Fork and other members of the family
Once in a class at school when we were about 15, we were told to give a short presentation on family life. My friend Tracy duly stood up and announced Mi padre es tenedor, much to the amusement of the class! She actually stated that her father is a fork! What she wanted to say was Mi padre es tendero, my father is a shopkeeper.
Editor's note: If you're a shopkeeper running your own shop, it sounds more natural to say Tengo una tienda, I have or run a shop.
Sent by: Ailsa
Comments
I once excitedly related to a Spanish friend how two men had been attacking each other in the street with cucharas - spoons! Of course I meant cuchillos - knives!
I live in Spain at the moment and am always mixing up the words for knife (cuchillo) and spoon (cuchara). I have to think of the word spoonful (cucharada), which you see a lot on food packets etc, to remember which one is spoon! I prefer the Catalan for knife (ganivet) but I get hopelessly lost when I try to talk Catalan in public!
I was in a fast food restaurant in Barcelona with my two friends and we were only in Spain for two weeks. As Filipinos we're quite confident about communicating in Spanish as there are lots of Spanish words and phrases in our language. One of my friends, who was working and living in France and Switzerland and speaks fluently French, accidentally dropped her fork. So she went to the counter to ask for another fork, but she got confused about how to say it in Spanish. She remembered that the Spanish word for fork is the same in Filipino. So, at last she said in Spanglish, Can I have comedor? Well, comedor means 'dining room'. She got confused between comedor and tenedor because they sound so similar. So when finally she got it right and went back to us, the man behind the counter was secretly smiling at us every time he looked at us
To avoid confusion between cuchillo and cuchara, think of the ll's in cuchillo as like 2 straight knives and the r of cuchara as the way the spoon is shaped when you look at it sideways.
Flag this comment