Hola,
So it’s been about two weeks that I’ve been here in South America. I’d love to see it all, but with only about a month here, I’ll only be staying in Peru.
The flights here were more than 20 hours in total not including time spent in airports for stopovers but due to timezones, I landed in Lima the same day I flew out. More time to spend here? No, not really – I’ll spend two days flying back. But, that’s all part of flying long distance.
I’m about halfway through my trip right now. I’ve visited Lima, celebrated the New Year and my birthday in Trujillo and now I’m in Cusco. The first half week was mainly just sightseeing and exploring. In the second week, I did a Spanish crash course which was really helpful as I can at least get directions and understand menu boards. So now I’m continuing with Spanish classes Monday to Friday for this week and the next while I homestay with a local Peruvian family. There’s no better way to learn a language than to immerse yourself into the culture 🙂
In the afternoons, I’m volunteering with an organisation which is trying to assist a less privileged community. I’m mainly painting and doing some labour work for their school for a few hours a day. It’s honestly more tiring than I thought it’d be to learn Spanish and volunteer at the same time, but it feels great. On weekends, I’ll be doing trips to other cities, and I’m pretty hyped for my trek starting next Saturday to Machu Picchu!
At first, learning Spanish was a lot easier than I expected it to be because of the similarity to English and the similarity of some words. But it’s gradually getting more difficult with many many words to memorise and lots of grammatical rules with exceptions. I haven’t tried reading many books in Spanish yet but I’m planning to try the Spanish translation of DxD at the end to see how much of it I can understand.
Yo se que algunas personas de habla espanol leen mi blog. Yo apreciar todo conversacion o preguntas para mejorar mi espanol. Por favor disculpe mi limitado de vocabulario y gramatica. Es dificil recuerdo las gramatica reglas y palabras. Yo estoy probo escribir esto sin el diccionario, mi cuaderno, o Google Translate.
Anyway, it’d be a real pain to type everything in Spanish while I’m still learning the basics. I probably won’t have another post until I get home so I’ll give you an update then. I’ve read some of the comments, not all, so I’ll get back to everyone when I get home as I only have my phone at the moment.
It seems like Baka-Tsuki is still ok, although I don’t know the details. For those who have asked and will ask – I’ll continue translating regardless of what happens. But I really like Baka-Tsuki so I’d gladly help out.
Hasta luego
Good that you enjoy your trip to Perú 🙂
I hope someday i can travel there too…despite being much closer than you…
By the way I am from Barranquilla, Colombia
Yo soy uno de los que te agradece tu esfuerzo en la traducción de estas novelas. Y nada mejor que hacerlo en mi lengua materna, el español. Un saludo desde Sevilla (España)
Gracias, es bueno a escuchar esta. No tengo muchos oportunidades en Australia a practicar mi español entonces esta es muy servicial.
A couple tips for your Spanish:
-You can type the letter ñ with AltGr+4, then n.
-I know that verb conjugation can be difficult being accustomed to English verbs, but I’d suggest you, while you still haven’t got a knack on the three basic regular conjugations, to stick with the infinitive for the present unless you are sure you got it right. It’s better to speak like an indian from a cowboy flick than getting the conjugation wrong.
-There should be a key on your keyboard for acute accent (since in English there are some loanwords that have it). It’s important to use it as some words mean something very different with and without it. The bassic rules for accents are 1) if the stress is in the last syllabe, it’s writtten with accent if it ends with a vowel, vowel + n or vowel + s, 2) conversely, if the stress is in the next-to-last syllabe it’s written without accent in those same cases, but with it in the rest, 3) if the stress is in any other syllabe, it’s written with accent as a general rule, and 4) if the word has just one syllabe, unless stated otherwise it’s written without accent. There are some exceptions when breaking diphtongs, with compounds and diacritics, but those are for later.
-Remember that, the same way as British English and American English have their differences, Spanish is spoken in many countries by a lot of people and thus there are a lot of local variants.
