an 's' before a consonant is not only dropped, it causes the follow consonant to geminate with a slight breathy quality! Estoy becomes 'ettoy'

And obviously puting these things together makes everything worse:

Puerto Rico ---> Puelto Jico
Por todos lados ---> Pol to'o lao (I've gotten so used to this one that it's become the only way I can say this phrase lol)
Que estás haciendo? --> Que'ttaciendo

So yeah obviously everybody has their own experience, but PR Spanish is my bane. I'm obviously much better with it now than I was years ago, but it is still so damn hard sometimes.
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby AllSubNoDub » Fri Oct 29, 2021 6:21 pm

thevagrant88 wrote:I'd encourage anybody reading this to read about the "jíbaros" and their distinct accent. They are basically the poor farmers of Puerto Rico and their accent is so damn hard to understand. Instead of a voiced trill for their 'r's, it will either be unvoiced or straight up am unvoiced uvular fricative, like are harsher, breather version of a French 'r', or maybe like an extra hard 'jota' like how Spaniards tend to speak. For example, the only difference between how jíbaros pronounce the words 'ajo' and 'arróz' is the placement of the stress. Words that end in -ado,-edo, or -odo drop the -d. So something like 'intentado' becomes 'intentao', 'todo' becomes a long vowel as 'to'o', etc. A single 'r' before a consonent or at the end of a world becomes an 'L' so 'perdon' becomes 'peldon', amor becomes 'amol', and so on. Final 's' just don't exist, words are smashed together, slang abounds, blah blah blah. In fact, an 's' before a consonant is not only dropped, it causes the follow consonant to geminate with a slight breathy quality! Estoy becomes 'ettoy'

And obviously puting these things together makes everything worse:

Puerto Rico ---> Puelto Jico
Por todos lados ---> Pol to'o lao (I've gotten so used to this one that it's become the only way I can say this phrase lol)
Que estás haciendo? --> Que'ttaciendo


I was going to say, I agree with everything you said except the 'r'. My entire life raised around PR's I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced this way. The way you described it almost sounds like the Portuguese 'r'. But, I was looking into some research and it does appear to happen, albeit infrequently, in Dominican Spanish. DR Spanish is very similar to PR Spanish, but with even more oddities depending on the part of the island, e.g. 'comprar' = "comprai" or sometimes 'capital' = "capitarr". I've even heard 'esperando' become "eh'perandu". If you have any PR sound clips, I'd love to hear.

Typically, from all the PR's and Dominicans I know, I would expect 'arróz' to be pronounced the way you described it but with at least an alveolar flap added. So, /a'ɦrɔ/ or /a'ɦɾɔ/ (usually, with an alveolar trill though, not the flap). I'm also pretty sure sometimes I just hear /ɦrɔ/ in set phrases spoken fast, e.g. 'arróz con pollo' becomes "hro' com'poyo".

Anyway, what I'm referring to is called pre-aspiration, and is pretty common among caribeños (pretty sure I've heard it in other dialects as well).

Pre-aspiration of /r/
The trilled "r" in the Caribbean is often accompanied by glottal aspiration.


What you're referring to appears to be called the uvular /r/.

Uvular /r/: /r/ ➔ [ʀ̥], [χ]
In Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, trilled /r/ is often uvular.

source

Here is the research paper on the Trill Variation in Dominican Spanish.

I agree, PR Spanish is some of the hardest (I have a harder time understanding it than even DR Spanish). I've shared this on here before, but working with this guy's PR Spanish dialogs are super helpful (his whole channel is if someone knows nothing about Caribbean Spanish). Dialog starts at 5:00. Also, dissecting reggaetón songs can be helpful.




Edit: @2:15 he says 'arróz', and he might even actually say "a'jo" I can't tell. :lol:
Edit 2: @6:26 he definitely says 'ropita' = "jopita". Wow, no wonder I haven't been understanding this whole time lol.
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thevagrant88
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Sat Oct 30, 2021 12:18 am

Haha funny how that works. To better qualify myself, my ex-wife and her entire family speak that way. Her abuela in particular really let’s her uvula flap when she says words like “ropa”. First time I heard it I thought she was clearing her throat :lol:

And thanks for the link! My biggest resource for listening practice has been Chente Ydrach and his podcast. It’s great but I’m starved for more resources. Great stuff!

EDIT: Wow, this channel is a game changer. I’ve been looking for this exact thing for basically the entire time I’ve been studying Spanish.
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Mon Nov 08, 2021 2:31 pm

Lately I’ve developed are pretty intense interest in philosophy and metaphysics. Consequently, I’ve discovered writers such as ibn ‘Arabi and have been playing around a bit with Arabic.

So I’m really curious to hear others’ opinions on Arabic, because frankly, after Japanese this language feels like a piece of cake. I’ve talked about this before in other posts, but the grammar of Arabic that I’ve been exposed to so far is not all that disimular to Spanish or other Indo-European languages. The word order is very similar, the case system is straight forward enough and isn’t even used most of the time anyway, the logic behind verb conjugation and the role of verbs is almost the same, there are relative pronouns, etc. Hell, they even have the word “and” which, if you haven’t studied Japanese before, is a big damn deal :lol:. I want to stress that I’m just referring to grammar and forms of expression. The pronunciation, script, and Semitic vocabulary of course present their challenges, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of material I’ve encountered so far could be translated word-for-word into English and still be pretty acceptable kind of blows my mind.

I don’t doubt that if I continue exploring it will start to show its warts (I mean this in the best way possible) but until then I really have to wonder why Arabic is almost always ranked higher than languages like Vietnamese, Mongolian, Turkish, and other super distant and different languages on the FSI scale. I’m really curious about what your guys’ experiences are with Arabic and it’s difficulty relative to other languages.
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Re: Vagrant - Spanish Log and and Introduction

Postby thevagrant88 » Fri Dec 17, 2021 1:36 pm

So for the first time, I feel like I really confidently stuck to using "usted" and its corresponding verb forms. I was at work transporting a patient and for some reason, I was the only person at the facility who spoke Spanish. Anyway, the guy was from Mexico and while I've been able to speak pretty fluidly for some time now, I always seemed to fumble when it comes to formality.

Not today! So maybe once I accidentally slipped in a "te" or "a ti" but I was overwhelmingly successful at not botching it while also speaking at a natural pass. Interactions like this really sort of hammer the point home for me that communication is far and away the most rewarding reason to learn another language for me.

Anyway, hope you guys' studies are all going well.
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