Montaditos miércoles!

28 Sept 2011
I had a pretty uneventful day. One of my host teachers was gone today and so technically I only had one class that I needed to help my other host teacher with. However, I decided to help out with the other teacher's afternoon classes. For these classes, I got to be the "expert" on counting and saying the abc's. Although my aim for this blog is to try to write about Spain and its culture, today I learned more about British English. My students and I were singing the alphabet and I heard them pronouncing the letter "z" in a slightly different way. This isn't completely out of the ordinary because there are a number of English sounds (especially the vowels) that are very hard for a Spanish speaker to pronounce. For example, a speaker of Spanish might be more likely to pronounce the word "ship" the same as "sheep." In Spanish, every vowel corresponds to only one sound. It doesn't matter where you put it in a word because it will always have the same sound. In contrast, in English, there are long vowels and short vowels. Pronunciation of vowels depends on what other vowels are with it and where it falls in the sentence.
Apparently, the letter "z" has a different pronunciation in British English versus American English. For example, we pronounce "z" as zee (rhymes with bee). However, in British English, "z" is pronounced as zed (rhymes with head).
Today was also Montaditos miércoles (Montaditos Wednesday)! As I wrote in a previous blog post, there is a chain restaurant that has basically everything for one euro on Wednesdays. The restaurant specializes in montaditos--which are small sandwiches. You only really need 3 or 4 and some chips to fill you up! As a special treat, we decided to get their ice cream sandwiches as a dessert.