Raising Bilingual Niños: Tip #4

3 Sep

“Trabalenguas”, (Tongue twisters), are fun and they help one practice pronunciation. Here are a few you can try yourself, or with the niños.

Erre con erre cigarro,
Erre con erre barril.
Rapido corren los carros,
Cargados de azúcar al ferrocarril.

—

Dime cuantos cuentos cuentas cuando cuentas cuentos.

—

Pedro Pablo Pérez Pinto Prieto,
Pinta puertas por poco precio,
Para poder pasar por Perú
Por el Partido Popular.

—

Cómo quieres que te quiera si al que quiero no me quiere como quiero que me quiera.

—

Pepe Pecas pica papas con un pico.
Con un pico pica papas Pepe Pecas.

—

Tres tristes tigres tragan trigo en un trigal.

—

Pablito clavó un clavito.
¿Qué clavito clavó Pablito?

—

In the video below I tried my 3 favorite tongue twisters. Native Spanish speakers, feel free to let me know how I did. My husband isn’t very objective when it comes to helping me with pronunciation. Sometimes he’ll tell me something sounds great and later I find out it wasn’t pronounced correctly. When I ask my husband why he didn’t tell me, he just shrugs and says, “But you sound cute!” … So I guess as much as I love his English mistakes, he must like my Spanish mistakes, too.

—

Want all your Spanish sounds in just one sentence? Well, just like English has “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” to include every letter in the alphabet for handwriting practice, Spanish has the following sentence:

La cigüeña gigante bebió ocho copas de whisky, más quince jarras llenas de fría cerveza rubia, y enseguida huyó en un taxi.

Translation:

The giant stork drank eight glasses of whiskey, plus fifteen full mugs of cold pale ale, and escaped in a taxi right away.

It’s a little weird, verdad? … Anyway, the website, SpanishLearningHacks.com has more information on this particular sentence, and other great tips, so I highly recommend a visit to their site as well.

Links:

Spanish tongue twisters at WikiQuote

Spanish tongue twisters at AlphaDictionary.com

Salsa Picante

2 Sep

As I mentioned the other day, I made spicy salsa using one of the habanero chiles a friend sent to me. Well, my husband brought the jar of salsa into work to share with his co-workers, (who are mexicanos.) His co-workers said it tasted good but it wasn’t spicy enough for them – And so I made another batch of salsa, partly out of kindness and partly for a little venganza. “You want picante?” I said smiling, dumping in several habaneros, “I’ll give you picante.”

So it came to be that I made a salsa so picante that one small drip of it on the tip of my tongue induced coughing. My husband brought it to work, and while his co-workers ate it the way I eat ketchup, they said it was nice and spicy.

At dinner time, the niños insisted they wanted to try it. I love letting them try new things and they do eat spicy foods most other kids won’t touch – but this salsa was super picante and I didn’t think it was a good idea. They persisted and I gave in, (after I got the video camera, por supuesto.) I expected some funny reactions but it looks like I have two little machos on my hands. They refused to admit it was spicy, (though I noticed them drinking more than usual afterward!)

In the background at the end you can hear an incredulous Suegra questioning my oldest son. You can also hear my husband telling them not to cry so it’s no wonder they decided to be tough guys.

Sisters, Strangers & Starting Over

2 Sep

Book Review: What happens when a niece you’ve never met before shows up on your doorstep needing to be taken in, and the ensuing turmoil of painful memories of a lost sister and a life disrupted threatens to destroy your marriage?

Sisters, Strangers and Starting Over, is the second book I’ve read by Belinda Acosta. Like her first book, (Damas, Dramas and Ana Ruiz), Acosta’s talent is in drawing out each character’s deepest thoughts to show the motives behind their behavior, so that the reader feels immense empathy. Also, when it comes to writing about marriage, I rarely see myself and my husband in fictional characters but Acosta completely nails it.

The unapologetic Spanglish writing style she uses is a treat for English/Spanish bilinguals and the other thing I absolutely loved about this book was that the couple reflects the changing face of families today in the United States. (The husband in the story is Anglo and the wife is Latina. How many of you who married gringos can relate to having a name like “Beatriz Sanchez-Milligan”?)

Escritura y Diferencías

1 Sep

September is a special month to me. It’s the month I started this blog last year, and though my husband and I met each other at the end of August all those years ago, September is when we became novios. And so today has me thinking about the early days, when we were new to each other, and I was still discovering all the little things about him that endeared him to me…

I first noticed my husband’s escritura, (handwriting) within minutes of meeting him. He gave me his name and phone number, and instead of the chicken-scratch I was used to seeing from American boys, I held in my hands something not only completely readable, but strangely intriguing.

Yes, after all these years, I still have it.

As novios, I looked forward to his love letters, not just for the words themselves, but the way in which they had been written – the form of each individual letter. Everything about him reminded me of how different we were, from our inability to communicate at times, (I read his love letters with an English-Spanish dictionary by my side), to something as simple as the way we write the letter “e”.

