I’ve found as I discuss my future travel plans that “visit” is often too weak a word to describe that I want to go to a country. We all learn in Spanish 1 that there’s two words for “to know”: “ saber” means to know facts or information, and “ conocer” means to be familiar with a person or a place. I’m sure there’s more, but it would take a specific situation for them to occur to me.Ĭonocer: This is the number one word I miss in English. Without further ado, here’s the list of words I could come up with in the moment, in the order I thought of them. –As a side note, in that article I learned a new definition of the word “ estrenar,” which I already knew to mean “to premier.” Imagine my delight when I discovered you can also estrenar things other than movies and shows: “You’re looking good today, Renee.” “Oh, thanks! I’m premiering my new dress!” So much fun.– I read an article today about words that don’t directly translate from Spanish to English, many of which I don’t relate to, either because they’re not commonly used in Costa Rica, or because they haven’t become an important part of my personal vocabulary, so I decided to make a list of my own. Turns out you can’t do that with people who don’t understand Spanish, so every once in a while in Texas, I found myself trying to translate my thoughts into English when they wanted to be expressed in Spanish, a phenomenon that is all too familiar but al revés when I speak Spanish. Even when I was speaking completely in English with the other exchange students, I had the option of substituting in a Spanish word or two if I felt like it. As a result, I became accustomed to speaking a sort of Spanglish with varying degrees of proportion of English and Spanish, depending on whom I was talking to. I wasn’t really capable of communicating myself well enough to have a good friendship with someone completely in Spanish. Nearly all of my friends last semester were bilingual to some extent: either fellow exchange students learning Spanish or Ticos learning English. I discovered gaps I had never realized existed in English, things that I had learned to easily express in Spanish. at the end of last year, I learned there was just a bit of a backlash in returning my own tongue. When I came to Costa Rica, I sacrificed my ability to express myself properly so I could learn a new language.

Spanish word for comment