Saturday, February 6, 2010

Language Barriers

As a parent, you sometimes have to decide which is better: to step in and fix a problem for your children or give them the tools they need to fix it themselves and step back out of the way.

My daughter was messing around with the settings on her phone last night and managed to change the default language. After punching a bunch of buttons to no avail, other than having the phone splutter out a long string of Español, she brought the phone to me with the expectations that I'd fix it for her.

I handed her an English-Español dictionary and left her to fix it herself. As an extra bit of motivation, I told her that if she didn't fix it, all of her text messages would be sent out in Spanish and no one would be able to read them. (Yeah, I know. I'm bad.)

Eventually, after a long struggle with the nuances of conjugating Spanish verbs, she figured it out, and her phone is now speaking the Queen's English right and proper.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The Queen's English? So it adds a lot of pointless U's to words and can't say aluminum properly?