¿how bilingual is biliningüe?

Working in different languages:

Working in Spanish has been a great way for me to learn. Unfortunately, you must take the good in with the bad. The good: my Spanish is getting better. Sometimes I am even more comfortable in Spanish that English, which brings me to the bad. The bad: my English is getting worse. I constantly depend on spell check because I will look at the words and be convinced that they are correct. The words are correct if I were writing a different language. Below are a handful of the words I have misspelled:

-International (I spelled it internacional)
-Emphasis (I spelled it enfasis)
-Photos (I spelled it fotos)
-the radio (la radio)
-Carrots (I spelled it zanahorias) If anyone makes fun of me for that one I am going to kick them.

Next are my troubles with commands. I am constantly underlining things (Ctrl S) instead of saving things. This is especially annoying at times they decide to randomly turn off the power. But again, now I am forgetting how to do these commands in English.

Ctrl G = guarder (to save)
Ctrl S = subrayado (to underline)
Ctrl N = negro (literally to blacken….but it actually means bold)
Ctrl K = cursiva (to italisize)
This one trips me up a lot because the word cursive does not even begin with a K.

The commands I used back in Canada often do something trippy to my document, or they open up a new window or pop-up box. I will learn eventually; but I kid you not, every command you would use in English will do something. There are 26 letters on both English and Spanish keyboards, and no one had the tact to share the commands with other letters. Effers.

I also have problems finding different forms of punctuation. I remember when I was in Bolivia, I would have to get on msn and ask someone to send me the opposite of the backslash, because I needed it to login to an email account and I did not know what to press on the computer. There was a key that had the image of the opposite of a backslash (which I cannot show you because I do not know how to find it on this computer either) but I did not know what to press to make the punctuation show up on the page.

Another element of working/living in a different language is that no matter what you do, people think you are stupid. It is almost as if they think that education does not exist in English or that 2 plus 2 does not translate. I have had people tell me that gasoline is almost surprising…especially after I tell them that I studied Environmental Science and Geology. HELLO! I repeat: I studied Environmental Science (why petroleum is bad for the earth) and Geology (where petroleum comes from). One might just think that I could carry an intelligent conversation about petroleum. I also come from the country which is the biggest polluter in the world per capita…I might just have an opinion. With all of that said, I still get the same line: “Petroleo es malo.” I do not feel particularly enlightened after someone says that to me.


Working in your first language
Today I had an interesting experience translating something Spanish into English. This experience was a combination of having the difficulties of working in two language AND having people think you are stupid.

To keep it short, I basically had an argument with someone who is a native Spanish speaker (and NOT bilingual in English). He was trying to convince me that something I had written was grammatically incorrect. I spent about half an hour explaining to him why I was right and he was wrong, and never once did I use the excuse “I don´t know, it just sounds right”—which we all know is a cop-out. He was still not convinced.

The conversation ended when he told me that “you can’t do that in castellano (Spanish).” I told him “Well, it is a different language.”

But in my head I thought “Well DUH! It’s a different language.”