The English and Spanish alphabets are generally the same. The only real difference, beyond pronunciation (as Hondurans will tell you, English is difficult because “you don’t pronounce words the way they are written”, and no matter how hard you try to convince them that letters just make different sounds in English than they do in Spanish, they will not back down from this point), is the presence of the letters “ñ”, “ll”, and “ch”. The last two are seen as separate letters from their individual components since they have such strongly different pronunciations, “ll” making the equivalent of a “y” sound, and “ch” making the same sound it does in English (though there is no “sh” or “th” in Spanish, thus “ch” is unique enough to warrant being its own letter, which also leads to Hondurans pronouncing “sh” as “ch”, when speaking English, as in “pencil charpener”, and “th” as “d”, as in “duh” or “dee” rather than “the”).
I bring all of this up, because the other day I was listening to the kindergarten class practice their letters in their classroom, located next to my office (this means that every morning I get to hear them start off the day singing loud songs about Jesus and get reminded why I love the separation of church and state that we (supposedly) have in the US). When they got to “ch” I happened to be listening to the teacher give them examples of words and had to laugh a bit to myself. This is because the examples she gave were “Ch de Chucho” and “Che de Chino”. This is funny because “chucho” is Central American slang for a dog (the actual Spanish word being “perro”), and “chino” is the official word for “chinese”, but is universally applied to any asian person here (thus to talk to a Japanese person they will say “Hola chino” the equivalent of “Hello Chinese”). It just struck me funny that the only two examples that this teacher was giving to her class as part of their Spanish lessons were a local slang word (that actually derives from a Mayan word rather than from Spanish), and a word that is used almost exclusively as a semi-racist slang way of referring to asian people. She apparently could not think of any actual common (and politically correct) Spanish words to use as examples for her students.
After thinking about it though, I realized that there are only a few actual words that start with “ch” (only a single page in my Spanish-English dictionary) but a multitude of local slang words, indigenous place names, and nicknames. Thus it is reasonable that she had difficulty thinking up good common examples of official Spanish words (though there are some easy ones like “chispa”-spark, “chupar”- suck or drink or, “chocar”- crash), seeing as her mind was probably flooded with slang and proper noun examples like “chancho”- a pig, “Choluteca” – a department of Honduras, and “Chepe”, “Chofo”, “Chomo”, “Chungo”, or “Chicho”- all nicknames of people in my town (most of which are super common nicknames, there literally being at least six “Don Chepe”s in my town, and three “Chicho”s).
I bring all of this up, because the other day I was listening to the kindergarten class practice their letters in their classroom, located next to my office (this means that every morning I get to hear them start off the day singing loud songs about Jesus and get reminded why I love the separation of church and state that we (supposedly) have in the US). When they got to “ch” I happened to be listening to the teacher give them examples of words and had to laugh a bit to myself. This is because the examples she gave were “Ch de Chucho” and “Che de Chino”. This is funny because “chucho” is Central American slang for a dog (the actual Spanish word being “perro”), and “chino” is the official word for “chinese”, but is universally applied to any asian person here (thus to talk to a Japanese person they will say “Hola chino” the equivalent of “Hello Chinese”). It just struck me funny that the only two examples that this teacher was giving to her class as part of their Spanish lessons were a local slang word (that actually derives from a Mayan word rather than from Spanish), and a word that is used almost exclusively as a semi-racist slang way of referring to asian people. She apparently could not think of any actual common (and politically correct) Spanish words to use as examples for her students.
After thinking about it though, I realized that there are only a few actual words that start with “ch” (only a single page in my Spanish-English dictionary) but a multitude of local slang words, indigenous place names, and nicknames. Thus it is reasonable that she had difficulty thinking up good common examples of official Spanish words (though there are some easy ones like “chispa”-spark, “chupar”- suck or drink or, “chocar”- crash), seeing as her mind was probably flooded with slang and proper noun examples like “chancho”- a pig, “Choluteca” – a department of Honduras, and “Chepe”, “Chofo”, “Chomo”, “Chungo”, or “Chicho”- all nicknames of people in my town (most of which are super common nicknames, there literally being at least six “Don Chepe”s in my town, and three “Chicho”s).
