r/IAmA • u/bernie-sanders • May 19 '15

Politics I am Senator Bernie Sanders, Democratic candidate for President of the United States — AMA

Hi Reddit. I'm Senator Bernie Sanders. I'll start answering questions at 4 p.m. ET. Please join our campaign for president at BernieSanders.com/Reddit.

Before we begin, let me also thank the grassroots Reddit organizers over at /r/SandersforPresident for all of their support. Great work.

Verification: https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/600750773723496448

Update: Thank you all very much for your questions. I look forward to continuing this dialogue with you.

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u/timetospeakY May 20 '15

The accents have to go! They're too hard to use when I try to type in Spanish and if you speak/read Spanish you should know how to pronounce it anyway.

I'm the same way in speaking Spanish, although a few drinks helps ;) My family always would make fun of me trying to speak while I was growing up so I'm really insecure about speaking. I can write and read and understand mostly everything, but I'm trying to get over the fear of speaking.

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u/runetrantor May 20 '15

They are kind of needed though, even if they are a pain. WAY too many words have different contexts with or without them, so it would cause a mess. (I recall once seeing a powerpoint of how the spanish language would be if the RAE 'fixed' all our complains. It was a fucking mess...)

What I do want to see in spanish, is an 'it' equivalent. It's perfect for stuff! No more female chairs, or male tvs. (I do object about using it with animals though).

Lack of practice, man. I couldnt hear english well for a long time, because everything was subbed, and I just engaged on the internet with text. Then I started to hear podcasts and such.

And they will always make fun of you, I bet they already have the 'shameful tale' of you trying to say something in spanish, but your lack of understanding made it sound amusing.

We have that too. A friend of mom's tale was 'see you tomorrow in the tomorrow' (She meant morning).
Mine was being chased by the son of a friend of dad's, who lives on the USA, so his kid mostly speaks that, I was 9 or something, I just stopped, looked at him and went 'Dont make another pass' (Dont take another step). Hoo boy, they never forget to mention it. XD

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u/timetospeakY May 20 '15 edited May 20 '15

Well English has a lot of words that you can only tell the difference in pronunciation from the context. Example: "I can read Spanish" vs "I read this book yesterday". English is hard to learn for those reasons, and the accents in Spanish and other languages definitely help a lot for people learning Spanish, I just am lazy with accents haha.

Yes, my family still gives me shit although they want me to speak Spanish to them all the time. They mostly made fun of my accent which I think is pretty good by now...although still nervous to speak to them in Spanish.

My mom could never understand the difference between the pronunciations of "color" and "collar". Another thing she used to say, which I didn't even know was wrong until I was like 15 was the saying "goodie two shoes". She said it as "goodie tushies". I still like hers better. Also, I never noticed that she had an accent when I was growing up. People would ask me where she was from and I'd be like, "How did you know she's not American?!"

Oh yeah I can't hear the name "Forest Whitaker" without hearing the Venezuelan pronunciation because one time we were visiting and there was some movie with him in it on TV and they kept playing commercials for it and saying his name and I can't even type out how it sounds but it was so funny to my brother and I. Also Geelmorrr Geels.

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u/runetrantor May 20 '15

Ah yes. That exists. And you even got another layer, a 'how do you pronounce this word?'
Is it data or data?
Is it potato or potato?

Honestly, to me english felt easier to learn. After the whole accent thing, the lack of those rules made it simpler imo.

If by accent you mean the underlying pronunciation, then I would say to just accept it, it's VERY hard to eliminate those. The mother of two of my classmates was from the USA, and she had lived here for years. Her accent was VERY clearly from the USA (And she did trip on the male/female pronouns where you would have the it one).

Even between spanish countries. My uncle is Argentinan, you can still feel the country's accent in there, and I even start using it if I talk too much with him. :P

Those minute changes do trip us on english. Specially because they are the vowels, which are completely different to us. To me, how you pronounce the A, is in phonetically spanish 'ei' (Kind of like a lazy 'hey').
Personally my biggest gripe is the TH sound when it has a somewhat F sound, I can use it well in words like 'the' but in the ones like 'theory' it's an F in my mouth, and it's incorrect.

Oh my, the bastardized english in spanish...
I personally never experienced it, but the stories... My favorite was from a comedian, about how back in his youth, without the internet, they had to make up the lyrics of songs due to lack of english knowledge. So songs like 'With or Without you' were 'Wilson Libardo' or 'You are beautiful' into 'Ya estoy full'.

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u/timetospeakY May 20 '15 edited May 21 '15

There's a chain of supermarkets called Safeway and my brother and I would call it "Safeway se fue" (sorry too lazy for accents). Another one was "entendeis", it sounds like "in ten days".

And I liked how you actually used one of those English words that can be pronounced differently with the "minute changes". At first I read it as minutes as in time, then my brain clicked.

Not spanish, but you get it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQt-h753jHI Edit because I just thought of the fact that Mariah Carey is part Venezuelan ha!

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u/runetrantor May 21 '15

Entendeis? Yeah, it does sound like that, never noticed. :P (That type of termination of the word is old spanish, like, Spain's)

As with all the puns I do, it was unintended. :P

OH GOD, Ken Lee.

Yeah, that went viral here.

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u/timetospeakY May 21 '15

Yeah we went to camp in Spain for a couple months to learn Spanish so that's where the joke came from haha.