Language Calendar
They knew they were hitting to a field more sotted, say, than any market for a new wine cooler, a better board game or a cheeseless mouse trap.
But Bonfacio Contreras and Antoinette and Kerry Choppin decided to build a better calendar anyway.
Now they’re offering the first four in a series of Learn-a-Language calendars containing one idiomatic expression for every day of the year.
Available in French, Italian, Spanish and German, they promise to be meilleur que (better than) their 1989 competition. In kurzer zeit (in a short time) each should create a paso a paso (step by step) understanding of four major languages. La pura verita . The honest truth.
The idea came five years ago to Contreras--a languages teacher at Santa Ana High School--when he visited UCLA-Harbor Medical Center and walked into a bilingual emergency.
A group was shrieking in Spanish at a receptionist, who “had no idea of the problem,” Contreras said.
Group members kept yelling, “‘El bolsillo se rompio’ . . . the bag had broken,” Contreras said, noting the comparable English phrase would have been “ the water has broken, ‘ “ which the receptionist might have understood because the only word of Spanish she knew was agua.
That made Contreras remember his earlier travels, to Germany, to Yugoslavia, where he tripped over language barriers as “an adult thrown back to expressing yourself like a 2-year-old.”
So he invented his expression-a-day calendar.
Artist Antoinette Choppin said she would illustrate it.
Her husband, real estate developer Kerry Choppin, agreed to finance and market it.
The three friends became Los Tres Amigos Publishing of Long Beach and developers of one of the more useful calendars since Julius Caesar gave us July.
The calendars, Kerry Choppin explained, are not designed to teach a language but to polish and adjust the schoolboy basics that live in most of us.
They cost $8.95 apiece plus 75 cents for mailing and may be obtained from Los Tres Amigos, 3935 E. Broadway, Suite 119, Long Beach 90803. Or call: (213) 433-2405.