As a bonus, just for didactic purposes, this is how your message should have been written if it were in spanish Spanish (i.e. from Spain; sorry, but while I have no problems understanding it, I don’t know how to write in peruvian Spanish):
Sé que algunas personas de habla española leen mi blog. Aprecio toda conversación o preguntas para mejorar mi español. Por favor, disculpad mis limitaciones de vocabulario y gramática. Es difícil recordar las reglas de gramática y las palabras. Estoy probando a escribir esto sin diccionario, mi cuaderno ni Google Translate.
Accents may be something worth having in mind but by no means should he tackle it this early on. I’ve lived in Spain for about 10 years and I still had problems with remembering the rules for accents in a recent test.
If he continues studying spanish it’s recommended to learn them, but if he’s just learning to say hello, good bye and the basics, I wouldn’t pressure him.
Thank you so much for the help Kemm! Are you a native Spanish speaker or did you learn? I’ve done three weeks of Spanish now and I still can’t remember all of the exceptions to those conjugations and I don’t know if I ever will. Infinitive is indeed much easier.
I didn’t have a Spanish keyboard installed on my phone yet so I couldn’t do the tildes or accents but I should be able to now on my PC. I was told how Spanish can change in different countries, and I guess I’ll find out more about it soon as I’ll be visiting Spain about mid-year.
Native Spanish speaker. From Spain.
Ah, no wonder your Spanish is amazing. Hopefully I’ll get a fraction as good by the time I visit later this year.
Las diferencias entre el español en los diferentes países es muy poca. Hay más diferencias entre el inglés americano o el ingles de Inglaterra.
¿Realmente? Cuando yo en Peru, mis profesores dice español en Sevilla es muy differente español en otra paises pero el inglés Americano y el inglés en otra paises parece similar.
Cheers from Trujillo~
Nice! I was in Trujillo and Huanchaco for a few days over the New Year.
Hey zxzxzx!
I can already see that some people are volunteering to help you, but hey, one more won’t hurt right haha?
I’m from Spain and I speak fluent English too (I study at an English institution), so if there is anything you need help with feel free to ask me.
Btw, the best way of learning a language is by listening to it, so I would recommend you to watch movies/series in Spanish. A very tipical Spanish comedy series is ‘La Que Se Avecina’, so check it out if you find the time for it.
Thanks for the offer Aquesi! I do realise that as reading a passage was a lot easier than trying to listen to my teacher narrate the passage.
Omg you’re in Lima?! That’s where I live. Thanks for all your hard work!
Cheers, had a great time there for about a week.
Hey, thanks a lot for sharing with us about your trip to south America. I hope you can enjoy it as much as you can, and well my native language is Spanish and if you want to improve it maybe I can help you with that if you want. And I can see you’re trying your best to learn Spanish, really just some weeks and you already can type a paragraph with just a little mistakes. And finally if you wanna try to read some Spanish translation of DXD I can send you the links, since there are different translations of it and differ from quality.
Have a good trip !!
Gracias! Yo no se existe traducciones de differencia por DxD.
It would be great if you could send me the links to them as I was just going to read what was on Baka-Tsuki. (Didn’t really know how to write that in Spanish)
Well, for me this translation has the best quality, I hope you can enjoy reading DxD in Spanish, they have the pdf version so you need to download them. And for your sentences in Spanish the right way would be:
Gracias! No sabia que existiera diferencia en la traduccion de DxD.
Just I’ve said there are many translation into Spanish of DxD, but they differ from quality and here is one which I think is the best you can find.
Here is the link: http://goo.gl/88Fm4u
Thanks for the correction and sharing the link!
Edit: Would you perhaps have another link? Most are dead.
Yeah, sorry i didn’t check that out and they are uploaded to mega so here is the link:
https://goo.gl/hRVDYv
I hope you had a nice trip !! and thanks a lot for translating DxD
Hola zxzxzx,
Me gustaria poder ayudarte en la traduccion a español de highschool dxd soy un gran fan de tu trabajo y admiro el esfuerzo que otorgas en cada traduccion que has hecho,tambien me gustaria poder ayudarte con la revicion de la traduccion a español.
Espero poder ayudarte.
