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I had no idea that it would be such a headach to order in Spain. I knew the language difference so I thought I prepaired. I took several years of spanish in college, I have a friend thats mexican that she helped me also. I took a trip to Madrid Spain thinking that I knew enough spanish to get by reasonibly but no where near fleuntly.
So imagin my shock when I tried to talk to a waiter the first day only to get a dumb look back that told me 'What is this moron trying to say to me' lol.
Go figure I eventually found what my problem was. I was learining Spanish the way Mexicans speak it. first off, We learn to pronounce 5 Sinco, there. It can pass in mexico but spaniards pronounce it Thinco. C is actually TH. that was ahuge part of my problem and something I never thought of before. That i was learning it wrong and would be though of as a complete idiot in spain
But I dont feel that dumb. My friend who is totally fleunt in spanish and married to a mexican husband that doesnt speak a word of enlgish got the same look from people also, at times there. but she did better than Me.
in spain, they have no idea what Sinco is. at leat the waiters i asked for 5 from didnt. I tried to ask for Sinco Aqa (5 waters) and they just looked at me like i was a moron
My injury was also really dumb. I was climing the stone steps up a castle tower in segovia and fell. I guess I made a total idiot of myself
Comments
Cinco
It's not pronounced "thinco" in all of Spain, just mostly Castille which is the area around Madrid and some of the southern cities. Elsewhere, it is "sinco" except where they don't speak Spanish at all. Catalan is spoken in the area around Barcelona and that's less like Spanish than Portuguese or Italian is. Catalan sounds like an Italian trying to speak French with a fake Spanish accent. It's about as much like Spanish as Dutch is like English.
And of course, Basque is spoken in some parts of the Pyrenees Mountains. Basque's closest linguistic relative in the world may be a dialect of Chinese spoken in Western China, it's not only nothing like Spanish, it's nothing like any other language in Europe.
You also may have ran into the sort of rudeness that tourists encounter all over the world. A Brit or Aussie might encounter it in New York or Los Angeles, where their English would be deliberately misunderstood. Most waiters are patient with tourists, but not all.
But the other problem is that "five waters" in English is idiomatic. What you meant was "five bottles of water". The idiom does not translate straight across. In Mexican Spanish, locally at least, you could say "cinco de agua", "five of water" but I'm not sure that would be the idiom in Spain. Safer would be to say "cinco botellas de agua" but in some Spanish-speaking countries it might be "cinco frascos de agua" or maybe something else. Still, "botellas" is likely to be understood.
Getting the language right idiomatically is very, very hard.
I remember when I learned Vietnamese, I learned "vâng" meant "yes". Well, it does, in writing, but idiomatically, the Vietnamese don't say yes, verbally, to anything, they repeat the verb of the question to be in agreement. As if in English we replied "go" to the question "Did you go to town?" What I was saying sounded to the Vietnamese as if someone had replied, "Verily," to a question. :) I got peals of laughter until someone explained it. Plus which, in the area where I was, they spoke a dialect that lacked the "v" sound. They understood me, but I sounded hilarious.
My Spanish sometimes gets the same reaction. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
That's interesting
That verb repetition, when in agreement, is actually quite interesting. But, I wonder, is there a special way of disagreeing in Vietnamese or is it simply saying a translated version of "no"?
No
The word for "not" is used as an all purpose negative. Directly opposite to Japanese who have problems actually saying "no". :)
It's also how you end most questions. "Are you going home?" is "Di nhà , khong?" literally, "Go home, not?" Yes would be, "Di." and no would be, "Không."
You could also use "à " as an interrogative ending if a yes answer would be surprising or as irony. "À" as a word by itself is roughly equivalent to "Wow." :)
Oh, Vietnamese leaves out pronouns if context is clear, even though the verbs have no conjugations. And verbs function as nouns, adverbs, prepositions, adjectives even conjuctions with no problem. Except for learning how to pronounce the tones, Vietnamese is super-easy to get minimally fluent in. If you can get them to talk slow enough. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
The meaning of thank you.
Someone, I forget who, claimed that the English invented abroad. If so it must count as one of our greatest historical blunders.
Linguistically furrin parts are just one enormous minefield. Even when words are perfectly well pronounced and understood by both the speaker and the listener they can mean entirely different things.
Anyone learning French will encounter 'Merci' on Page 1 of their text book and will quickly master both its meaning and a fair approximation of its pronunciation within a few months.
Emboldened by this accomplishment the foolhardy will immediately venture abroad.
Preferably to France.
There, having found someone who is prepared to buy him or her a drink, the new French speaker settles down to an evening's quiet inebriation.
