Learning a new language makes me feel like a kid once again. It is long, hard, made of wood, and we use it to write, to sketch, and to paint, what is it? And my study partner would answer, “Pencil!”, in Spanish. And it would be my turn to ask, “What is it?”. “A handkerchief”. “What is it for?”. “To wipe nose!”. So on, and so on. For the obsessive compulsive me, this exercise is ideal to practice for our upcoming Spanish examination. Unfortunately Cynthia is far from being an OCD. And she prefers to watch television instead.
Learning should be fun. The beauty of a language is not what the words mean but what one can do with them. To that extend, I love learning expressions. Every culture has its unique way to express a certain idea. In English, there is a saying: Every cloud has a silver lining. I think it is beautiful, though at time of a heavy downpour, I can hardly find any silver lining. Dark patches all over the sky, that is all I see. But expressions like this stick to our minds. In Spanish, the same idea is expressed in a more practical term. No hay mal que por bien no venga, which roughly translate to good things won’t come when nothing is bad. Don’t think too hard on the logic involved. My mind goes into an infinite loop whenever I ponder too hard on the Spanish version of every cloud has a silver lining.
Learning new words, I must say, is hardly possible without dictionaries. Kids nowadays are so blessed. The online free ones are even better than some of the paid ones. By right, I would imagine that with an explosion of readily available online knowledge, kids nowadays should be super kids in no time. Yes? One may be awed by the movie Matrix when Neo learns Kung Fu via an instant download from an optical disk. The 20 years younger version of me back in the nineties would too be awed by the fact that one can learn the overview of Spanish history – or any topic of my choice – with a click of a button at Wikipedia today. Or to learn how to bake a cake at YouTube. Perhaps with the explosion of online knowledge comes an explosion of distractions in an equal magnitude. That may be why our kids are still not the super kids we would have expected. Or because knowledge is so readily available, we seldom make an effort to memorize. That would explain why I keep searching the same Spanish word online again and again. The penalty of not memorizing a word is another click of a button. Hardly a penalty at all.
Learning objects is more fun that I thought. Cloth hanger in Spanish is called percha. Informally speaking, ser una buena percha is an expression that means to have a good figure (for girls). I suppose if one’s body is good enough to hang clothes, one’s figure must be good? My favorite one is pañuelo that means handkerchief. Instead of saying it is a small world, there is a Spanish expression that says the world is a handkerchief (¡el mundo es un pañuelo!).
Learning online could be distracting. What does a comb use for? Peinarse. I looked up the word and was attracted by the poetic usage of the verb comb (peinar). Las aves peinan las olas depicts the beautiful graphical scene of the birds gently combing through the waves. And by looking up the meaning of secarse (to dry), I stumbled upon the sentence me sequé las lágrimas (I dried my tears), and was intrigued by the conjugation of the first person past tense of ‘to dry’. Soon, I am staring at how to express crying one’s heart out in Spanish (llorar a lágrima viva). I am pretty sure none of these matters for my Spanish examination. But I think I am too old to study solely for an examination. Don’t you think?
