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Category: Language

  • More Spanish practices

    I had a Spanish lesson today, so I packed extra tofurkey sandwiches to eat on the way from office to class, and then, quite predictably, ate them all by four in the afternoon because I was hungry. Leaving the office today, bamboozled and tired from my ever-dripping nose, I took a train to Bugis rather […]

  • No hay mal tiempo, solo mama ropa

    I had a Spanish lesson today, so after a sluggish run and a cappuccino, I went over to Bugis to stuff more words into my brain. Today’s lesson was on holidays and weather; being British, the intersection of Spanish, holidays and weather is two weeks in Alicante getting a terminal case of sunburn while eating […]

  • To be or not to be

    There are two verbs that mean "to be" in Spanish: ser and estar. As described to me, one is essential and the other is contingent. That is, ser is for describing things that you always are: soy ingles, soy un hombre, and so on, whereas estar describes transient states of being: estoy cansado, estoy encima […]

  • Me gusta …

    Tonight I had a Spanish lesson after work, to make up for the one I missed when I was in Hong Kong. It was quite a different dynamic to going to class on Saturdays; for a start, I was in an evil temper after work, and my mood wasn’t improved by getting lost on the […]

  • Spanish practices

    Today we did conjugation of irregular verbs in our Spanish lesson, along with reflexive verbs. Reflexive verbs are things like llamarse, which in first person singular becomes me llamo (I am called); until today I hadn’t cottoned on to reflexive verbs having infinitives that weren’t things like ver or comer or salir; reflexive verbs all […]

  • Any joy with that?

    I was called across the office today to arbitrate a point of English. Somebody had received an email about a fairly monotonous task they’d been attempting, asking "did you have any joy with that?" I looked at the email. I looked back at the lady asking me about the email. I asked what was the […]