The Language of the Telenovela

This past Wednesday, I watched my first episode (and only episode so far) of my chosen telenovela, Verano de Amor. What first struck me as interesting, and I must admit a little exciting, was the colorful backgrounds and sets that the telenovela had. This is such a contrast to the soap operas that I watched when I was in high school. I remember when I used to watch the soap opera, Days of Our Lives, the scenes were never that colorful or exciting.

After getting past the colorfullness of the initial scenes, I began to pay attention to the storyline. Because I chose to watch a telenovela that was not on DVD, I did not have the advantage of using subtitles, just closed caption. After watching a few scenes of Verano de Amor, I began to realize that although I could not totally understand the rapid spanish that the actors spoke, I still had a very good idea of what was going on in the story. This is when I realized how much nonverbal communication was important in interaction between humans.

Although catching key words during the episode such as, cine, vender, constuir and centro comercial was key to my understanding of the central story, I always knew how the characters felt about that particular situation. Feelings were shown through facial expressions, whether they raised their voices, whether they stayed to talk or turned and ran away. All of these actions and expressions helped tremendously in my understanding of the conflict and in my understanding of human contact and interaction.