Definition

I've been reading books in Spanish to improve my literacy, and I just finished the 5th book last night. As it turns out, I picked out a bad book. It was written in English and then translated into Spanish, and when one of the professors took a look at it, they told me how badly it was translated. There were mistakes everywhere. So I lost some confidence in the book.

However, it still helped me pick up on some new vocabulary. For example, there's a town in Ecuador called Bahia de Caraquez, but I never really thought about what it meant. But the word "bahia" kept coming up in the book, so I looked it up and realized that it means "bay." So even though it was a bad book, it still helped me learn something.

And another word came up that caught my eye. "Cuenca," was in a sentence and I couldn't figure out why. I always thought it was just a random name. I knew that there's a city in Spain called Cuenca, so I just assumed it was named after that. But I brought out my Spanish-English dictionary and discovered that Cuenca actually means "eye socket." So after all this time, it turns out I've been living in the eye socket of Ecuador. It's also kind of funny, because I've heard people refer to Ecuador as the armpit of South America. So that means I'm living in the eye socket of the armpit of South America.

My plan is to pick up a new book either today or tomorrow, and hopefully this time get a book that's actually written by a Spanish speaker so I can maximize the potential of what I'm reading, rather than screwing myself up with translation errors.