TheElephantsCafe

One that always gets me is "Happy as a clam." Are clams really that happy? HOW is a clam even happy? I feel like there's so many things that are happy and yet someone somewhere went with a clam, and I just really want to know why. Other ones that get me are pretty much any idiom for "It was fantastic" i.e. "The bee's knees," "The cat's meow," etc. Don't get me wrong, I love the phrase "the bee's knees" and I actually use it sometimes but how is a bee's knee great? Or a cat's meow? I don't know, so many questions with these idioms.

I wish I could type in American Sign Language, that would be much more interesting than just doing Spanish which is the only other thing I know well. Anyways, here's the Spanish translation (sans accent marks and upside down question mark): Good Afternoon. ---> Buenas tardes. Where do you live? ---> Donde vives? What is your nationality ---> Cual es su nacionalidad? What is your job? ---> En que trabajas?

My weakness has always been grammar, as in the actual structure of the sentence. It's such a hard thing for me to get used to, and I always mess up the order I'm supposed to place things. When it comes to adjectives it's fine, those I can deal with, but there's lots of times where you have to say something and the order is completely different than how you'd say it in English. The more I think about it, I also am pretty bad with pairing the correct endings when I'm actually speaking Spanish, I tend to mess up and say things like "Tu camisa es negro" or something instead of "Tu camisa es negra." I get ahead of myself I guess. I'm trying to practice more so that I can get better with these things, but I still tend to make silly mistakes! :shy:

As people are saying, the "es" forms mean something permanent whereas "estar" is temporary. So "es" is used for things like cities, buildings, personality, etc. "Estar" is used for things like cleanliness, feelings, locations of objects, etc. This is probably a very silly trick, but I think of the lengths of the words to remember their meaning, so I would think "Es is short, the time I would take to figure out the thing is also short because it never changes. Estar is longer, and the time I would have to think about the thing is longer because it's changing and needs more thought." It's silly and it's a long way to remember something, but it's what I do.

I agree, I know for me trying to learn Italian after learning Spanish is going much better than before when I tried to learn Italian without knowing any Spanish. They're both very similar and I'm sure that's why it's easier. If I were to try and learn German or Swahili right now I'd probably have no idea what I was doing. :bored:

To me this actually seems like a better way to go about learning a language. There's something to be said about keeping things simple and straightforward. Granted, babies/young children retain learned information better than adults do, but I think it's still very effective regardless of age. I went on a website designed for kids to learn Spanish and it went much better for me than when I took an actual Spanish class.