canciones de cebolla y Piedad del Solar y Language.

In Chile, they have an expression, ¡Que Cebolla!, which literally translated means "what onion!" They use this to refer to anything really cheesy, for example: Enrique Inglesias songs, romantic comedies, Titanic, really sappy comments, etc, but ONLY in Chile.

Chileans seem particularly thrilled that I know this phrase, as it says it all in only two words!

This is all due to my lovely Spanish teacher Piedad del Solar. Piedad is Chilena, bilingual, and I been taking classes only with her for about the past month. We have become friends, and have gone out on several occasions and are in the midst of a book swap. We have often hilarious times, especially because she corrects my spanish as we go along, so sometimes it takes a REALLY long time for me to complete a thought. (I have also shared her teaching skills with all the other gringos here, in the hopes that soon we can stop speaking English. She is now teaching three others.)

With her tutelage, though not in excellent use, I now have every single verb tense there is to have under my belt. About 14 tenses or so. This is VERY exciting to me because now I technically can say whatever I want, it's just going to be a matter of putting together the pieces.

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When learning a language, one learns much about oneself. For example, I realized that you can ask for pretty much anything with "Puedo tener," "Can I have?" which I use about a million times a day. Also, I found myself needing to have Piedad translate for me "I would, I could, I wish I could." Turns out I spend a lot of time speaking in the Condicional. I now know the condicional and am using it a lot. "I would like to have," instead of just "Can I have"; "I would go to the cinema, but I have other plans," etc etc. V Satisfying!

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Some informational nuggets about the Spanish language.

There are EIGHT past tenses, and only TWO future tenses. My previous teacher Alejandra explained that every language tells a lot about the culture. Therefore, the Spanish people spend a lot of time looking backwards, as they have different tenses for very specific different periods of time. Also, clearly, they're less inclined to think about change and such.

Whereas we Americans and English speaking people have a lot of ways to talk about the future, and it's all involved in the future as well. (Only one of the Spanish future tenses is actually about only the future - the other is talking about things in the future from a point in the present or past...)