To obtain the first drink it is usually sufficient to wave one's glass around in an encouraging manner. The second time the bottle is proffered however the unwary will, urged on by the general feeling of goodwill towards his or her host engendered by the first drink, fall into the tragic error of trying out the fruits of his or her study by uttering the fatal word. "Merci"
On the utterance of this dread word the bottle will be immediately moved out of reach and used to fill a neighbour's glass. Moreover this refusal, for indeed that is what it is construed as, may be taken as pertaining to the rest of the evening.
The perverse French understand 'merci' in this situation to mean 'No thank you' and make little or no effort to dissuade you otherwise.
Much harm is thus done to international relations and all but the most determined traveller invariably takes the next ferry home. Indeed the ferry companies bank on this as the subsequent bartakings form a substantial part of their profit.
So beware. My advice is to restrict yourself to a grunt of a generally encouraging nature together with the lifting of one or both eyebrows accompanied by an unmistakeable nod of the head. Alternatively a small donation to a charity of my choice will bring you, under plain cover, a guaranteed, fail safe, verbal response.
Hugs,
Fleurie
Diabolical Dialectical
I had a friend in high school that was an exchange student from Colombia. He went to a convention at the state capital for all the exchange students in the state. He met up with a group of spanish speakers there from Peru, Argentina, El Salvador, Spain, Panama, and Chile.
They had to speak English to understand one another.
During "international week" at my high school his senior year (my sophomore year), they read the menu for the day in Spanish each morning. On Wednesday, after the menu was read during my first hour Spanish I class, there was a resounding "BANG!" from the courtyard. We all looked out the window to see José sprinting across the courtyard. Moments later he burst into the class breathless.
"Señora!" he near-shouted when he had his air back.
"¿S�" the teacher, Miss Judy Schneider, responded.
José's English was very heavily accented, so I will attempt to reproduce his pronunciation...
"Vhat... eez 'el bocadillo de pollo' I am heering on de eentercohm?"
Miss Schneider dropped Spanish in favor of English so that her beginners might follow a conversation that was obviously going to be entertaining. José had just asked what the main entreé for the day's lunch was. Even us beginners knew what it was... anyone who has eaten at the 'El Loco Pollo' chain knows what it is.
For you non-Spanish speakers, a quick pronunciation guide of the phrase in question: el boh-kah-dee-yoh day poh-yoh :: el bocadillo de pollo.
She looked at him completely puzzled by his question.
"Um, José... it's a chicken sandwich... or 'the sandwich of chicken' literally."
"No!" responded the now-breathing (and grinning) teenager from the general neighborhood of the equator, "Eet eez nawt! Eet eez being a cheekeen, ah, vhat say, cheekeen... dessert!"
Yes, the word 'dessert' came out free of his normal slight garbling, and we all (the class) laughed uproariously.
Realizing that this was a dialect differential, Miss Schneider then asked, "So... what do Colombians say for 'sandwich' then?"
José pulled for a moment at his bottom lip as he stared at the floor.
He looked up and his grin again split the hemispheres of his face.
"Ee-see! San-veech!"
Una torta de pollo con una gallina viva.
Local Spanish for sandwich is "torta" which is the word in Spain for bun.
A sixties comedy record had Castro ordering what I typed on the subject line, "A chicken sandwich with a live chicken." :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Dialects
The French find Quebecois French hilarious. The Dutch find Afrikaans equally funny. An Australian friend of mine, who speaks excellent Cantonese, decided to show off in a Chinese restaurant in Melbourne after he heard the staff talking amongst themselves in that language.
He began ordering in Chinese only to have the teenage waitress yell out:
"Hey, Dad. I got a wog 'ere don't know English!"
And speaking of Chinese, they can't even understand their own dialects. They have to write notes to each other!
Joanne
So your friend's a Greek-Aussie?
... and another query... you're in the Melbourne area? When I finally get over there, I'll be in that area -- maybe we'll have to get together for a dinner or something!
Sister-in-law's Chinese
My sister-in-law is from Hong Kong but her parents were from a small village in Southern China where they spoke a dialect of Cantonese apparently as rustic as if my grandfather had visited the London and offered someone a "dip" (snuff). She gets by with Cantonese speakers but not if she and her sisters get to yakking together at 78. :)
But Cantonese, Wu and Mandarin and the other major Chinese "dialects" are verbally less like each other than English, Dutch and Swedish. There's a resemblance and some words in common but it would take some effort to have a conversation. A Swede, a Hollander and an Ulsterman would probably have an easier time. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
There's A Famous Joke
About General "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell, who fought in China during WW2. He spoke Mandarin perfectly.
He stopped his jeep at a junction one day, and asked one of two local men who were sitting there,which road led to Shanghai.
The man looked at him blankly, so he repeated the question, directing it at the other fellow.
The second one also looked blank and just shrugged his shoulders.
Stillwell gave up and put the jeep into gear to drive away, when he heard one say to the other.
"You know, I could have almost sworn that foreign devil was asking us which was the way to Shanghai."
Boom-Boom,
Joanne