Buen día a todos, espero que todo vaya bien.

I’m 8 days away from my Uruguayan tourist visa running out which means I’m 8 days away from the 3 month mark of my stay in Montevideo. Like Siobhan has mentioned a few times, the time flies, so take advantage of it, I can only imagine how fast her one month program went! For any future generation students reading this a one month program is a great experience, a semester is an awesome experience but the best has to be the year long program. I was planning on the one year plan down here in Montevideo but I’m going to be mixing up my academics a little bit back at UMass which means I have to get back home after just a semester. At first I was excited because I had been feeling overwhelmed by the idea of a year down here, but now that I’ve been here for almost three months I feel settled. I still have 9 weeks to go but I’m already thinking about how it’s going to be weird to get on that plane on December 21st. I’ve finally started to feel like I’m actually getting better at Spanish and we’re starting to form better and better friendships and groups and relationships with professors and the doormen and everything like that. Yesterday I was walking to school and the security guard that is always at the grocery store near my friend’s house was there and saw me and recognized me and we said a few words to each other and then kept on going. How does that happen? It’s pretty cool once you’ve established yourself in a new place and you start feeling comfortable. So I already put everything into place to come home for the Spring ’14 semester and I guess it is necessary for my academics but if time and money weren’t objects I would be here for at least a year.

Aside from the depressing matters of life…since this is a language department blog I thought I’d share some language observations with you. When I first arrived here in Montevideo I kept thinking about how bad my Spanish was, how I could barely understand everybody, how annoying it is to always respond to somebody with “¿qué?”. Although I still respond with that obnoxious word plenty of times in a day it’s usually because I can’t hear or focus my brain on what somebody is saying right away. And after two or three weeks here I realized why I was having even more trouble than I am now. In the Rio de la Plata region of South America; South Brazil, Uruguay, and some parts of northern Argentina, they use ‘vos’ instead of ‘tú’. It isn’t ‘vosotros’, just ‘vos’. I still am not sure how exactly it is formed because now I just use it and it sounds right but the biggest distinction I can see is that stem changes don’t really change much. There’s usually an accent on the end of the verb too. It’s an awkward thing to try to explain so I’ll spit out some examples.

¿Qué querés hacer hoy? ¿qué hacés mañana?

Podés hacerlo.

¿Tomás agua o jugo?

¿Cómo andás? Bien, ¿y vos?

It’s kind of weird to explain but if you have some idea in the back of your head that it exists, it gets a lot easier to hear, understand, and use it. For the people going to Buenos Aires I would say keep an eye out for it. I don’t think it’s as popular as it is here in Uruguay but there’s still a chance you’ll encounter it.

That’s all for my linguistical analysis for today. Keep it in mind for all those future students coming to the Universidad de Montevideo!