Refrescos

The other day I was listening to a young man speak and I realized that 1. His accent was fairly easy for me to understand 2. The speed of his speech made him nearly incomprehensible. Turned out he was Mexican. It reminded me of my friend Monica, also Mexican, who was an exchange student with me in Sweden (now over 20 years ago!). Once she spoke Swedish, she spoke it about twice the speed of Swedes. I loved it.

The Nicaraguan accent is harder for me to understand although I am getting used to it and enjoy its quirks. Nicaraguans drop the 's' sound a lot. And Calhoun, though he doesn't say much in Spanish at this point, has of course picked that up. The other day he said something about how sometimes they have 'refrehco' at his school and took me a minute to understand that he was saying 'refresco'.

He also corrected me the other day. We were walking and saw a couple of dogs (one little and one large). I said, “Hola, perrito!” (speaking to the little one) but Calhoun said, “No. There are two dogs so you have to say 'perritos'.