Owed to the Spell Chequer

Owed to the Spell Chequer

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Man that was really hard to write even though I was just copying it over! My English professor gave that to us today, because he grew up in the time of dinosaurs and thinks spell check is utter fail and we shouldn't rely on it at all. I was pleased to note that Microsoft 2009 has a bit of a grammar check now, it's limited naturally, but if you, say, put weather where you needed whether it gives you a pretty blue squiggly. Too bad English is such a whore of a language and has grammar that will gladly bend you over and rape you in more ways than one.

As you all well know by now, I suck at grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It's one of the reasons that I have such a bitch of a time writing, because I'm always second guessing myself, and then I get all embarrassed cause I fail. I can't ever just sit down and write well. I can't even take the advice of great authors and just write a first draft, not care about spelling or grammar or punctuation because I'm like ocd about it. I always stop and go back, cross things out, add words, delete words, change words. For example my little "sci-fi" story thing I wrote a while back I wrote in a composition notebook, it was only like 4 or 5 pages in there cause my writing sucks, but by the time I actually went ahead and transferred it over to the computer I had such a hard time reading it cause of all the marks. I guess it's just a skill you have to learn with practice, but I don't know how to not go back. It's awful! In any case part of my English class I have right now, yeah I know summer school English fucking fail, we have to keep a journal because he says that the more you write the better you get. A theme I've mentioned here, indeed the whole purpose of this thingy, and so I'm going at it steadily. I'm thinking I might even transfer it on here at some point, not sure if I wanna put the whole thing at once or split it up into separate posts for separate entries. We'll see I guess.

I figured I'd share that little poem with everyone, because even though I suck at all that stuff, I still found it super amusing! And hey, I needed a "blog" post at some point, all the other blogs I read-not including Shem, Aaron, or Cory-are all short and kinda not intense? I can't think of the word right now, but they don't seem too content-y, just random thoughts and mini entries about daily lives. Not that mine is much better, but I think this is my first post that's just kinda eh and only took like 10 minutes to type up.

Wow so right before I posted this guess what I did, hit spell check. I'm hesitant to call that irony, but it made me shake my head at myself. I also must say I hate how FF doesn't really spell check stuff written in blogger, it catches some stuff, but hardly anything. I typo'd because earlier and it didn't even say anything.

Linguistic Autobiography

This was an assignment for my Linguistics 101 class that I found particularly enjoyable. Basically what we were suppose to do was map out our linguistic experience explaining the different languages we've been exposed to over the years. We were given a few areas that we had to address in the essay, but there are others I would like to add here so this will be a bit longer than the original.

Growing up here in New Mexico I was lucky enough to have more than my fair share of exposure to language. I experienced several different languages growing up including English, Spanish, and even bits of Polish. My experience with language further developed in high school when I first took my trip abroad, followed by a trip to Mexico, and most recently a around the world journey taking me from Europe to Asia. Language has always been fascinating to me, more so now as a Psychology major, the parts of the brain used, and even the function of language are all amazing to me, and hopefully someday I will learn another language fluently.

As far back as I can remember I was always somewhat exposed to Spanish, though not directly at home. I grew up here in Albuquerque, but my mom and I made weekend trips up to Las Vegas, New Mexico to visit my grandmother who could speak English well, spoke primarily Spanish. With that kind of exposure I did not so much learn Spanish, but more recognized the language itself. I was young enough that I started using words here and there that were Spanish, and indeed my whole family uses certain Spanish words for everyday items, including myself. As I grew older I realized that when asked if I knew Spanish I could not really say yes, but at the same time I could generally understand what my grandmother was saying to me and for the most part what my mother and grandmother were saying to each other. With this sort of naturally education I learned Spanish primarily as a spoken language, and yet not quite, I have always had difficulty speaking it, but understanding it comes much easier to me than either writing or speaking. The other part of growing up that I remember, though my memory is somewhat limited by how young I was, is my grandpa using some Polish phrases. This was not nearly as much as Spanish, seeing as he and my grandma spoke in Spanish, but it was enough that I recognize Polish over the other similar languages—like Russian or Czech. Now that I am older I learned that most of the phrases and words my grandfather used were curse words, but I suppose that’s better than using English curse words.

I have another very distinct memory of Spanish from my childhood, this one coming from a friend. When I was in second grade Cuban family moved in next door to me, amazingly they had a boy the same age as me. His name was Javier and we became fast friends. Him and his family fled Cuba, the year before landing in Florida, before moving to New Mexico, and to my knowledge his family was the first non-American family I had ever met. Earlier I said I could understand Spanish fairly well as a child, but I learned very quickly that the Spanish my family spoke was, though fundamentally the same, completely different from that of Cuban Spanish. Here my memory fails me, but I am told by family that for a large period of time I was using Cuban slang and developed a slight Cuban accent when speaking Spanish. I do not remember any of it now—the only thing I do remember is the absolutely amazing food Javier’s mother made for us—but I am sure if I heard Cuban Spanish again I would recognize it.

