Me cortaron mal el pelo

Today a collection of amusing moments:

Quality of Sound
We continue to be very dedicated to speaking in Spanish all the time, even with just each other. Sometimes this means it takes two or three tries to get our meaning across clearly, but after two months of practice we have made enormous progress so we know in the long-run it will be worth the effort. :)

However, our current level of fluency doesn´t always have the speed we would like. This can lead to some hilarious, if somewhat misadventurous moments. For example, today I was reviewing some vocabulary through Quizlet (an awesome online vocab study tool, btw) which has a particular tool that reads vocab out loud so that you can type what you hear. This was helpful for me, but distracting for Nathan.
No problem, I thought. I´ll wear headphones.
So I popped the headphones in, plugged them in and suddenly the next word resounded in my ears with such force that I almost fell off my chair.... I forgot that while my computer speakers are poor (and I therefore have the volume cranked all the way up, pretty much all the time), our headphones are actually of a fairly high caliber... And as such, the volume was about 9 settings too high...

Nathan, meanwhile, witnessed the whole event and tried to warn me, but in the few seconds he had between the plugging in of the headphones and the next vocab word sounding, the translation of ¨Wait! Turn the volume down first!¨ didn´t quite make it out in time...

Eventually we hope to reach a point where even in time sensitive situations we can find words quickly!

Haircut Research
Even after you can communicate fairly fluently on a basic level, there are always so many more specific words to learn. The other day I decided it was time to learn some hairdressing vocabulary (in preparation for a haircut). How does one say ¨sideswept bangs¨ for example? Or ¨textured layers¨? Having never had a haircut in Spain before, these words were not yet part of my vocabulary.

With an interest in avoiding a strange or random haircut due to miscommunication, I did some research and now have all the words I need (hopefully). Along the way, I also found an article that pointed me to this video, which I found quite hilarious. Hopefully I will end up better off than the singer did with his haircut.

Acento Andalu(z)
Last weekend Nathan went on a hike organized by the Campus Ministry group. It is always interesting to listen to the variety of accents in that group, as many students who participate are Erasmus students (which means they are on their required year abroad of their undergrad) from many different European countries. However, on this particular outing there were mostly local students, which meant the predominant accent was Andalusian.

The acento andaluz can be a bit hard to understand for foreigners. They speak very rapidly and they ¨eat¨ many of their consonants. This is especially true with ´s´, ´z´, and ´d´ and most endings of words. (For this reason, it is always referred to as ¨el acento andalu´, not ¨el acento andaluz¨ because that ´z´ is dropped)

Nathan, with his singer´s ear (and more importantly, his singer´s experience of studying, practicing, and mimicking vowels in many different languages), got to listen to and practice the acento andalu all day. At the end of the hike he was taking a photo of the whole group and counted out ¨Uno, Do, Tre¨ (instead of uno, dos, tres) and the priest who organized the group proclaimed with much laughter (and some pride) that Nathan now speaks Andalu! ;)

While the locals are very proud of their Andalusian accent, within the global community of Spanish speakers it is not exactly the most posh of accents :) We´ve been joking that we might need to spend some time soon in a different part of Spain before Nathan´s accent becomes irrevocably andalu  ;)