Leer un libro en español....

Goodreads Review-- 

This is the first book I read in Spanish... Now I have a surfeit of vocabulary words for "shrugged," "smiled," "raised an eyebrow," "sighed." It will be interesting to see how this gets rendered as a movie because a lot of the scenes seem contrived. 


Este es el primer libro que leo en español ... Ahora tengo un exceso de palabras de vocabulario para "encogió los hombros", "sonrió", "levantó una ceja", "suspiró". Será interesante ver cómo se hace renderizado como una película porque muchas de las escenas parecen artificiales.

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The rationale for this project intrigued my physical therapist, so if you are in the same camp-- 

#1 I live in the barrio and generally believe that being able to communicate with a variety of people makes the world a better, friendlier, safer place.  This goes back to formative lessons learned in: The Butter Battle... I wonder if Seuss' work is available in Spanish?  Anyway, this better-ability-to-relate-to-a-variety-of-people, is one of the main drivers for having a bucket list in the first place.  Now I have all this exposure to stuff I wouldn't ordinarily do, thereby meeting people I wouldn't ordinarily meet and/or quickly stumbling upon sort of shared interest when I meet strangers rendering them less strange.  Specific to wanting to be bilingual, on a police ridealong, the night ended with investigating an homicide.  Lots of bystanders wanted to help the police find the shooter who was still at large but could describe what they had seen only in Spanish.  

#2 The prospect of live interaction with Spanish speakers and possibly paying for their time (i.e. Verbling) is a little bit too much of a jump into the deep end for me.  That said, I didn't want to make up Spanish sentences myself because I want to start soaking up common parlance-- connotations, common phrases and euphemisms, etc.  I tried to read 100 years of solitude but that was so fantastical I wasn't sure I trusted my translation after a couple pages-- really?  the gypsy sold him a sextant?  I opted for something that I thought would be a limited and contemporary vocabulary page turner that I could basically get for free using paperback swap credits.  Oscuros, the spanish translation for "Fallen," a YA book in the Twilight genre seemed to fit the bill. 

Typing stuff into google translate was tedious in some ways but the bomb in important ways, in that you could get a nice Espanol-bot lady to read back what you had typed, you could even try speaking a few words and see if the algorithm recognized what you were saying as an actual Spanish word.  Lots of free feedback!  Plus I learned random stuff like the phrase the book translator used for "swallow" in Spanish is pretty ugly, literally translates back to "drink saliva" and ironically a mustache is a "bigote."