They say “love is blind”, and while I agree with the sentiment, it isn’t literally true. We saw our differences, and were fascinated by them.

Many handwriting experts claim you can’t tell a person’s ethnicity or nationality by their handwriting, but again, I say this isn’t true. (Link is to a PDF titled: “Spanish Handwriting And Spelling” – a document meant for non-native Spanish speakers deciphering Spanish documents to extract information. The fact that such a document exists proves that there are differences!)

Maybe it isn’t fool proof, but I’m able to pick out the handwriting of native born Salvadorans from that of U.S. born Americans. While I haven’t seen handwriting samples from all Latin American countries, everybody in my husband’s family – his mother, his sister, his brother, his cousins and uncles – even completely unrelated Salvadorans I’ve met, all have similarities in their handwriting. I can’t tell you if it’s a uniquely Salvadoran handwriting or a Spanish-speaking/Latin American way of writing, but it is different – and noticing a difference is not a bad thing.

In this politically correct world we’re admonished to look for the similarities, but I say go ahead and look for the differences, and celebrate them, because they’re beautiful.

Remedios (a guest post)

31 Aug

Mi gran amigo, Joe Ray, is back with another entertaining guest post. (You may remember his first guest post here on Latinaish.com, “Spanglish…El bad boy de linguistics“.)

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!

—
El Remediosphere®
by Joe Ray

My mother was raised on a rancho in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. When you got sick, you had remedies that worked for everyone, you went to a sobadora or a curandera. And if things were really bad, you were taken into town.

This is old school. No pinche WebMD for research. If you wanted to know something, you asked your comadre about it. You were part of the Collective Comadre Network.

One common herbal remedio is yerba buena. Yerba buena’s great stuff, it’s used for everything from stomach ailments or flavoring mojitos. My mom also kept around a glass jar filled with rubbing alcohol that contained marijuana, which she would rub on her varicose veins. Aloe vera was always around as well.

Having asthma as a kid, my mom would rub Vicks (AKA vaporu, vivaporu, or el veex) all over my chest, usually along with other very nasty smelling herbs/weeds. Not yerba buena but my guess is that it was probably more along the lines of yerba mierda. After rubbing it on my chest, she’d make me put on a heating pad over my shirt and blanket. I can’t stand Vicks. I knew some kids ate the stuff. I like the smell of eucalyptus, which she would also boil leaves into a tea but I still find Vicks to be quite repulsive.

Growing up in Arizona, we were only 2 hours from the Mexican border, so we would go visit family, shop and so forth. I recall going to a yerberia for dried rattlesnake strips to eat daily in order to cure my asthma. Never having seen a snake cough, this made perfect sense to me. The meat tasted okay (like jerky), but didn’t really cure me.

Prior to that trip, Doña Yoya in San Luis once gave me a little black bunny. I think the rabbit was supposed to absorb the asthma and I’d be cured. She lived a couple of houses away from my aunt and was a curandera who had a bunch of animals. Anyway, that didn’t work. This rabbit was the first pet I ever had. The rabbit proved to be quite the trouble maker, and eventually we ate it

I also remember one family friend using bleach for everything from ant bites to other skin ailments. That always had a nasty smell to the rub. Every once in a while I smell bleach and think of that. But it still doesn’t repel me the way Vicks does.

I went online the other day and asked friends a little about what type of remedios they remember from their childhoods.

Here’s a small sampling of what I heard back:

Suzi: We all know what cures-VICKS and 7-UP!

Veronica: I thought all cures came from a lil shot of tequila

Tony: Lemon honey and tequila for coughs-Mexican Nyquil. Olive and castor oil after a hot bath in the winter.
Note- Tony also remembers his father using the pot in the alcohol for arthritis.

Celeste: Vaporu. That with some salpicot y una limpia con huevo and whatever weeds grew in the backyard. Santo remedio! Anything that was sting related had saliva in it: aver que te pongo ajo, con un poco de saliva.

Gennaro: Mi madre used to pull the skin on our back really hard to cure empacho, until today I don’t know wtf that was about.

Lonnie: Mentholatum smeared under the nose. My suegra would shove it up her nose. I think she used a couple of tablespoons.

……….

Culturally, we have a lot of herbs, beliefs and rituals that we relate to. These range from lighting candles, to a limpia con huevo (go ask about that one), to rhymes. Think of that little kiddie healing rhyme:

“sana, sana,
colita de rana…”

Before the internet, before WebMD, there was the Collective Comadre Network, which will always be around. Many of us continue these healing traditions. They are part of who we are and where we come from. It’s all part of the Remediosphere®. What are some of the remedios you remember?

—

Author Bio: Joe Ray is a Latino painter and printmaker living in Scottsdale, Arizona, as well as Creative Director and President of Estudio Ray, a visual branding/marketing agency in Phoenix.

