I don't know if I posted about this originally.

[conuly]

Ana and I were sitting at the table. Evangeline was napping. Few weeks ago.

I was cutting up an apple, and Ana was pretending she spoke Spanish (Spanish lessons for Christmas? Why yes, I think that's a fabulous idea if I can get her there and cadge the cash somehow!) and she actually came out with something that sounded a little like manzana, so I told her that manzana is Spanish for apple. She's so proud of her small Spanish vocabulary, so she told me that rojo means red.

Well, these apples were green. She didn't remember the word for green, so I gave it to her, and then, just to push things a teeny bit, told her that a green apple is a manzana verde.

And she jumped right ahead of me there! "And a red apple is a manzana rojo, Connie!"

I didn't have to go "LOOK! THE ADJECTIVE! IT'S PLACED DIFFERENTLY! YEAH!" at her! (I did have to explain about noun-adjective agreement, and I kinda lied and said that it has to do with whether it ends in a or not, which is true as far as it goes, but... yeah. I wasn't sure how to even begin with the subject of gender, frankly.)

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

There are a few words that are exceptions and aren't the gender they look to be, but it does work as a general rule. One of the things that surprised me when I studied Spanish was that I didn't have to make much of any effort to learn the proper word order. It was simply never difficult. It felt very natural to use the right word order, about as natural as doing so in English. It simply wouldn't occur to me to say "una roja manzana" just as it wouldn't occur to me to say "an apple red". I didn't notice this until I had been studying Spanish for a few years and then wondered why this was, but I still don't know. I had the same thing happen in studying Hebrew (although I have forgotten almost all of my Hebrew, which was always limited anyway). Learning the vocabulary and the proper ways to conjugate verbs was difficult, but word order never was for me. I did have to be explicitly told I could drop subjects like "yo" but I think part of that is that we were first taught to use it and given examples with it and later taught that most of the time it didn't need to be used and would sound odd to do so.

[leora.livejournal.com]

There are a few words that are exceptions and aren't the gender they look to be, but it does work as a general rule. One of the things that surprised me when I studied Spanish was that I didn't have to make much of any effort to learn the proper word order. It was simply never difficult. It felt very natural to use the right word order, about as natural as doing so in English. It simply wouldn't occur to me to say "una roja manzana" just as it wouldn't occur to me to say "an apple red". I didn't notice this until I had been studying Spanish for a few years and then wondered why this was, but I still don't know. I had the same thing happen in studying Hebrew (although I have forgotten almost all of my Hebrew, which was always limited anyway). Learning the vocabulary and the proper ways to conjugate verbs was difficult, but word order never was for me. I did have to be explicitly told I could drop subjects like "yo" but I think part of that is that we were first taught to use it and given examples with it and later taught that most of the time it didn't need to be used and would sound odd to do so.