I would dog I have to go

One of the most frequent mistakes of english speakers speaking spanish is that they mispronounce the ´rr´in words and it comes out sounding somewhat ridiculous to all the native spanish speakers. So when I started speaking spanish I made a concerted effort to roll my ´r´s and correctly pronounce them. I hadn´t really had anybody tell me that my accent was good or bad, so I just kept going.

Until last night.

One of the english teachers at the institute, Brian, had a clam bake last night (my first) and invited a few people over. We had a great time, at first by just playing a bit of scrabble and having a few beers, but then we ate the clams and everyone just ended up scrunched together in the cozy, fire heated living room. I had started to talk to a chilean girl from Santiago, who was a friend of Brian´s old roommate. We got along pretty well and it got to a point in the night where I realized that I had been talking to her for a while and that, intermittently, she would just start giggling without (so I thought) any reason. At one point she broke out in full laughter and I had to ask her what was so funny. She was very blunt, plainly stating that my accent was funny. Of course, I didn´t feel all that great because I had felt that my accent, while far from perfect, was much better than the average gringo accent. And since I am actually trying to get better I asked her what was so funny about my accent and she said that I overpronounce my ´r´s and make them sound too much like ´rr´s. I didn´t understand what this meant until she told me what impact it was having on the meaning of my spanish.

Because we were having somewhat of a debate there was a lot of counterarguing, which led to a overuse of the word ´but´ which in spanish is ´pero.´ However, with my overpronunciation it was coming out as ´perro´ which means dog. So I basically spent two hours trying to impress this girl while frequently using the word dog as the start to my interjections. Needless to say, I slept alone last night. Dog at least I learned a lesson.