Spain

Here's something a little different for my website visitors who wonder when am I going to add more about learning Spanish, after all I do live in Spain and I do have a few articles about the language, but sometimes I get distracted with other topics like SEO.

Well, today I got an email from Marcus Santamaria whose list I subscribe to about instantly adding a bunch of words to your Spanish vocabulary to help you understand and speak more confidently, and all you need to do is change one letter in many English words to instantly convert it to Spanish.

Here's how it works, any word that ends in TION in English can become CION in Spanish, so information => informacion, collection => collecicon, solution => solucion, vacation => vacacion etc. Actually Marcus has translated a Beatles song into Spanish to show how easy it is to get to grips with Spanish;

You say you want a revolution
You tell me that it's evolution
But when you talk about destruction
You say you got a real solution
You ask me for a contribution
You say you'll change the constitution
You tell me it's the institution

Then in Spanish;

Dices que quieres una revolucion
Me dices que es evolucion
Pero cuando hablas de la destruccion
Dices que tienes una solucion verdadera
Me pides una contribucion
Dices que cambiaras la constitucion
Me dices que es la institucion

Actually there are 325 words that can be converted this way, and you can get the entire list from Marcus' blog post Easy Spanish

Last week we had our annual Carnival here in Ronda, which is normally a great little procession and a lot of fun. Nothing like the Brazillion Carnivals, or even like Sydney's Gay Pride, Spanish carnivals are mostly about people letting go politically and lampooning local politicians.

If you don't know, the president of Spain is José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, also known as Zapatito which pretty much means small shoe, the inference being he punches way below his weight. I'm not really into politics unlike my Spanish friends, but I really thought this picture was amusing from Carnival. Busco a Zapatero means I'm looking for Zapatero...

This is an example of the many tiled murals you see in towns in Spain, in this mural you can see a group of people picking olives from a tree before the fruit is taken to the factory to be converted into virgin olive oil.