Hello zxzxzx
im willing to help you with the spanish traduction of highschool dxd im a huge fan of your workand i really admired the efforts on each translation that you have done,im also would like to help you with the review of the spanish translation.
hope i can help you.
Gracias Jose, yo puedo leer la mayor parte de eso. Esta bien tu ademas incluir el Ingles traduccion. Yo voy a leer el traduccion a espanol de DxD tarde entonces yo voy a decirte cuando yo empezo leer.
ok, espero con ansias poder ayudarte y disfruta tu estancia en latinoamerica.
The spanish isn’t my native language, but I can speak and read it a bit better than english, so If I can do something for help you, just tell it
It’s my way to thank you for your work translating these novels
El castellano (spanish’s original name) no és mi lenguaje materno, pero puedo hablarlo y leerlo un poco mejor que el inglés, de modo que si puedo hacer algo por ayudarte, solo dilo
Es mi forma de agradecer tu trabajo traduciendo estas novelas
Gracias por eso. Ahora es mi tres semana de aprendiendo espanol. Yo estoy lentamente puedo leer, escribo y hablo entonces todo practica esta bien.
Let me correct a few things
“Ahora és mi tercera semana aprendiendo español”
“(Yo) puedo lentamente leerlo, escribirlo y hablarlo”
“toda práctica esta bien”
This “yo” (lit I) isn’t usually used in latine languages, but isn’t incorrect
“Todo” (lit all) have a masculine and femenine form. In this case is the femenine
Pd: a curiosity that only can be said for someone that live in “spain”
Spanish/español isn’t the language’s correct name. Is “castellano” (maybe castilian in english, not sure)
When Castilla (the center kingdom in the iberian peninsule) gained control of Catalunya (Catalonian) and Portugal the XVI century, she began to extend the name spanish over the world, basically saying that they are the only language and culture in spain
But this would be equivalent that when England annexed Scotland and Irland, they had proclaimed that the english’s new name is unikim or brittany
This is a common mistake, but in fact spanish speakers from all around the globe prefer the term “castellano” (in English “Castilian”) for the language.
Another mistake is “how the name ‘Spanish’ came out to be”. In fact, as far as I know it was born at the end of the 15th century, after the battle between the Iberian Christian Realms against the Moors came to an end. By then, there were a total of six languages belonging to the Christian Realms, which were Galician-Portuguese, Leonese, Castilian, Basque, Aragonese and Old Catalan (which had recently scinded from Occitan). There were also a total of four Christian Realms: Portugal, Castile, Navarre and Aragon.
Galician-Portuguese was spoken in Portugal and northwest Castile, but the nobles of that area had twice sided with the legal successor in that century’s Succession Wars and lost, so it had fallen from grace before Castile’s queen Elisabeth’s eyes.
Leonese was spoken a bit eastwards than the former, in the territory of the Old Kingdom of Leon, but had fallen from grace some tome before when they were conquered by Castile, which was a kingdom that had once seceded from them.
Basque was spoken in the regins of Vizcaya and Álava, belonging to Castile, and the kingdom of Navarre, but only at the level of populace since trade and government used Castilian, Aragonese and Occitan.
Aragonese was spoken in the kingdoms of Navarre and Aragon.
Catalan was spoken in the territory of the Catalan Counties, banded together under the banner of the Count of Barcelona who had some generations ago married into Aragonese royalty, making the CC de facto a (somewhat autonomous) part of Aragon.
The royal families of Aragon and Navarre had become one and, by the end of the 15th century, king Ferdinand of Aragon married queen Elisabeth of Castile, becoming the Catholic Kings, and the territories of both became a single country (Ferdinand tried to stop it, but he was a henpecked husband) known as “Spain”.
As a “symbol” of that unity, the Castilian language saw its name changed to Spanish due to the facts of 1) it was the main language of the territory since Castile was the larger portion and 2) Ferdinand was a henpecked husband.
Muchas gracias!
nice effort with your spanish, needs improvement but getting there
Good to hear that you’re doing okay over there, man. Be safe and enjoy yourself. Happy New Year and also Happy Spanish-Learning!
Have a fun and safe trip Enjoy yourself and be careful..