I’ve been trying to learn Spanish for almost 20 years. Of the seven words I know, four are swear words. So when I tell you how not to learn Spanish, you can take it to the bank.
I signed up for Carlos Muñiz’s RSS feed. It’s in Spanish. Every so often I open the next post and see if I can translate. I’m not very good. I’m also not sure I’m learning anything, but it’s kind of fun like a puzzle. Once I’ve completed my translation (with plenty of guessing), I go to translate.google.com and see how I did.
Post 4
Title: Escribir metros cuadrados con subíndice
DK: To write meters words with subscript
Google: Write square meters with subscript.
I’d like to think I would have got subíndice, but actually the picture helped me out. It didn’t help enough that I thought to look at what was in the cell, because I probably could have got cuadrados instead of punting and guessing it was something related to ‘word’. ‘Word’ is ‘palabra’. I told you my Spanish sucked.
Body: Para escribir metros cuadrados con subíndice es muy fácil del texto en la celda seleccionar sólo el número 2, pulsar click derecho del “mouse” ir a formato de celdas y en efectos seleccionar subíndice.
DK: To write square meters in subscript is very easy. In the cell select only the number two, click the right mouse button to go to cell formats and select subscript.
Google: To write sqm with subscript text easily select only the cell number 2, press right click the “mouse” go to format cells and select subscript effects.
I’m always inserting punctuation into Carlos’ sentences instead of trying to figure out what it really says – my ‘is very easy’ should be ‘easily’. And I glossed over ‘en efectos’ because I didn’t know what it meant. Now I see that the frame in the dialog is captioned Effects.
The posts are a reasonable length so it doesn’t take an hour to translate. And there’s usually a picture which provides some valuable clues. Plus I have a little domain knowledge, which I’m sure doesn’t hurt.
