Visit my chamber VI: I am looking for Dirty milk

This is a series of posts on my funny language mistakes that I started in 2008 in France. This is my first post on Spanish language mistakes.  It has been a little while since I wrote anything because I’ve been living in an MBA bubble where I mostly spoke English. Now in the Wayra incubator I speak a lot of Spanish, so here we go with a new edition of “Visit my Chamber”. 

Eaten or Comfortable?

I was speaking to someone and wanted to ask them if their seat was comfortable. I said: estas comido. This in fact means: have you been eaten? I should have said: estas comodo, which means: “are you comfortable”. They were comfortable but not eaten 😉

Bandaging my car

One of the things I did in the last 6 months was selling our car as we didn’t use it at all since our move to Barcelona. So I was talking about “vender mi coche’ all the time. This must have been very funny for people as it actually means that I was “bandaging my car. I should have said: “vendar mi coche”. One single subtle letter of difference.

Dirty Milk

We also had another baby since the last time I wrote a post in this series. After a while we started to supplement our baby’s diet with cereal, so we needed formula milk to be able to make it. I went to the shop to get some powdered milk (I didn’t know the word for formula). I asked the lady in the shop and she looked at me very strange. I’d asked her for “leche poudre” (tried a French word when I didn’t have the Spanish one). But the lady was really puzzled. It turned out I had asked for dirty milk. I should have said “leche de polvo”.

So you see that learning a language can lead to all sorts of funny situations. As always my message is: put yourself out there and speak the language, people appreciate it too much to care for your mistakes, your effort counts more. If you ever hear me make a language mistake, please let me know. It is because of all the people around me that correct me that I can learn… I thank all of you!

Until the next… Visit My Chamber.