Amores Verdaderos Update

Since I wrote last, I've been keeping up with Amores Verdaderos​ the best I can.  With my family's activities, I don't always get to watch every night.  Even with my spotty watching, I know things are heating up quickly.  Since I last wrote, we learned that Nikki and Roy are getting divorced, which strange given that they got married about two weeks ago.  Nikki's great uncle or grandfather, Tatito, doesn't want to permit Nikki's divorce because "we are from a family that has no divorce."  However, Nikki drops a bombshell (complete with sound effect) and shares that her own father is having a child with "that minx."  I don't know who that minx is, unfortunately, because the episode ended.  

Before each commercial break, the show slide is shown and the viewers see about 10 seconds of two characters holding each other or something equally dramatic.  The song "No Me Compares" (literally "Do Not Compare Me," more figuratively this would describe ​how he's not as good as her and comes from a different background) by Alejandro Sanz plays over these images.  Just by watching the video, you can get the idea of how overdramatic this show is.

​I do almost like watching the commercials more than the show.  It's very interesting to see how products are advertised on this channel versus the usual things I watch.  For example, on the DishLatino commercial, a big emphasis is made on how DishLatino allows children to watch programs in Spanish rather than English.  I never thought about how parents feel about the growing influence of English on their children, so it was insightful to see how this could be used as a marketing tactic to encourage parents to switch cable providers.  It's another important consideration for parents raising children in a culture where the language at home is not the main language spoken outside and shows valuable insight into the increasing influence of language and media.

Summer Spanish Boot Camp

Now that school has ended, it's time for me to get my act together to work on my Spanish.  I'm pretty good at reading and understanding what is being said, but my ability to speak is dismal right now.  My last Spanish class was a literature course--I loved the class, but speaking about the theme of the book is not the same as being able to ask for directions or tell someone what happened during the day.  Here's some what I've been doing to keep up my skills--I'll include more in later posts.​

Telenovelas:​ Every weekday from 9-10 p.m., Amores Verdaderos​ is on Univision.  Now, I haven't seen the show from the beginning so I'm a little shaky on the plot.  As such, I understand what's happening in each individual scene (Victoria is cheating on her new husband Franky with the body guard, Guzmancito, on her wedding night), but I have absolutely no idea what's happening in the context of the show.  So far, I know there are a lot of characters in the family, the women never go out without a lot of makeup, the FCC doesn't censor shows on Univision with much scrutiny, and that it is acceptable to roll the credits and play the theme song before the start of a commercial break.  

​​Música: Spotify has a pretty good selection of music from Spain.  They also have a charts feature that shows the top 100 or so songs in a particular country; unfortunately, the proliferation of English music has extended into the Spanish-speaking world.  I also listen to NPR's great music podcast Alt Latino, which is helpful in explaining the artists and the stories behind the music.  

Vocabulario: ​I've started making word of the day flashcards to help myself work on new vocabulary.  The words have to be something I don't know and couldn't easily figure out.  So far, I've learned to check (comprobar), playground (parque infantil), and shelf (estante).  

Follow Me... as I start on a Research Project

This semester I have been working on developing a proposal for my senior International Studies capstone project.  I will be investigating and comparing the significance ​of Twitter followers in Argentina and Brazil by looking at newspaper articles, talking with university students in focus groups, and accessing live tweets through a computer program.  I just completed the introduction class to this project where I needed to write a research proposal.  I only focused on Argentina in this proposal because much of the literature I wanted to read in Portuguese was too hard for me to read at this point.  Below is a word cloud of my proposal, which visually shows the topics I'll be focusing on in my research.