My husband…Manolo?

30 Aug

I wanted to write about all the things I love about my husband, so I started to make a list. Some of the things I love are his voice, his accent, (in Spanish and English), his laugh. I decided to record him talking, but it didn’t go exactly as planned. He was tired and being stubborn… and then he got downright silly.

And as if I haven’t already shown how weird I am, this video confirms it. If you’re wondering why I wanted him to say “lagartija” (lizard), it’s because I love the way that word sounds in Spanish. I don’t know what it is, but that word makes me a little weak in the knees, (native Spanish speakers are laughing at me right now. Está bien.) … I love the word so much that Espinoza Paz’s “La Lagartija” is like a love song to me.

Other words I was trying to get my macho to say were my name and his name, because I like the way he says those, too.

To my native English speaker friends, which words do you love to hear in Spanish? … Native Spanish speaker friends, which words do you love to hear in English?

Ask Señora López: How do Latinas Keep Their Man?

30 Aug

George over at SofritoForYourSoul.com has posted the second question in my “Ask Señora López” column. The question this time: How do Latinas keep their man? … Come find out and add your 2 cents in the comments!

Ask Señora López: How do Latinas Keep Their Man?

Habaneros by mail

28 Aug

I have been receiving a lot of surprising things in my mailbox lately. Today it was a package containing fresh habanero chiles from the garden of my friend Luis, photographer turned gardener! (He also sent me a beautiful photo I had admired on his website.)

Fresh habaneros all the way from Luis's garden in California

These came at a great time because I watched a video of another friend, Juan, making salsa, and I wanted to try one of his techniques. So I assembled everything I needed and put on a pair of gloves, (because I had a bad experience being burned by chiles before. Now preparing such things turns into more of a medical procedure than cooking!)

First, the roma tomatoes, (about six), and one habanero were put on the comal to slightly roast the skin. (It seems silly, one lone habanero, but trust me. One is plenty.)

(Roasting the tomatoes and chile first was the idea I got from Juan.)

I think that when they’re done roasting, some people remove the skin, but I left it on. My husband helped me cut open the little habanero and remove the seeds. I wore plastic gloves. Mi macho said he didn’t need gloves and his hands got a little burned.

The tomatoes and the habanero went into the blender, (I’m not as awesome as Juan. I don’t own a molcajete.) Into the blender I also added 1/4 of a large onion, a few spoonfuls of minced fresh garlic, a little handful of fresh cilantro, 1 medium green pepper, 1 tablespoon vinegar and a few dashes of salt. (All very technical measurements, verdad?)

One minute in the blender and ya estuvo! That salsa is so picante pero so good. My husband was the first to taste a spoonful and you would never know he’s Salvadoran by the grito mexicano que salia de su boca.

¡Aaaaajúa! :)

Los Pikadientes de Caborca

26 Aug

I don’t care if people think it’s naco music. I love these güeys. I think they’re hilarious. Their music and videos always put a smile on my face. I can’t even count how many times I’ve listened to La Cumbia del Río. I dare you to listen and sit still. No dancing! No smiling!…Es imposible!

And the other day, I discovered their tribute to Michael Jackson – a rendition of Billie Jean. Qué padre! His accent makes this so super chido. Now I know what is lacking in my life – Music sung in English by people who don’t speak English fluently. You think I’m joking but I’m serious. I really love it. Makes me secretly wish my husband’s English hadn’t gotten so good ;) Some women want smooth talking guys, but I think broken English is really cute. I’m loca, ya sé. Just goes to show, there’s someone for everyone out there.

Raising Bilingual Niños: Tip #3

26 Aug

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

Reading is a big deal at my house. Everywhere you look are stacks of books and it gives me so much happiness to see them there waiting for me. Likewise, my boys have hundreds of books for themselves. I’ve read to my niños every night since they were babies and taught them to read before they stepped a foot into school.

Left: My favorite Spanish alphabet book, “F is for Fiesta” by Susan Middleton Elya / Illustrated by G. Brian Karas

Without going into too much terminology, the method I used to teach my boys how to read employed the use of flash cards and what are referred to as “High Frequency Words” or “Sight Words“. These are the most commonly used words in a language. By practicing with the flash cards, (showing the child the card and saying the word), they soon memorize it and learn to read it on “sight”. (This is in addition to teaching them the alphabet and phonics first.)

This worked well for my kids and so, after practicing with them in the Silabarios, (Spanish phonics books), over the summer, I am now teaching them to read “High Frequency Words” in Spanish.

FREE FLASH CARDS!

I made the flash cards and you can use them too. To download the PDF of the 175 most common words in Spanish for your niño go HERE. Once you’ve downloaded it, open the PDF in Adobe, print (I recommend using card stock, but regular printer paper works just fine.) – Cut them into individual cards and then they’re ready to use!

“Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!” – Betty Smith/A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

← Older Entries