Pages

Popular Posts

Saturday, April 18, 2009

An F In Spanish

Seven years ago I began teaching our first born, Spanish. She always had a knack for it- she caught on really fast. She could roll her tongue when needed, and much better than me. Unfortunately over the years I have gotten slack with keeping that up and our son has NOT had an interest in it at all.
"How do you say cat in Spanish?" I would ask him. He would flare his little nostrils, look at my happy mommy face and reply, "el cato".
But I had a feeing he knew because he knew to put the article "el"in front. Everytime I asked him a word in Spanish he would just put an "o" on the end of the word and snicker. That little... sweet little thing.
Our daughter knows a fairly good amount of Spanish but due to me being slack, she doesn't know enough to have conversations... yet. I guess she would be considered a beginning Spanish student.
We were in Wally World (Wal-mart) and she began talking to two little girls (She never meets a stranger). They spoke to her in Spanish. She did well with the greetings- saying hello and how are you. She even did fairly well when one girl asked her how old she was.
"Setenta!" she answered and winked at me.
"No. That's seventy Maurissa. You are seven so it is 'siete'."
She winked her eye and gave me a thumbs up. "Okay mamacita!" she said. I gave her the old eyebrow raise that says "watch it!". She then went back to the girls.
They began speaking more Spanish and much faster now. I focused on the playdough in front of me on the shelf- pretending not listen. I wanted to see if she could figure out what they were saying. It had now jumped to Advanced level Spanish.
Then to my horror she began speaking a bunch of gibberish- nonsense that I can't spell- not even phonetically. (The following are the words- as best as I can spell it- that came out of her mouth)
"Reighereiiuteieirueihgbs, llgeiesieiuagijige, bueno uno kdfieuigeirueijgeiuge, la cuccuracha, ccochei-"
"Okay, okay Maurissa. Get over here," I interrupted, while looking to see if the girls' parents heard this mess.
I guess she just wanted to be involved in the conversation or maybe survival mode kicked in. I just didn't know.
"Adios," I said to the girls as I walked Maurissa away. I was so avergonzado (embarrassed). She had flunked Advanced Spanish.

No comments: