Caray, Caray!

Thank you so much UA. Nothing like a little memory lane to brighten my day. What I remember most was Liliana Abud's extremely W-I-D-E shoulder pads and obnoxious '80s hair. It's still a valuable tool for beginners and I may go back and watch it again. It gave good examples of how Spanish is spoken around the world from Spain to Buenos Aires, Miami, Puerto Rico, not just Mexico. I loved the old lady in Madrid with the letters containing Rosario's secreto. And, of course the Hacienda!
 

Thank you UA!

I've seen Silvia Mariscal in several things - Tontas, Teresa and Mujeres asesines.

Is Arsenio Campos currently appearing as Bea and Guzman's father on Amores?

Diana
 

UA: you read my mind. I was going to ask Viewerville where they had seen some of the actors. Caye is the only one I've seen--that I'm aware of.

I watched an ep the other night and couldn't believe how much better my comprehension was from the first time I watched it. Thank you TNs and Caray Caray
 

Yes, Diana; that is Arsenio Campos. If you never saw it, look for the 1993 Corazon Salvaje. He plays the best friend of one of the four leads.

Luis Couturier was also in Ramona as Cesar Echague, the father of Felipe's bride, Beatriz. Felipe was played by Rene Strickler, currently Mariano in AB. If you watched ENDA he was in a photo on the set as the father of Macarena and Carlota.
 

LXV: My Cuban friend Jacky says that the Cuban secretary in Destinos is actually a Puerto Rican trying to use a Cuban accent.

I wouldn't have any idea. The only accent I seem to be able to recognize is the sing-song Mexican country accent that you hear a lot on the TNs.

Aleta
 

The Castillian Spanish accents are also quite obvious. You only hear them in TNs when the character is from Spain which also usually means the actor is. Often the other characters make fun of this accent.

I've watched three Argentine TV series -- Hombres de Honor, Epitafios, and the Argentine original of Mujeres Asesinas -- and those actors often sound like they have Italian accents.
 

Aleta, thanks for the tip. She was a charming lady. I only guessed she was cubana because she was in the middle brother's Miami office. It was a noticeably different accent, as were the Argentinians and the Castilians (por supuesto).

And has Liliana Abud done any more acting? Her name shows up as a writer, but I've not seen her in anything else
 

UA, I remember comments during the original run of Alborada to the effect that Ada, the servant of Hipòlita used a noticeable Castilian accent and that it indicated she (the character) had been brought over from the mother country and that this was a sign of prestige. I learned similar things from my grandmother about the servants in her house growing up on the continent (Europe) in the 1880s. They often hired English governesses with the result that upper class ladies learned to knit with the right hand (the English way) whereas Continental knitting was for the common folk. I was taught by her to knit the English way but as soon as I figured out that left hand knitting was faster, I snuck out and learned it on my own.
 

Nice timing for bringing up Destinos! My aunt just started a Spanish class and they are in the middle of this series. I sent her the link to catch up. It's funny because I remember this from school too. I hope whoever made this is getting royalties.

Kelly
 

I don't have any real need to watch Destinos as a learning tool, but you have all made me curious about the storyline and the accents--speaking of which--the accents in River Plate Spanish is heavily influenced by the huge influx of Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. That's why they sound so much like Italian.

Over on Amor Bravio, I get a big kick out of everyone remarking on Dan's Chilean accent, which he's learning to turn into Mexican--in honor of his new status as husband (I say that cautiously after last night) and naturalized Mexican citizen, while no one says anything about Mariano's Argentine accent, which he hasn't been able to hide and whose character is a Mexican native son. Ah well, beanies are a dime a dozen (except for Emilia's special formula). And speaking of Emilia, I think she does English knitting. I learned to knit from a woman who was originally from Spain, who had immigrated to Uruguay with her husband. She did right handed knitting. Maybe that was left over from when The English took Gibraltar.

I heard Cristian de la Fuente in an interview talking about his accent and how it changes depending on the group of friends he's with at any particular time. If he's with Cubans, he begins to mimic their pronounciation and cadence. When he's in LA, the friends and acquiantances are much more diverse, so he tends to use the standard Mexican Spanish.

He also mentioned the differences in definitions between C.A. and S.A. One example was that he has to be careful not to ask for his *jaqueta* if he's in Mexico because it is slang for condom. He has to remember to use the word saco.

 

That's amusing.

I vacationed in England four times during the 80s and I start sounding British on Day 2. Did a fair amount of British drama in college, so that was somewhat inevitable.
 

Gracias for the memories. I first learned Spanish in Med School watching Simplemente Maria when it was on the only Spanish language TV in Houston. When my children used the Destinos series, I thought it was an awesome way to learn. Caray Caray is a HUGE help.
Muchisimas gracias to all the recappers.
 

Bienvenidos, Ron!

I taped the series in 1993 when it ran on PBS and watched it a couple of times before taking a vacation in Spain. Loved it.

It won a number of educational awards and has been imitated for English-language instruction in other countries.
 

Thanks Anita for referring to Rene Strickler's accent. It's not as pronounced as in the Argentine novelas but it is definitely not Mexican!
 

Interestingly, I think La Gavia exteriors are being used for La Malquerida. Check this out.

Considering the plot turn in Amor Bravio with Daniel's first wife coming back from the dead (as it were) I wonder whether someone planned this.
 

Urban- I never saw this series and didn't know about it till someone on the Amor Bravio line mentioned that the same hacienda was being used as in Destinos and that the actor playing Cayetano was in it. What a great way to learn Spanish. One of my assignments in a college Spanish class was to watch episodes of Esmeralda, report out on it, and then with a group write and act out a script for scenes in a tn. That was my first introduction to tns, and the only tn I had watched till I found CarayCaray a few years ago. That was a really fun assignment though and a great way to make the language come to life.

As for the accents, thanks for pointing out Rene's accent. It seems even more pronounced in AB than it was in PVAA, which I last saw him in. Maybe hanging out with Chileans on set is making his Argenine accent more pronounced. :)

Just in that tn alone we have a Puerto Rican (Ximena), a Spaniard (Piedad), and Cuban (Dionisio), and an Argentine (Mariano) all playing Mexicans, whith varying degrees of success in covering their accents. And now we also have a Mexican (Miriam) using a Chilean accent.
 

Thanks UA for this very interesting topic. As someone who still has a long ways to go before I can understand tn spanish, it's encouraging when I listened to Distinos the other night and discovered I could understand it so well. When I took the classes at the local llibrary in 2007,
I could not understand a word they were saying.

Nowadays, even though I have to rely on the captions to understand the novelas, I can see a huge improvement in interpreting what I am hearing.

Cayetano is the only person I've seen in anything and wouldn't have recognized him if you hadn't pointed it out. I love his acting (not his character) in AB and look forward to seeing him in something else.
 

Tks for the Destinos reminder. I never finished it. I'm ALWAYS beginning Spanish, so I'm going to try it again. Great it has someone we know. I think it's amazing you can distinguish Spanish accents. About the only ones I can tell are Spain & Arg.
I took a Spanish class in Mex, they said NOT to use chaqueta (means to masturbate)use chamarra.
 

Thanks to my fellow knitters I now understand why Augustina was teaching Isa to knit in those early episodes. I didn't realize that it was something reserved for the upper class and therefore at the time those scenes seemed out of place.
I first learned to knit as a teenager (anyone remember argyle socks?) But after a few years of knitting addiction I didn't knit for years until after I retired to FL in 1999. Although I now have other hobbies that have priority, I still enjoy knitting outfits for my Barbie and Kelly dolls every once in a while.
 

Foxy, Knitting is universal. The commonfolk have always done it to provide clothing for their families and to bring in some cash. Shepherds in England (and we're talking about men here) knitted while they were out tending the sheep. But upper-class ladies did all kinds of handwork as a social grace and so that they could entertain gentlemen without a hint of compromise to their character. Their eyes lowered and their hands busy (idle hands are the devil's workshop), they were above reproach.

Here is a quote from Edith Wharton: "Their interminable conversations were carried on to the click of knitting-needles and the rise and fall of industrious fingers above embroidery-frames; and as Undine sat staring at the lustrous nails of her idle hands she felt that her inability to occupy them was regarded as one of the chief causes of her restlessness. The innumerable rooms of Saint Desert were furnished with the embroidered hangings and tapestry chairs produced by generations of diligent chatelaines, and the untiring needles of the old Marquise, her daughters and dependents were still steadily increasing the provision.
It struck Undine as curious that they should be willing to go on making chair-coverings and bed-curtains for a house that didn't really belong to them, and that she had a right to pull about and rearrange as she chose; but then that was only a part of their whole incomprehensible way of regarding themselves (in spite of their acute personal and parochial absorptions) as minor members of a powerful and indivisible whole, the huge voracious fetish they called The Family.
 

A repost of my response to several kind responses to a post about using Telenovelas for Spanish learning in the AB discussion.

Juanita, I had seen the site by Andrew before, but hadn't followed up. In fact, the squidoo site from Melinama looks familiar. Still, if I hadn't at least checked in at those sites, I might not have started watching telenovelas and found CarayCarary to be reminded of them again, now.

Vivi, I will be looking at Hulu options. I had't realized that there were telenovela on Hulu. Then again, I don't think I'd ever noticed anything not in English on Hulu. I assume you mean Hulu plus, the paid version, and I will look more deeply.

Carolina, I haven't even figured out how to get English subtitles on my current TV feed of AB via Verizon. It may be "in there" but I haven't found them. But, I think you're right, and I can safely continue to put off sorting out subtitle language issues.

I do have a version of Corazon Salvaje on DVD, but there are two fundamental problems. First, it is so severely edited down to under 4 hours that the "plot" just doesn't make sense. Second, the only subtitles available are in English, and that just doesn't really help in general. I have gone back and turned them on when I just couldn't get a clue what the dialog was, but as an ongoing proposition, I agree, it takes too much focus away from the Spanish.

As for the Spanish subtitles generally, they do sort of convert it from a listening experience to reading, and I can imagine coming to a stage where it would be better to "rewind" from time to time for the difficult bits, at this point I have great difficulty separating the sounds into specific words, much less sorting out the conjugations and such, and without the spanish subtitles, I get so lost, so fast, sigh.

Carlos, I suspect that some folks had the same reaction to the apparent boxing theme of at least the promos and early stages of Un Gancho that we've seen here to the bull-fighting.

La Pola looks very, very interesting. War and Peace should get such an extended treatment instead of being crammed into one regular movie! Unfortunately, while I was mentioning the chop-job done on Corazon Salvaje (a title suggested as a classic that would stand up to close viewing) LaPola seems to be only available on a $120 or so completely unedited version and even that only available from out of US providers I'm not familiar with. But I will poke around youtube, hulu, and such for it. Looks like there were 190+ episodes of that one. Wow.

BTW, I know that I said it would be too much effort for me to pay the kind of attention and take the kind of time necessary to apply the sorts of techniques that seem to be set out in the learn-spanish-by-telenovela sites and also keep up with AB and the conversation about it here in real time, but I do understand that that is exactly the type of time and commitment that the Recappers have made, and have been making, for years. Thank you, thank you.

Someone said something to the effect that sitting alone in the dark making snarky remarks about telenovelas was just sad, and while hyper-analyzing them in the pursuit of language acquistion may be less pitiful, it is pretty much just as lonely. While there is some positive effect to just casually watching more Spanish language programming, to add to the pedagogical value by being exposed to reflection on the show, and its language, well, that's just a bonus when it is just so much more fun watching the novela with CarayCaray in the first place.

Finally, my apologies to those wading through this when they were just looking for more comments based on Jardinera's fantastic recap.

Why I didn't post my questions about using the novelas for more structured educational purposes on the separate page about Destinos? I don't know. So, I'll be copying this over to that item, and invite anyone else with educational type comments to post there?

Chris in Florida
 

Variopinta--Thank you for the correction, jaqueta does refer to masturbation--at least I got it into the proper zone. The interviewer asked Cristian what it really meant and he stumbled a bit and described the act a bit comically, but didn't use the proper terminology.
 

Variopinta, I was so happy to see that I'm not the only one who normally can't tell one Spanish accent from another. Like you, the only ones I can usually identify are those from Spain and Argentina. I was surprised to read that Cesar Evora is from Cuba, because the only thing that I associate with a Cuban accent is dropped s's and my having more difficulty in understanding what people say. But that's not true of Cesar Evora. He's one of the characters whose speech is most clear to me.
 

Cesar Evora went to Mexico when he was fairly young and his accent conformed early. He was in the 1993 Corazon Salvaje and fit right in with the other actors.
 

Juanita,
The Cuban accents we are probably most accustomed to are Miami spanglish, a far cry from Cesar. I think I notice accents more by education. An educated Mexican o Cuban sounds a lot different than one that is not, just as in English.
 

That is probably true in all countries' languages. I can't imagine how many variations currently exist or what has happened in developed countries where television is so prevalent it has the potential to even things out.
 

Thanks UA for the theme. Personally, in high school, my spanish teachers said to watch telenovelas to help with vocabulary usage. The first spanish television program I ever saw on my tv here in Iowa was (I think) Sabado Gigante. My dad spoke fluent spanish so when the cable system introduced the channel S.I.N. (predecessor to Univision), we all had to sit in front of the television with hiim and watch whatever was on. Years later, Univision came to Iowa first by sharing channel space with the local university (Drake University). The first telenovela I ever saw was Esmeralda (with FC and Lety Calderon), only at the time I saw it, I had no idea who they were or what the title was, I only saw two scenes but those two scenes are stuck in my memory bank forever. After watching pretty much all the FC stuff from then until STUD, I think I have graduated to being able to understand spanish comedy and dramas and now I'm on to trying to understand all the different accents. I don't really need subtitles. Although occassionally I still need to read summaries just to make sure I understood what happened in the program.
 

As an intermediate student of Spanish, I followed it well.
I was thoroughly gripped by the on-screen magic between Lilian's "Rachel" and Arturo Piug's "Arturo". Acting wise, I found Rachel graceful, subtle and when necessary assertive. Puig played the Pychiatrist nicely sensitive--but emotional enough for me to feel his desire for the woman of his dreams.
Although I wished these two were together in NUEVOS DESTINOS, I will watch all 52 episodes again--for the Spanish--but more that for the lovely music, sensitive acting, and for the LOVE !

CliffordII( Athens,GA,USA)
 

Thanks to the person who started this "Memory Lane" for "DESTINOS"/1992.
Well, besides NUEVOS DESTINOS/1997,
Who has seen Liliana Abud acting in something ?
(I have UTUBEd Arturo Puig's comedic acting in Grand(e) Pa.)

Boy ! those two hit a home run in onscreen romance; and I would love to know that Arturo Puig and Liliana Abud had acted together in ANYTHING else !


CliffordII (the wife feels the same/Athens,Ga,Jan., 2016)