Never Too Vieja for Children's Books...

I've never outgrown a love of children's books, whether reading them aloud to others or just having the fun of looking back over them myself.  It's been a while since I read ones for primary age kids.  I always love comparing the pictures and the different ways the artists have of illustrating the same classic stories.  This little stab at learning some Spanish is becoming a fun excuse to read more children's books aloud.  And, for myself, to familiarize myself with how letters sound, the musicality of the language, to recognize here and there some words.

To find out that in the Three Billy Goats Gruff that the Spanish word for troll is Gnomo.  (Hey wait, isn't there a difference between gnomes and trolls?  Or maybe there are no trolls left in Spanish speaking countries...they are extinct?)

 More trivia about differences... the sound the three billy goats make as they trot across the bridge, in Spanish, is not Trip-Trap Trip-Trap, but ¡Cric! ¡Crac! ¡Cric! ¡Crac! <---note that half the punctuation marks must be made upside down.  Who invented that...people standing on their heads?  You SO know I'm about to google the "origins of the upside-down exclamation point"

Ah.  Now I can rest easy knowing the reason Spanish punctuation marks are far more creative than the ones I'm used to...here's some illumination from the Ask.com folks  (It makes for some fun with the ALT key plus the numbers 174 and 0161)

Short summary, it helps make sense of who's saying what when, and where in the sentence. 

See, ¿don't you feel it's more clearly a question now with the additional standing-on-your-head question mark? 

¡Woo!

Now on to the book Margaret and Margarita...let's hear it for books that are easy enough for even ME to understand.  And why do I suddenly have an urge for a cold frosty mixed drink?

This is the last book Jack could handle today.  After I read as many kid books to him as he could endure in one sitting.  After a very long shift last night at work.  Well, it never hurts to be read to before bedtime.  I have a stack of twenty or thirty more Spanish children's books from the library just waiting to be read aloud to him when he recovers from the first fifty.  But I think if I had tried to press for one more reading today, the man would seriously have contemplated teaching wee Quinito how to become airborne, minus the airplane...a term I learned right inside the book.  Up = sube.  Down = Baja.   As in "sube, sube, sube...baja, baja, baja..."    I can't wait to ride the elevator with Jack now (he can run but he can't hide...hey it was HIS idea I learn Spanish...I'm just cooperating, haha)

Can I just say that the sound of some words just cracks me up?  As in the word for swingset, which is "columpia."  Columpia reminds me of the sound swingsets make when you swing way too high and the actual metal legs of the swingset begin clumping up and down out of the ground the higher the swing goes back and forth.  It DOES sound like coLUMPia coLUMPia.

Yes.  Deep thoughts. 

Sleep tight, Jack.  Buenos Noches for now, Quinito.

And thank all of you out here for your great feedback and advice!  Yes, I've decided to be fearless and to happily blunder and bludgeon my way through conversational attempts without grammatical correctness, as much as it goes against my grain. 

And to indulgently type incorrect accents on the keyboard...

¿Tíll maybé threé ór four yéars fróm ñow?  ¡When I know better!

¡Ók, off ñow to pláy wíth my ALT cómmands...!