Category: Mexico

In Spanish you read and pronounce words as they’re written, it’s very clear. So clear that there’re no spelling bees in Spanish because words are spelled like they sound.

In English on the other hand, we have 26 letters but can make 50 possible sounds when speaking. And, there aren’t always easy rules to follow when trying to read out loud.

These are things native English speakers don’t know about, because they don’t need to. We grew up surrounded by English, like fish that aren’t aware they’re surrounded by water. We just picked up English from listening to the people around us.

An example of how tricky English can be. When there’s a “t” is between two vowels Americans will say it as a soft “d,”  water is “wa-der,” computer is “com-pu-der,” or butter becomes “bud-er.” It happens between words too -“get up” sounds like “ged up.” It’s tough to constantly remember what’s happening in English, but it’s easy to listen for.

The rules for the sounds in spoken English would give most students headaches and really slow their speaking while they tried to sort through rules, if they could even remember them.

Lately I’ve been working with a Mexican woman who speaks English pretty well. But for her work, she wants to improve her pronunciation.

So I try to get her to be aware of the patterns in English she hears and why words often sounds different than the way it’s spelled.

Most students can’t recall every rule that needs to be evaluated, it’d slow down any speaking they might do. By using a smaller list of concepts, rather than checking a large number of rules there’s much less to consider. Just keep an awareness of the concept in mind and let the speaking move along. 

We have a limited amount of decision making we can do in a day. That’s why President Obama has his suits and meals arranged for him. He has so many decisions to make daily that he doesn’t want to waste his allocated amount of decisions on mundane choices.

Stressing some concepts about what’s happening in spoken English, gives the student a flashlight to shine an explanatory light on sometimes confusing sounding pronunciations. That usually helps in recognizing and explaining situations they run into when they hear native English speakers talking.

The concept is this: Here’s why it is that way, but don’t sweat it, just be aware that there’re reasons English is often  spoken differently than the way it’s written. Instead of pronouncing English the way you imagine it to be, try to pick up English pronunciation by listening the way we did as kids.

In December we visited the wintering spot for monarch butterflies.Last week, I blogged about the butterflies we saw. It was impressive but apparently there should have been many more butterflies than we saw according to an article in the NYT yesterday about the dwindling number of the butterflies over the last five years.

The aerial picture here gives you an idea of the number of butterflies in one spot in Mexico, the orange-colored trees look that way because there are so many orange monarch butterflies clinging to each tree!

Below is a shortened excerpt of the NYT article:

Mexico is the southern terminus of an age-old migration widely called one of the world’s great natural spectacles in which monarch butterflies shuttle back and forth between  summertime havens in Canada and a single winter home in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains,. It is now in danger of effectively vanishing.

An internal compass guides the butterflies each fall to a small cluster of mountains where ideal temperatures and humidity allow them to rest, clinging to trees by the millions like brilliant orange capes. Then in March they set out on the 2,500-mile-plus trip north, breeding and dying along the way. It’s their descendants that actually complete the migration.

At their peak in 1996, the monarchs occupied nearly 45 acres of forest. …the span of forest inhabited by the overwintering monarchs shrank last month to less than two acres. Not only was that a record low, but it was just 56 percent of last year’s total, which was itself a record low. This is the third straight year of steep declines…

Over time, the number of butterflies has varied from year to year, sometimes wildly, but the decrease in the size of the migration in the last decade has been steep and generally steady.

The latest drop is best explained by a two-year stretch of bad weather. But the loss of habitat is a far more daunting problem. Monarchs lay their eggs only on milkweed which has rapidly disappeared from the Great Plains over the last decade.

As corn prices have risen, farmers have planted tens of millions of acres of idle land along the monarchs’ path and increased use of herbicides on fields of herbicide resistant corn all but wiping out milkweed that once sprouted between rows of corn and soybean.

Now the monarchs must travel farther and use more energy to find places to lay their eggs. With their body fat depleted, the butterflies lay fewer eggs, or die before they have a chance to reproduce.

The monarchs are the most visible victims of the habitat loss. A wide variety of pollinators and other insects, including many beneficial to farmers, are also disappearing along with the predators that feed on them.

There’s a bar in our small Mexican town owned by a sweet young gringo couple.

The bar struggles a bit. It’s in a pretty good location on main street, but it’s several blocks from the beach. There seem to be some “regulars.” And because the couple is well liked some other, non-regular, people pop by from time to time. Everyone in the bar is a local.

Here’s the thing I don’t understand. There isn’t much signage. Even the name of the bar isn’t easily seen. And more important than that, I think, is that there’s not a sign with the word”Bar” anywhere to be seen. And it is a bar. It’s very mysterious to me.

Everyone who drives or walks into town has to pass by the bar. It can’t be registering as a bar to visitors to town. People on vacation generally like to go out at night. I think vacationers would make a mental note of a bar as they passed by it, especially in a town with very few bars. And later, they’d return to where they saw a sign for a “bar.”

People don’t like unsolicited advice most of the time, but maybe I should work it into the conversation next time I’m there. It seems like a good idea to point to a bar if you want people who like bars to stop in.