Shameful: Mark Flowers defends racist College Republican tweet

hatred toward undocumented immigrants

I'm on a political discussion board and have been shocked by the lack of compassion and hatred toward immigrants.

argentina legal terms

armar - assemble, adjust, set up
tribunal is trial court
camara is 3 judge appeals court
societario/a is corporate
invesores - investors
cordalito - devaluation of peso
seña - deposit
boleto de compraventa - K for sale
planilla - form
a la brevedad - shortly
fecha limite - deadline
plan de inversión - investment plan
certificado de antecedente penal.
chanta - trickster
deliver- entregar
me estoy alegre o me alegro
croquis - master plan, exhibit A
ejecutar - execute
obligar a cumplir - enforce, make to complete
activos - assets
quilombo - clusterfuck

“high-priority chunks need to be taught"

NYT has an interesting piece on Chunking.

Here's the basic idea:

An idiom like “Make yourself at home” is rather tricky if you stop to think about it: the imperative verb “make” is followed by a second-person reflexive pronoun (“yourself”) and an adverbial phrase (“at home”), but it’s difficult to break the phrase into its components. Instead, we grasp the whole thing at once.

Ritualized moments of everyday communication — greeting someone, answering a telephone call, wishing someone a happy birthday — are full of these canned phrases that we learn to perform with rote precision at an early age. Words work as social lubricants in such situations, and a language learner like Blake is primarily getting a handle on the pragmatics of set phrases in English, or how they create concrete effects in real-life interactions. The abstract rules of sentence structure are secondary.

In recent decades, the study of language acquisition and instruction has increasingly focused on “chunking”: how children learn language not so much on a word-by-word basis but in larger “lexical chunks” or meaningful strings of words that are committed to memory. Chunks may consist of fixed idioms or conventional speech routines, but they can also simply be combinations of words that appear together frequently, in patterns that are known as “collocations.” In the 1960s, the linguist Michael Halliday pointed out that we tend to talk of “strong tea” instead of “powerful tea,” even though the phrases make equal sense. Rain, on the other hand, is much more likely to be described as “heavy” than “strong.”

My question is, do we learn foreign languages the same way? I know I tend to pick up chunks and use them frequently. For instance, where I once said "Necesito hacer ... [algo]" now it's "Tengo que hacer..." It's just a phrase, you hear it enough it gets into your usage. It's heavy rain instead of strong. More thoughts on this to come.

more spanish!

méxico vs argentina

pool = piscina (maybe alberca) vs. pileta

jacket = chamarra vs. campera

t-shirt = playera vs. remera

rivalry - rivalidad

to score a goal - meter un gol

el fútbol es gracioso (funny)

leftovers are sobras

to leave a place is "irse," not salir. salir is more to go out. Por eso, salí de la oficina al kiosko y volví. Siempre me voy de la oficina as las 7.

with infinitives and gerunds, the pronoun can go "por atrás." Vamos a disfrutarlo. Estoy disfrutandolo.

with all other tenses, the pronoun must go adelante.

spanish lessons

random things learned in spanish class recently:

the verb haber (there is/are, there exist) is used more with tangible things. Hay dos libros en la mesa. Hay mucha gente en la parque.

the verb existir (to exist) is used more with ideas, arguments, abstract things. Existe muchos argumentos en favor del matrimonio homosexual (ahora legal en argentina)

en argentina, to say "to drink," always use tomar. beber is more formal and sounds odd.

because = porque, ya que, o por lo que
therefore = por eso, por lo tanto, o en consecuencia

when discussing rights, es derecho de [verbo], por ejemplo, derecho de casarse, o derecho de vivir libre de la tortura
o derecho al/ a la [sustantivo], por ejemplo, derecho a la vida, derecho al matrimonio, derecho a la igualidad

línea = line, but in the sense of line in a drawing, also lane en una autopista o carretera
fila o cola = line, in the sense of a line of people. hacer fila o hacer cola = to wait in line

suyo/suya = his/hers
tuyo/tuya = yours
cuyo = whose, often used with inanimate objects

here is aquí in Mexico, acá here in Argentina
ahí o allí = there, but there closeby, within eyesight generally
allá = there, but more like way over there

Estoy acá en la oficina, el vino está ahí en la sala, y hay más vino allá en la vinoteca.

I am terrible at the difference between imperfecto and pretérito. typically, pretérito is for actions that happened once and are done. imperfecto is for actions that were 1) habitual, 2) used to describe, eg, ella tenía 30 años, brian era jugador muy malo, or 3) when there are two subjects, such as discurso indirecto, eg, me dijo que iba a ir a la fiesta o me mandó correo diciendo que llevaba a dos chicas.

imperfecto is used much more in telling stories: me dolía mucho la cabeza y por eso no salí a la fiesta. or when one action interrupted an ongoing action: Cuando caminaba a la oficina vi a dos personas.

Interestingly, to say the same, puede ser, Cuando estaba caminando a la oficina vi a dos personas. For most purposes, estaba + gerund and imperfecto mean the same thing, and for whatever reason, the estaba + gerund form seems more common.

but watch out, with mientras, you need parallel construction. mientras caminaba a la oficina, escuchaba una fiesta.

a borrador is a rough draft, but the verb borrar does not mean to draft, it means to erase.

(photo is potrerillos, lake near mendoza)

periquitos en la ciudad

Ayer, mientras estaba haciendo ejercicio en mi gimnasio, vi dos periquitos verdes sentados en la línea de teléfono fuera de la ventana -- apenas diez pies de mi cara. En Costa Rica, incluso en la ciudad, hay pájaros magníficos.

(parecen como esto)

There's also some fun tico slang. "Choza de la momia," which literally means "mummy hut," is slang for the house of the girl you're going out with. Choza is all purpose slang here for house. And momia sounds like "novia," meaning girlfriend. It may also be (not sure I heard this right), that a mummy is a monster, and at times girlfriends can be too.

And now, some new spanish vocabulary:
tiquismos - expressions unique to costa rica
retroalimentación/realimentación - feedback
hipoteca - mortgage
vid - vine
viñedo - vineyard
catar - to taste
catación - tasting
arbitraje - arbitration
maletas - suitcases; muletas - crutches
principio - beginning (as in, a principios de, o al principio)
sin fines de lucro - nonprofit
expectativa - expectation