Algunos Cachivaches

Here's a little song that our teacher taught us to help memorize some of the irregular verbs in the preterite tense:

vi di vine dije fui fui,
hice quise supe puse,
estuve anduve tuve pude,
produje traje cupe

They're all "yo" forms of common irregular verbs (fui is in there twice to remind you that it is the yo form of ir and ser).

The song is sung to the tune of "Ten Little Indians".

Obviously it's a "nonsense song" - since it's just a list of verbs ("I saw, I gave, I came, I said, I was, I went..." etc.)

Here's my attempt at singing it :

Try memorizing it - it may help next time you're struggling to remember one of these irregular verbs in the preterite!!

Here's another entry from GsT at the LSLC Forums:

¡Muchas gracias!

Here from "NYC Trini Span" of the LSLC forums is the first entry in the challenge.

Excelente!

and here's another sentence that he used to practice those pesky double r's in combination with a "regular" r sound :

El gato es mio, pero el perro no es mio. x2

Thanks NYC!! Now, who's next?? .........

OK, so (like most students of Spanish) I struggle with rolling my r's!

I came across this trabalengua (tongue twister) which is sometimes suggested for practice with the dreaded r's:

Erre con erre cigarro;
Erre con erre barril.
Rapido corren los carros,
Cargados de azucar al ferrocarril.

I figured I'd try it out and let you see what you think:

here's one attempt :

and here's another :

So leave me a comment to let me know how you think I did.

If you want to take the challenge, e-mail me a .wav or .mp3 of you trying the trabalengua.

Send to : conejillo@rincondelconejillo.com

Finally here's a funny story from HBO Latino about rolling r's [warning it's probably PG-13 if you understand the joke] (she does the trabalengua at the end).

This blog was originally hosted on Google's Blogger.
I decided to move it to my own site once I'd set it up (partly to give me some experience with the administering a b2evolution site).

I'll delete the blog from Blogger in a few weeks.