Spanish mixes me up
While I was walking home today, I thought to myself,
“Me duele mis pies,”
because my feet hurt from wearing winter boots that were not tied tightly enough. Then I realized how bad my Spanish had become. I had meant to think to myself,
“Me duelen mis pies,”
because “feet” are plural, and in Spanish, a literal translation are “My feet hurt me” not the person-hiding “My feet hurt” as we say in English. It’s still plural in English, but it just comes so much more naturally than my Spanish…
Update:
A friend of a friend on livejournal points out that to be polite Spanish, I should have written:
“Me duelen los pies,”
I’ve been reminded of this 1000 times, but I always go for the cute, redundant los. If only he knew just *how* quirky my Spanish was 
| This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2005 at 5:58 pm and is tagged with winter boots, literal translation, friend of a friend, walking home, home today, pies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
2 Responses to “Spanish mixes me up”
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Another source of confussion for english speaker is the gender in spanish
A friend canadian friend told me once: “El inglés es el idioma de los negocios, el francés es el idio del amor, y el español es el idioma de la pasión” (He speaks the three languages).
By the way, I just installed your antispam plpugin in my experimental WordPress blog: http://www.encalrtado.com/topochopress/ and it looks like it is working great.
Not to mention the tendency to always translate literally! Imagine reading:
and then translating it, “He lanced the rock…” rather than “He threw the rock…”