On Learning Spanish

I have a story about learning Spanish…..

I took a couple Spanish courses in high school and enjoyed it, so when I went to uni for languages, I took a bunch more. I was to the point where I could have decent conversations in the classroom, and could understand a fair bit.
However.
One year my parents and I are in a Florida supermarket. My mom is searching for her butter-like margarine that will melt when she puts it on toast. Now if you knew my mom, you’d know this was very important to her….. 😀  So I go to ask the guy stocking the shelves, but he indicates he only speaks Spanish. So, being the educated lady I am, I start to speak Spanish with him. The only problem was, I didn’t know how to say “butter”. It had never come up in my school teachings about El Cid or Spain or any other normal topic taught in Spanish courses. To make matters worse, I also didn’t know the word for toast, or melt.
What I did know was the words for ‘hot bread’ and a heckuva lot of hand gestures.
The poor stock clerk had no idea what I was talking about and soon, he had a couple coworkers trying to understand me and my crazy-talk, and finally he beckoned his English-speaking boss over, who recommended a kind to my ever-persistent mother.

For that reason, I will never forget the Spanish word for butter ever again: mantequilla 😀

Advertisement

Ahh, the benefits of statistics. Now I know how to avoid evil.

So I started reading this article on a topic I was interested in.

Everything looked normal from the start:

(my thoughts in italics)

http://www.movieguide.org/news/3/74/living-together-increases-divorce

Living Together Increases Divorce

April 10th, 2008

Statistics show that people living together who then get married are increasing their chances of divorce more than 10 percent.

Hmm, interesting.  I always like when articles start out with “Statistics show…..” and then don’t source any actual statistics.  This should be fun.

Thus, 67% of cohabitating couples who get married eventually get divorced compared to 45% of couples who marry first before cohabitating.

Seems high!  I had no idea!

This shows that living together without being married leads to more objective evil in society, not less.

Objective evil?  Weird.  Well, I know people don’t generally like divorce, but I guess this writer really hates it.

Apparently, Jesus Christ was correct when he said in Mark 7:20-23 that all sexual immorality, including pre-marital sex, adultery and homosexuality, is evil. Yet, a few in Hollywood too often keep promoting these evils in our society, to the detriment and destruction of the world’s children and grandchildren! Only by fulfilling God’s mission to redeem the values of every area of life, including Hollywood and the mass media of entertainment, can people see a reduction of evil in their lives and in the lives of their families.

*stunned silence in brain*