Some notes on living in the Spanish-speaking country.
Because I’m getting new rent cars every time I travel, I end up with
different radio stations I listen to, because sometimes I’ve been too lazy to
re-find the ones I previously liked. My
favorites thus far have been a station that plays only love songs, a station
that has political round-table discussions in the mornings, a radio station
that plays Christian praise music, and one that has preaching on most of the
time.
The Christian music and love song stations I like because I have an
idea of the context already, and thus it’s easier for me to figure out what
they are saying. Side note: I found the
Christian station because I was surfing the stations and, after stopping on
this one for 10 seconds, I realized the music was so simple musically and the
lyrics were pretty repetitive that it had to be Christian praise music, since
no regular song would get airplay if it were that bad. Unfortunately, I was correct.
The preaching I like because it typically consists of one person
speaking for a long time, with dramatic pauses for emphasis which allow me to
catch up. The political dialogue I like
because they are civil and don’t talk over each other, so it stretches me to
follow the conversation but not terribly so.
Spanish has one structural difference vs. English that makes a lot of
sense to me: adjectives generally come after the nouns they modify. IN English I might describe a “big, old, green,
Chinese vase.” You have to retain all
those adjectives in the abstract before I finally give you something concrete
(vase) for them to modify. Spanish is
the opposite – closer to saying “the vase that is big, old, green and
Chinese.” In the second way, the picture
can grow in specificity as I describe it, but you have an easy starting point.
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