words that trip up english speakers
module: say it out loud (sounds and vowels)
okay. six lessons in. vowels are steady, r's are rolling or not rolling and either way people understand you.
today's the lesson where i tell you about the specific words that mess with english speakers' heads. not sounds this time. actual words. the ones where your mouth wants to do one thing and spanish wants a different thing and there's a little collision every time.
the big one: false friends
these are words that look like english words, so your brain relaxes and just says the english meaning. that's the trap.
- embarazada does not mean embarrassed. it means pregnant. i have seen this go wrong in real life and it is a whole situation. don't say this one unless you mean it.
- excitado/excitada — also not what you think. skip it. say "emocionado" for excited.
- molestar looks like molest. it just means to bother or annoy. "no me molestes" is "quit bothering me," not anything dark.
- contestar isn't contest, it's to answer. as in a phone.
- carpeta isn't carpet, it's a folder. the word for carpet is alfombra.
say those five out loud right now, slow. the point isn't to memorize the definitions perfect. the point is your mouth learns to hesitate for half a second before it trusts the english-shaped word. that hesitation is the whole skill.
the b/v thing
in spanish, b and v are basically the same sound. english speakers want to make them different because we do at home. spanish doesn't care.
vaca (cow) and if you said it with a hard english v, that's fine, you'll be understood, but if you relax it toward a soft b sound you'll sound more native and it's honestly easier to say fast. try it: vaca, baca, same mouth shape either way. iykyk once you've done it a few times.
the double letters that aren't doubled the way you think
- ll — not "l-l." in most of latin america it's a y sound. "llamo" is "yamo." this trips people up hard because it looks like it should stack.
- rr — that's your rolled r from two lessons ago. one r, tap it. two r's, roll it. "pero" (but) versus "perro" (dog) is a real difference and worth getting right because otherwise you're telling someone their dog is a "but."
the silent h
h is silent. always. "hola" — no h sound at all, it's just "ola." english speakers want to breathe a little h in there out of habit. drop it completely. feels weird for about a week and then it doesn't.
practice at home, five minutes
grab a notecard or your notes app.
- write the five false friends above.
- say each one out loud, then say what it actually means out loud right after. "embarazada — pregnant. embarazada — pregnant." you're building the correction into the saying.
- do vaca/baca a few times just to feel the b-v thing loosen up.
- say "pero" and "perro" back to back, slow, then fast.
that's it. five minutes, out loud, standing in your kitchen is fine. don't do this one silently in your head — it's the whole reason these words trip people up in the first place, because we read them silently and assume.
my opinion on this, and i'll say it every time it's relevant: vocab lists are mostly a waste unless you're saying them out loud and using them. you can stare at "embarazada = pregnant" on a flashcard for a week and still say it wrong to your neighbor because you never practiced it with your mouth. say it out loud. that's the whole method.
melody's been drilling these with me lately too, actually. she caught me at the kitchen table doing verb conjugations out loud and started repeating them back at me in this ridiculous voice, real exaggerated, and now it's just a thing we do — i'm canning peaches, she's doing homework, and we're lobbing spanish back and forth over the sound of the pressure canner. her accent's better than mine already and it bugs me a little 😩 but that's kind of the whole point of saying it out loud in front of people. somebody's always going to be better at it than you. keep going anyway.
one caution, not a big one: if you're practicing "embarazada" or any of these false friends with somebody you don't know well yet, maybe don't lead with that one. save it for people who'll laugh with you instead of just laugh.
before next time
pick two false friends from today and use them correctly, out loud, at least three times each before we meet again. doesn't matter who's listening — the dog, the kids, yourself in the car.