SpanishI watched several episodes of
El internado, followed by a long discussion with my husband about how watching shit like that might actually contribute to my increasingly bad mood these days. Clearly I'm having another moment of "Why am still I in the wrong country?!" Another observation came up: my issues with local people and their communication with me are in his opinion due to a general cultural inferiority complex on their side, because I look like I'm from a country that is better off economically. Speaking to foreigners with the same tone with which they speak to 5 year olds - the same tone that is ever present in
El internado, hence my bad mood - is in his opinion an overcompensation for this inferiority complex and matches precisely the self-deprecating humour in "Ministerio del Tiempo". And since nobody speaks like that with me in Argentina he's probably right that this has nothing to do with my language skills at all
All this is fine and probably correct, but it doesn't change that I'm simply sick of it and continue to be stranded in this country! He suggested that I should probably stop watching
El internado but frankly, why? Quitting it won't change that people will continue to speak like that with me and I'll just feel more annoyed about letting "these people" distract me from the actual purpose of watching the series - namely improving my listening comprehension for Iberian Spanish. This series wouldn't be enjoyable even without all the children in it, simply because the writing is so bad. Let's be honest here, this whole exercise is torture for me in general, I dislike the accent and the writing is impossibly bad. That condescending tone of dealing with little children (and foreigners) is the least of the problem here! I'm almost through with it now, just 13 more episodes, I might as well finish it. For the next series I will avoid content with children like the plague though, since I don't have to go out of my way to make this exercise worse than it already is
My bad mood will probably already subside because we will be travelling to my hometown in a week and this is a place that is so horrifically awful that I moved away from there as early as possible. According to my parents and my brother right now it's actually worse than ever due to German politics. I'll probably be happy to be back here again afterwards! Basically a bit of shock therapy to sort out my internal compass again should work wonders. And besides, it's not as if I left Germany without reason. It was never really my home either due to ... politics.
I simply have some days when this eternal homelessness gets to me more than on other days, especially since I didn't have much choice in the matter of where I got stranded this time. And whose fault is it that I'm still stuck here? Well, answering that would be to talk about recent Argentinian politics and how it messed up my life. We don't want that here either! So, should I be mentioning any of this? I don't know ... occasionally language learning is super affected by cultural and political problems, especially when it's triggered by somewhat forced migrations and similar circumstances. In any case, no matter where I look, right now politics just makes me sick everywhere and being stranded here is probably just as bad as being stranded anywhere else on this messed up planet. Maybe I should be learning Klingon.
As for more Spanish content: After our long discussion we watched the Chilean movie
Neruda. I don't think that a story of political persecution that ends in exile was the right way to combat my blues under these circumstances, but well, at least it was fitting! As for Chilean: I have no experience with this accent, but still understood almost all of it. There was just one speaker who had 2 lines and was simply not understandable at all for me
The rest of the movie was not difficult and relatively close to the Argentinian accent with some more elongated vowels perhaps. Maybe when I'm through with my Iberian Spanish, Argentinian and Mexican audio SCs I'll continue with a mixed Latin American SC and throw in some Chilean movies too.
FrenchThere was a little French in
Neruda and I read a little bit more of
Photographie et societé by Gisèle Freund.