Fifth Meeting 10/25

Denily and I met for our fifth time this week at our usual spot outside of 1873. We talked about a wide variety of topics, as usual, so I’ll just jump right into what we discussed!

For whatever reason, we always tend to talk a lot about language and things related to it. This week, I learned a few important things about Spanish that could save me from some embarrassment…speaking of embarrassment, we actually talked about the Spanish word for being embarrassed! Sometimes, as a non-Spanish speaker, I assume that certain English words can be changed into Spanish by a simple change in the ending or pronunciation. For example, the English word ‘family’ becomes ‘familia’ in Spanish. Unfortunately, this device doesn’t always apply; I had forgotten what the Spanish word for ‘embarrassed’ was (it is avergonzado), and asked Denily to remind me. When I asked though, she had a funny story to tell: there was a girl who she knew who was learning Spanish, and in trying to say she was embarrassed, she accidentally said, “estoy embarasado”….which does not mean, “I am embarrassed”. On the contrary, she quickly became embarrassed! Denily’s friend had accidentally said, “I am pregnant”.

Needless to say, I was glad I didn’t unintentionally claim to be pregnant. Denily also taught me another way to avoid embarrassment. Somehow, the word “Miss” came up, like the same “miss” as Driving Miss Daisy. Apparently, in Venezuela, if you call someone a Miss, it basically means you are hitting on them, or telling them they are beautiful. She said it’s based on the importance of the Miss Venezuela competition in her culture. So make sure you don’t call anyone “Miss _____” when you’re in Venezuela unless you mean it!

Since I am learning Spanish right now, we both exchanged what difficulties we have with each other’s language. Denily says that the hardest thing for her is actually pronunciation and perfecting her accent. I can definitely understand the pronunciation difficulty-we have no consistent rules on pronunciation, unlike Spanish. For me, the hardest thing about Spanish is the prepositions. I forget which preposition goes where, or whether one actually needs to be there. Even though Spanish doesn’t have as many prepositions as English, the smaller number cover the same number of uses, meaning one preposition is used in possibly hundreds of ways (that may be exaggeration).

            So yeah, language was the big topic of the day. We will meet again next week and talk again!