Antigua, Guatemala: Why Yoda Would Speak Great Spanish

As of today, I will have been in Spanish emersion classes for 5 weeks and one thing is for certain… Spanish is definitely hard to learn!

Granted, I am actually trying to accomplish something in a matter of weeks that takes most people years to learn. However, I have noticed and would like to document, the 3 things that have struck me as most problematic during my first month of learning the language.

First and foremost, one of the tricky things about Spanish is that it seems really easy to translate directly over from English when you are first learning the language. When you think about the most elementary phrases such as “Buenos Dias” or “Como Estas” spoken by beginning Spanish speakers, the translation is a direct one from English with “Buenos” meaning “good” and “Dias” meaning “day or days”, or “good day”. Also there are a plentiful number of words that have a similar direct translation and there are many more that actually “sound” similar in English and Spanish.

Take the verbs “Usar”, “Pintar”, and “Necesitar” in Spanish for example. It is an easy guess for beginners learning the language that these words in English translate over as: to Use, to Paint, and to Need. However, once you begin to expand your vocabulary you will find that there are many words in Spanish that sound like a direct translation in English, but their actual meanings are far different, which presents a problem during the learning process because once you run into a few words that sound like a word in English but have an ulterior meaning, one begins to second guess the meanings of all similar words after only making a few mistakes.

Take the Spanish words “asistir” and “emberazada” for example. Given the number of words that have a similar sound as well as the same meaning in Spanish and English it is really easy to assume that these words mean “to assist” and “to be embarrassed” respectively, when in actuality they meanings are far different. In Spanish “asistir” actually means “to attend” and for example, if one actually uses the word “asistir” incorrectly when speaking, and then is corrected its could be quite embarrassing. So afterwards if you are to say “Oh, I am very embarrassed” (for using the wrong word) and you say “Oh, estoy muy embarazada!” you have actually just said “Oh, I am very pregnant!”.

For instance, this morning (true story here) I was talking to a teacher about eating spicy foods and I said that I always pile on a lot of muy picante salsa on “mis lluevos” or “my eggs” for breakfast. Turns out that when your say “mis lluevos”, you are actually referring to a certain part of the body, rather than your 2 egg breakfast. I was wondering why she practically spit out her coffee and started laughing hysterically as I was describing my breakfast! LOL. The correct phrase should have been, “los llueveos”.

Another example that I can use to illustrate the point, and one thing that I have worked on for weeks to stop saying incorrectly, is the Spanish word for “tonight”. Every time that I needed to say “tonight”, as in “tonight, I’m going out” or, “I need to study tonight”, I would use a direct translation from English to Spanish as “a” being “to” and “noche” being “night”, hence “a noche” in Spanish. However, this is incorrect since, “a noche” in Spanish actually means “last night”. So I have been constantly finding my self referring to things that I am going to do tonight, as things that I am going to do “last night” in Spanish.

Second, the orientation of the words in a question many times are reversed in Spanish. For Example, last night or “a noche” I was watching a movie on TV. Someone in the house asked me in Spanish “Have you seen this already”? Now as you can see as an English speaker, the orientation of the words in the question make complete sense here.

However, in Spanish things are quite different. The orientation of the words in the question are reversed, with the question being “Ya la viste?” or translated to English being, “already, this you have seen?” I mean, it really sounds like something Yoda would say straight out of Star Wars…right? So it proves very difficult for me to ask questions correctly in Spanish. I think asking a question in Spanish is kind of the equivalent of learning to write from right to left as opposed from left to right. So I guess the next time I have to ask someone a question in Spanish I’ll have to tell myself, “Think like Yoda dude, think like Yoda. And what ever you do, don’t say mis lluevos!!”

Finally, I have found that there are an extreme number of verb tenses in Spanish, when compared to English. Take the verb “make” in English. Off the top of my head I can thing of saying that verb a few different ways, “make”, “made”, and “making”. The different tenses of the verb in English are then helped our by adding other words in front of the verb. For Example, “we made”, “they make”, “you are making”, “I am going to make”, “he should have made” etc. So in this example I have given the different persons doing the action as well as a few different tenses of the verb for past, present, future etc. As you can see, the actual verb “make” rarely changes.

However, in Spanish the persons doing the action change the verb “make” or “hacer” in 5 different ways, “hago”, “haces”, “hace“, “hacemos”, “hacen” for the persons I, you, he/she, us, and they respectively. I have also only learned 6 tenses of the verb (there are 14 in total I believe) each with 5 different changes for the person or thing doing the action.

For example the different tenses for the “yo” or “I” form are as follows, “hago”, “hice”,”haria”,”hare”, “hacia”, and “haciendo”. Multiply that by the 5 persons doing the action and you have a possible outcome of 30 different variations of the verb! Now this is just a simplified example and yes, some conjugations are the same as “haria” can be used for I, as well as he/she, and the gerundio form does not change with the person, but you can see the struggle I’m having given the insane number of possibilities for the outcome of the verb depending on what you want to say, or what people say to you.

Well, that just about sums up the top 3 issues that I’m having with the language and have to say that despite these road bumps I am thorughly enjoying learning Spanish and I really love my school. Anyway, Given that this is turning into a rather large post I think I’m going to cut it off right about here. I will try to post again soon.

Until then, May the Force be With You... and remember to use mucho of picante on los lluevos!