Have you been practicing your target language every day? Do you remember the Spanish or Italian or French word for lazy? For today's assignment, look up the word 'unmotivated' in the language you're learning. In Spanish it's
desmotivado. Uh-oh. Looks like someone got up on the wrong side of the bed. The word for 'to whine' in Italian is piagnucolare--purty, ain't it?
For me one of the most annoying grammar points in both Italian and Spanish involves the way those languages express the idea of liking something. It definitely makes me piagnucolare and at times causes me to be desmotivado. It's only recently that I've begun to get the hang of it. Let's start with an example.
In English we say: 'I like the tortillla.' (If you don't like tortillas, then substitute huevos rancheros or your favorite dish). I can see you're going to be trouble today. In Spanish, this would be expressed as 'The tortilla pleases me,' Me gusta la tortilla. I know some smart-assed smart students would immediately catch on to this, but at first I had a rough time with it, because it is such a different construction than in English. Not only is the familiar 'I' missing (yo) but it has been replaced with what is normally a direct object pronoun, me. And if it's first person singular, why isn't the verb in the third person singular gusto? Well, as I'm sure you've already surmised (boy do I have some bright readers out there) that the pronoun is treated as a direct object and the verb is correctly presented as third person singular. It gets even trickier when we use the plural: 'I like tortillas.' Me gustan las tortillas. The tortillas are now the subject and I am the object, so I need gustan, not gusto. Those tortillas are in the process of pleasing me. Thanks, tortillas! And what if you want to say They like the tortillas? Easy enough. Simply begin the sentence with the third person plural pronoun:
Les gustan las tortillas. Or, A loro piace i spaghetti. Here's a very good explanation of this construction: http://www.espanol-ingles.com.mx/spanish-grammar/how_to_say_I_like.shtml.
Italian has an almost identical structure. I like spaghetti becomes Mi piace i spaghetti. Spaghetti pleases me--as indeed it does. It takes a little practice, but after awhile this loses its strangeness.
Jeez, now I'm hungry. All that talk about spaghetti and tortillas has really worked me up. How 'bout ordering up a pizza for us. Or would you rather Mexican? Tú pagas? Bueno, bueno. Eres muy generoso!
A similar issue exists in Korean, one I never could resolve. There are two different verbs, one sometimes translated as 'like' and the other as 'is good.' But in practice the outsider soon learns the distinction is by no means that easy. The reader might get a better idea of how far two languages can be apart if she considers how 'I love you' is rendered in Korean. Here's what it looks like: 사랑해요. It's always written as one word, and there are absolutely no pronouns in it (no "I" or "you"). The first part (사랑, sarang) means "love." The second part (해요) derives from an all-purpose verb roughly corresponding to the English "do." The Korean expression, then, might be literally translated as "love does." It is (I submit) far, far removed from the pronoun-enslaved English.
ReplyDelete