Recent Realizations

I am now entering my last month in Logroño, which sounds a bit odd as I'm also reaching my peak level of comfort here. Among many other things going on (which I will discuss in future posts) the regional and local elections are being held on Sunday. Political campaigning here is a bit more active and open than in North America - posters advertise candidates, but also public rallies at which they will appear. There are also cars riding around town with speakers on their roofs, delivering announcements about their party's positions. There are also a few more visible parties here - I can name five off the top of my head - which doesn't begin to include the smaller alternative ones.

Beyond that, this campaign is much the same as the ones back home: lots of talk about jobs and taxes, plenty of photos of candidates and campaign slogans that get burned into your memory. On that note, the PP (the conservatives, quite popular in La Rioja) had a slightly embarrassing moment early on, when they released an English slogan ("I'm with you"), probably to build off the fame of Obama's "Yes we can." It fell flat when people realized the irony of a party that supports public spending cuts advertising in a language that Riojans will only understand with a strong public education system.

Also politically speaking, you may have heard news of the "Egypt-like" campout that is happening in Madrid at this very moment. A small cousin of that larger demonstration has appeared in Logroño's Plaza del Mercado, but I have yet to see it. Although news coverage of politics in Spain tends to be more reasonable than in the US, they have already started referring to this demonstration as the 15-M movement - the movement of the 15th of May. Considering that Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement in Cuba was similarly referred to as the 26-J movement - for 26th of July - that's quite a title for what seems to me to be a fairly typical protest. But I do notice that news outlets seem less willing to condemn the protesters than they are in North America...take from that what you will.

But the real reason I wanted to write this post is a bit of a revelation on the language front. Improving my Spanish continues to provide challenges and successes, one of which is reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in Spanish (Harry Potter y las reliquias de la muerte). But I had a major realization a few weeks ago. Learning a language does not just depend upon learning grammar and vocabulary - it also requires you to learn how people use it. For example, some things that are easy to say in English translate to rather long Spanish words, and vice versa, meaning people are more likely to use certain turns of phrase in one language than they are in the other.

This hit me when I was grocery shopping and a child in front of me was carrying a Kinder egg to add to his mom's groceries. The cashier said the following: "Tienes que darme el huevito, y luego te lo doy, vale? [She rings it up] Toma, chiquitín." Putting that in English word order and literally translating, she said: "You have to give me the little egg, and later I give it to you, okay? Take, lad." Although that would make sense in English, it is not what we would say either.

Perhaps the best example of this trend is the Spanish word igual. It has a variety of translations, but none of them encompasses its use, at least in Spain. Rather than use the complicated subjunctive forms that every student of Spanish struggles to learn, many Spanish people begin sentences with igual to imply uncertainty. For instance, to say "I might take a bus," my Spanish education would teach me to say "Podría ir en autobús." But my experience here has taught me a much easier way to say it: "Igual voy en autobús." Its literal meaning would be "Equally, I go by bus," but for the reasons mentioned above, its understood meaning is different. If I ever needed validation of my decision to learn Spanish by surrounding myself with it, this is it.