Yesterday, a student had a birthday. As usual, everybody began shouting the Happy Birthday Song, including the addition, "Ya queremos pastel, ya queremos pastel..." ("We want some cake...") and then, as apparently they were really into it, they added on another extra verse, which I really couldn't understand. Then they went through one more rousing version of the original song. (Singing Happy Birthday is a great way to waste time. IST students are very savvy when it comes to time-wasting strategies.)
After the song, I told my students that while I can speak Spanish quite well, I've always had trouble understanding spoken Spanish and even more trouble with sung Spanish. I've told them I can speak it a number of times before, but with their record of paying attention, this caught a number of them by surprise. So one student, Roberto, wanted to see how I well I could speak. He told me to say the word "ferrocarril," which means railroad, and apparently is difficult to say because of the double r not once but twice - that rr is very hard for gringos to get their tongues around, apparently.
I said it practically spot on. Everybody was impressed. I'm just glad Eduardo didn't speak up to have me say his name, because I have a much harder time with that - the d's and r's next to each other get me every time.
I still have a hard time understanding singing, though.
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