Chris and Spanish

The badge don't lie.

Spanish is an Indo-European language spoken by over 450,000,000 people worldwide, one of whom is Chris (arguably). He often uses Spanish in his videos and comics, as it was one of the few things that he learned at Manchester High School, however poorly. He often refers to himself by his Spanish name, Ricardo.

Chris is proud of his tenuous grasp of the Spanish language, but this has not prevented racism against Hispanics, creating a stereotypical babysitter in his comics and a highly stereotypical sombrero-wearing Pokémon called Espanolic, who "confuses its enemies with its language." Based on his vocabulary, and the fact that it's the most common Spanish dialect for L2 Americans, Chris most likely learned the standard centro-Mexican dialect.

Chris's "knowledge" of the language

¡Ay, caramba!

Chris's actual grasp of the language must be inferred from various sources. At Manchester High School, Chris took two years (4 semesters) of Spanish. The Manchester High Leaks indicate that Chris had a basic grasp of Spanish Level 1 and possibly 2. His exact grades aren't known, but they were likely to be average. On Okcupid, Chris claimed to speak Spanish, and wrote a large section of his profile in it (which was riddled with mistakes). He also states that he speaks Spanish on his resume (but mentions that he has only taken 2 years). He also has written some Sonichu comic pages in Spanish. Chris seems confident in his Spanish, despite plentiful evidence suggesting his grasp of it is feeble - he frequently makes mistakes of grammar, spelling, and pronunciation, and only employs the most basic of verb conjugations.

Some of Chris's mistakes in Spanish seem to have crossed over from his stunted command of English, such as an affinity for the written sequence "ein" (resulting in, for example, "bein" instead of bien). Chris is inconsistent with his use of symbols which do not occur in English when writing Spanish, such as inverted punctuation, accented vowels, and, most significantly, ñ. The inverted punctuation marks are sometimes replaced with their respective upright marks and accents with an apostrophe before the vowel, while the tilde in ñ is often omitted entirely. The fact that he sometimes uses the proper characters indicates that he knows how to enter them and simply does not care enough to do so consistently. In some of Chris's Tomgirl-era Spanish writing, notably Sonichu 12, Chris uses feminine nouns and adjectives when referring to mixed-gender groups, whereas standard Spanish grammar would use the masculine in these contexts. This could be an attempt at a subtle feminist statement, but knowing Chris it is likely a simple error.

In Chris's July 29, 2009 video to our TRUE and HONEST hero, he displays his grasp on Spanish, although basic for the majority. It can be safely assumed he used online Spanish dictionaries for words he did not know. Another video involving Spanish is U8C43P2A37A8 y U8C1N023V0L (a weird 1337[1] Spanish title), in which he says "Love Sonichu" and "hate Asperchu" backwards in English, surrounded by a sentence in awkward Spanish. In another display of his Spanish, his old Spanish assignment to create a hotel was released online. This assignment is mostly just basic Spanish and not very advanced.

Pronunciation

As with many English natives, Chris's Spanish pronunciation leaves a lot to be desired. This is coupled with his usual speech impediments. In A New, Fun Trick, Chris attempts to roll his R's, claiming he finally figured it out after over 3 decades on the planet. Instead of doing a proper roll, he simply moves his tongue to make a gurgling sound. In previous videos, Chris pronounces Spanish words the way an American would.

Ricardo Weston Chandler

Ricardo Weston Chandler is Chris's Spanish alter-ego. Presumably named in honor of Ricky Ricardo, a main character in I Love Lucy, one of Chris's favorite TV shows. This is a "Spanish name" Chris chose for Spanish class (a general practice in language classes where students will take a name in the language they're learning in order to "get into" the culture and language). Of course, while most people forget about this when they've left the course (or in some cases, even the teachers abandon the practice shortly into the course), Chris has adopted "Ricardo" as his actual Spanish name and uses it for his Spanish-related endeavors.

He is oblivious to the fact that in most European languages, people do not change their name when using a different language, but might use the language's native form of the name. IWhile Christian is actually a rather common name in Hispanic countries, if it were translated, his full name would be "Cristóbal Cristian Weston Velero"^[1] (alternatively, his middle name could be rendered "Huestón", as Spanish uses W only with loanwords). Also, actual Spanish speakers do not generally translate the names of foreign people. (Spanish media refers to Donald Trump as "Donald Trump," not "Ronaldo Trump") Of course it must be noted that Ricardo's linguistic skills have brought us gems such as noviophobia (from the Spanish novio, "boyfriend"). It should also be noted that Ricardo is the Spanish and Portuguese version of the name "Richard", which is sometimes shortened to "Dick".

Chris's attachment to his Spanish persona has not abated during the Tomgirl Saga, and he now lists the name prominently alongside his more common aliases (Christopher, Christian, and Christine). However, Chris has yet to pick a feminine Spanish name in agreement with his current gender identity, suggesting he has largely abandoned the concept of having a Spanish alter-ego.