One of my secondary projects (teaching in the schools is my primary project) is teaching English to the three person staff of a local NGO – I know I’ve written about them before. I love teaching them, partly for situations that arise that are absolutely hilarious. One of my favorite misunderstandings that came out of that class happened a while back. I asked one of the women “Do you have a cousin in Rivas?” and her attempt at translating before answering (“Eres una cocina en Rivas?”) actually means “Are you a kitchen in Rivas?” That might be one of those, “you had to be there” moments but we still laugh about it to this day.
Last week in class we were going over the homework which was to match the opposite adjectives in a list (small-large, deep-shallow, etc.) and the two women in the group had worked together and determined that “tall” didn’t match with anything on the list and so they had written in “bass.” I kept looking at it thinking “how in the world did they come up with bass?” With a little more thought I realized that they had taken “tall” which is “alto” in Spanish and knew that the opposite was “bajo,” which translates to both “short” and “bass” as in bass guitar. It’s like a little puzzle sometimes making the connections :)
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