CapitalistImperialistPig

A friend, who was planning to be out of town, wanted to leave the following message for the housekeeper: If you have time, could you clean the back patio. It's not necessary to wash the sheets this week. Since the housekeeper had limited English, she decided to leave the message in Spanish, which, with a bit of help from Google Translate became: Si tienes tiempo, podria limpiar el patio trasero. No es necesario [lavar*] las hojas de esta semana. Not sure what the housekeeper made of this, but Google put it back into English as: If you have time, could you clean the back yard? It is not necessary to wash the leaves this week. *Add per comments

The goal of studying language is to be able to understand and converse in it. My progress is muy lento . In order to try to train my ear a bit, I have started listening to CNN en Español on my XM radio. I don't understand much, but I do catch occasional words and phrases and sometimes can figure out roughly the subject of the stories. After a bit, though, I became more interested in the commercials. There aren't many, and they seem to be overwhelmingly from two sources: the US Department of Energy and the US Forest Service. I wish I could have got the gist of the recent one from the Department of Energy's National Watermelon Research Laboratories. There has got to be an inappropriate ethnic joke in that somewhere;)