As far as my legitimate foreign language experience—meaning taught structurally in a classroom—I am sadly limited. I remember in fourth grade we were required to take Spanish at the magnet school I attended, but after moving to the North East Heights I did not take any language classes again until freshmen year of high school. As most students know, freshmen year is a joke, there are good students of course, but I was not one of them. I was still making the transition from being the “top dog” eighth grader to the bottom of the food chain freshmen and academics were not the top of my list. After that one year of Spanish 1 I did not take it again until I found out, a semester too late, that I needed another credit in language to attend UNM. So four years after my last language class, and frequently less visits with my grandma, I was in Spanish 101 at CNM. Now I plan on pursuing Spanish further here at UNM and hopefully do a semester abroad in Spain. The only immersion I have had in Spanish was a week in Mexico, though by the end of it I was using rediscovered phrases from my childhood again. The other language I would like to pursue in college is Italian, mainly because I have been to Italy twice.

When it comes to reading, writing, and, quite honestly, speaking I am most comfortable in English. That being said, after my limited experience with academic Spanish I am starting to grasp the sentence structure better, but still no match for even a first grade Spanish speaker. One of my goals language wise is to learn how to at least read Spanish fluently because I am an avid reader in English. From what I have heard, if you read a book in the language it was written in you will gain a whole lot more from it than a translation, so that would be amazing.

As far as my feelings for languages my thoughts are more conceptual than practical since I only speak English. I can say, though, that when it I have to speak Spanish I am always horribly embarrassed because despite my past Cuban accent, I now have a thoroughly white accent and completely fail at rolling my ‘r’s. One thing I am proud of, if one can truly be proud of such a thing, is my ability to recognize certain words in Italian and Spanish, though even this is very, very limited. Another, more silly thing I am proud of is that I know the word for ‘cat’ in 5 languages, certainly not going to get me far, but neat none-the-less. Language is truly an amazing thing, and hopefully someday I will learn multiple languages and have my kids learn foreign languages from a very young age.


On a side note I DESPISE Word, or maybe Blogger, one of the two. Pretty much if you write in the new word and cp over here the html fucks up. God damn it google fix this shit, or Microsoft stop making such shitty programs that are ONLY compatible with what you want them to be compatible with. Gah.

Vocabulary

First off I'd like to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, let the food be good, and the naps even better. As for you shoppers out there, get a good night's sleep and beware the crowds! I've only been out shopping once on Black Friday and it was pretty intense I'm not gonna lie. There's some damn good deals out there though, I might hit the stores so I can get a special someone a special something :)

Anyway, as all two readers out there have noticed, I have a wretched vocabulary. I also can't spell nor use grammar nearly the way I should. Alas I'm not terribly interested in the latter, Fire Fox and Word take care of spelling, and friends and teachers point out my grammar plenty. So that leaves me with my 3rd grade vocabulary. Now I know there's plenty of harebrained techniques out there, learn a new word every day and use it in as many sentences as you can, which probably work, but I'm lazy. A customer at my work came in a couple months ago looking for a nice hardbound dictionary. No joke some of those dictionaries are really nice, and I was stunned to find that he was going to highlight words he didn't know. He was about 60, a really nice, one of those cool old guys that I wanna be when I'm old. He explained that as he reads whenever he comes across a word he doesn't know he'll look it up and highlight it. I didn't really think much of it at the time, kinda a neat idea I'll admit, but nothing that captured my attention for long. I guess it stuck though, I've been almost compelled to buy a dictionary since I spoke with that guy. I thought it was just a novel idea seeing as I wanna write better, but it seems his little technique rooted itself into my subconscious and finally wormed it's way out. Naturally because I'm so cheap I never got around to buying a full price dictionary-- they're freaking expensive-- but on Sunday I found a Oxford Pocket American Dictionary of Current English for a steal of $2.99. Well really with my 33% discount it came to around $2.13 with tax :P. It took til just today, I dunno why now, to realize that old man was the reason I got the dictionary.

Granted I read a whole hell of a lot--clicky-- and I'm sure that there's plenty of words I don't know as well as I should. So I'm gonna try this highlighting thing out and maybe go through the dictionary like, what? At the end of every month? I'll work the kinks out I suppose. One thing I know I'll have trouble with is admitting I don't know a word and then sucking it up and looking it up. I've been trying it, its hard! I don't think people realize just how much they don't know until something like this, and indeed I know a lot of words through context but that isn't quite the same. Some authors I've been reading recently are rather clever with their word choice, I wouldn't have even known! I'm toying with the idea of even typing up the words and the definitions here in my blog, but I'm not so sure about it. The people I know for a fact that read my blog are all way smarter than I am and I'm not so sure I'm willing to show how utterly retarded I really am. Though, I know none of them will openly say how dumb I am, I know they'll think it! Maybe I'll type it up in word and when I feel a bit more confident post it here? We'll see haha. Now that I'm doing this I think it may actually help with spelling a little, maybe? I really don't know, but I'm optimistic.

Speaking of Word, I know a couple of my friends use Blogger and I had a question. Recently I have been writing some of my blog posts up in Word first and when I tried to post it Blogger freaked out. Apparently, Word 2007 has some weird HTML that copies over here and screws up Blogger. Has anyone else experienced this? I should probably just ask the Blogger people, but yeah.