Sunday, August 8, 2010

wow! Your accent is wonderful!


So I think I've mentioned before that many stores, food products, etc here have English names. However, when Argentines say these names, they pronounce them with an Argentine accent. For example, Burger King is "bowr-gouhr keeeng", and Nike is said more like bike (we pronounce it like "niy-key"). Anyways, its really hard for me to pronounce these English words with a Spanish accent. It just gets way to confusing. If someone asks me where something is, and its next to the Burger King, I just say "está al lado del Burger King"; I really can't bring myself to say "está al lado del bowr-gouhr keeeng". Its just too much.
As part of my job, I often create worksheets for my students that I then need to print out. As these worksheets have to do with English grammar or vocabulary, I always give them names in English (really fascinating ones, like "Non-defining Relative Clause Review"). So, I save the aforementioned worksheets on my pen drive, and head down to the corner store to print them out. About a week ago, I went to the kiosko to print. I handed the lady my pen drive, and asked (in Spanish, of course) to print out some documents. She plugged in my pen drive and, noticing that there were several items on the pen drive, asked me for the name of the document. "Non-defining Relative Clause Review", I replied (in my normal Upstate NY accent). She stopped, stared at me for a second, and then goes "wow, your accent is wonderful!". I chuckled and responded "well thanks, I've been practicing".

PS Here's a picture of one of my new favorite terrible English names: an ice cream store called "Wimpy".

1 comment:

  1. wimpy, haha, where do they get these names from? Loved the post, she thought you were argentine? dream come true...

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