In Tlacochahuaya tonight, we worked on learning the second half of the Loteria deck in order to begin playing bingo. As we were practicing our newly acquired vocabulary, we were drawing pictures to accompany the words. The alarcrans (scorpions), aranas (spiders, but the students say “speeders” even though they know speederman is Spiderman), nopales (cactus), sold (suns), ulnas (moons), rosas (roses), and macetas (planters) are, for the most part, identifiable and well constructed. The hearts (corazons), birds (garzas, cotorros, pajaros), and various people (borracho, negrito, dama, catrin, diablito, musico etc.) are caricatures of their true selves.
We are using this deck to practice the “ll” as in umbrella(paraguas) in English and the “h” sound as in heart, hero, heron, and my name.
We are delighted by cognates and wish every word was a cognate. As a result we go from palma (palm) to rana (frog), but we want to say “ran.” We quickly realize that it is not so easy, but we have plenty of time to play with these words together.
I love these nouns (substantivos). They are the words stories are made of, but today in my Spanish class as I was answering the hypothetical question: what would you do if you were a man, I found myself handcuffed by my paucity of verbs, by the reality that I only have a pocket full of words at this point. So I say that I would be a cowboy with a tremendous mustache, great boots, and a black horse. I mean to say more, but my verbs wrangle me into the dust.
shewhodaresnothing 