Tactical Typos

Juices There

Jul 24, 20244 min read

A wildly inefficient but nonetheless fun and sometimes funny way to learn and practice Spanish.

Use phonetics, rhyming, vocabulary, and creativity to play with the languages of English and Spanish.

Independent Scholarship

Instructions

For the statements below, replace the bolded word with the Spanish version of the bolded word. Then read the corrected sentence to decipher the phrase, statement, etc. (The footnotes are there to help you if you get stuck.)

Fully formed (could use polish)

Your friend seems after1 for attention.

You’ve cat2 be kidding me!3

She wore her favorite but4 pants.5

Super which!6

Juices7 there?!

Ah-God!89

  • Note that this one relies upon us ultimately knowing the end Spanish phrase, whereas the prior ones’ end results were English phrases.

If you’re given a list of things that need to be imported before other things, you could say that the things in the list are import-ante.10

Sweet Beginnings

Donde’s inferno (Dante’s inferno)

Similar to luz-er phrase from yesterday, situations where you’re given a hint in English but to solve the riddle thing you need to know or learn the corresponding word and pronunciation thereof in Spanish:

Ojo [eye]! It sounds like you’re surprised! Eye! Maybe like a pirate looking through a looking glass is surprised, so his eyes bulge and he sees the thing.

Serio (serious), Cerebro (brain) - brain teasers, cross-lingual

About

Started this early in the morning of March 3rd, 2023

Manos menos - No, finger less

Utilizing a rhyming dictionary like the android app Poet Assistant

Knots of understanding have a way of cementing themselves, being more memorable. They’re stranger connections, ones that don’t iron out smoothly because they’re crude relations. This is like rhymes used to remember certain things, where the rhyming words used to remember a thing are wholly irrelevant to most of any context in which the thing being remembered actually exists. Like the bogus word of PEMDAS for orders of operation.

In language learning and teaching sometimes we try to make everything so easy and logical and make sense, but I suspect that this unwittingly makes people not commit them to mind as much, in part because they don’t feel like they need to work on it as much because it “feels” easy and correct in their mind but it isn’t actually grasped or recalled that well at all, it’s only fluidly processed and understood in the moment, not in future moments where it’s a less related context.

To make it really accessible, use Spanish words that beginners likely know and phrases that experienced English speakers would pick up on. Could go in reverse as well, with more in-depth Spanish words for simple English phrases.

These all might actually work better if the initial layer of translation is done, so “jugos there?!” instead of “juices there?!” - it might be worth releasing both to similar channels and seeing how either performs, comparing their performances. Either way, knowledge of the hidden meaning can give rise to a sense of being part of an in-crowd, like a shibboleth.

You could turn this into a course with quizzes about what various terms mean.

I’d likely call it “Juices there?!” after this one. Or “Jugos there?!” but I like that the Juices one conceals the game more and likely wouldn’t seem as impenetrable to people that aren’t quite familiar with Spanish.

Some of these are just puns that utilize Spanish! Brain teasers.

Footnotes

  1. Read/pronounced as “despues”, sounds similar to “desperate” in English ↩

  2. Read/pronounced “gato” in Spanish, like “got to” in English ↩

  3. Once corrected, this sounds like “you’ve got to be kidding me!” ↩

  4. Read/pronounced “pero” in Spanish, like “pair o’” (short for “pair of”) in English ↩

  5. It’s also simply hilarious to think that someone would wear something that would be described as “butt pants”. ↩

  6. Read/pronounced “cual” in Spanish, like “cool” in English … Admittedly, this one’s a stretch. If you imagine pronouncing “cool” with a smooth, bewitching Spanish accent, the jump from “cual” to “cool” sounds about 5% easier to make. ↩

  7. Read/pronounced “jugos” in Spanish, like “who goes” in English ↩

  8. Read/pronounced “dios” in Spanish. ↩

  9. Once corrected, this sounds like you’re saying “adios” in Spanish, which means “goodbye” in English. ↩

  10. This is my first Dad joke that utilizes Spanish. It’s my padre joke numero uno!11 ↩

  11. ahoy! ↩

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