¡qué lástima!

When you're here, if you bother to take the effort, you end up speaking a lot more languages than just English or Spanish. The University has special departments for people from the New World (called CIDE) and Europeans and Asians and Africans (called Erasmus). Though the staff is different from each department, for us students we are treated no differently and often find ourselves in the same classes. Taking classes with people everywhere from Vietnam (though uncommon) to Sweden (very common) means you are picking up a lot more than just Spanish. Take last night, for instance. I met some friends and went to a small party for Saturday night and I ended up talking to a Swedish guy named Cristofer. Linguists say that Swedish is in fact far more similar to English than German. In fact, it is the closest living language to our own. Even words that sound very different often bear a reason that is quite understandable. I provide an example to explicate what I just said:

The word woman is kvinnen in Swedish. Doesn't sound similar at all, does it? But if you konw a little Middle English you might know that queen was once spelled cwéna. Let's parse their sounds so that we can see the similarities and then work backwords to get to an older version of the word.

K' vi nehn
K' wi neh

Alright, now I'm getting bored. I am not tired at all but am gonna call it a night just as well. Ciao.