But, first, The Nostalgia Critic takes on Captain N: The Game Master (language warning btw). Man, that show sucked. I cannot decide whether Mega Man or Simon Belmont got butchered more. (Although Pit Kid Icarus is annoying-us to the maximus.)
Anyway, I am slowly making progress in Spanish, though I am hardly an expert right now. I'd say I am OK at reading (better in translating English to Spanish), below average in speaking and still god awful at listening to a competent speaker and understanding them in less than an hour. But, hey, once I hit that hour mark, it's comprehension ahoy!
Lately I have been reading children's books to give me some relatively simple things to translate. The experience has made my shortcomings clear, haha. I've translated Green Eggs and Ham and Hop on Pop into Spanish -- the former was just a really bad translation lol. There were so many errors I didn't see until I re-read it. Just a big pile of yuck. The latter is a much better translation (although it has simpler sentences than Green Eggs and Ham), but there are still some dumb errors that I really should not have made, mainly pertaining to usage of incorrect verb tenses. Verbs are my enemy right now, particularly irregular verbs with tenses outside of the main past, present and future group that I have already memorized. I hates them!![/Gollum]
I also translated an Arthur book -- Arthur and His Problems with the Teacher -- from Spanish to English. This took forever because I had to look up a crapload of words, and because there is more writing in an Arthur book than in the two Dr. Seuss books I translated. The translation is mostly accurate despite the presence of some idioms that threw me for a loop for a while. Their meaning seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time, I was definitely like, "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS SRSLY"
Also, the plot made me lol. The title is a total misnomer: Arthur has problems with his teacher in like the first couple of pages, and then it's never really brought up again. This book also has the worst spelling bee in history. I don't think even one kid spells a word correctly before Arthur swoops in and wins the prize. And Arthur's sister, D.W., is a total prick. She mocks him the whole time for doing his homework, she swipes his cookies and plays with his friends and is basically a douche the whole time. But she gets her comeuppance at the end when Arthur's teacher (who is a COMPLETE CREEPER) randomly decides to retire from being a third-grade teacher and become a kindergarten teacher ... and D.W. is starting kindergarten the next year! Uh oh! I wish this played when she learned that piece of information.
