The infographic with which you will not screw up on your trips
No more doubting about the dreaded English 'false friends', those who engraved you on fire at school and who, if you don't use them, remain in the limbo of eternal doubt. This infographic will save you more than one misunderstanding on your next trip.
False friends are those words that, despite being practically the same in English and Spanish, mean something completely different. They are responsible for the widespread medium-high level of English being called into question. They are also behind the faces of astonishment that your English-speaking interlocutors cannot avoid making when the word that is not where it does not belong sneaks up on you.
A few more, tip
That pregnant means pregnant and embarrassed, embarrassed (almost) everyone is very clear about it, until they are in the middle of a conversation, on the other side of the world, talking fast and trying to make themselves understood. So, the mess is served.
Something similar happened to one of the students of the creator of the False Friends infographic, Ana Gómez, teacher of Spanish for foreigners and author of the blog Pencil of ELE.
“She hadn't been working as a teacher for long. She was giving Spanish classes to a group of Italian teenagers and one of them jokingly told me, 'Ana, handcuff me.' Since the two languages were so similar, I was convinced that he had asked me to marry him. When he realized that he had asked me to handcuff him, he wanted to die” Anna remembers.
this was in 2014 , the year in which this infographic was born, which Ana has been perfecting over the years until achieving the current result. “I always use colors and icons to make it easier to remember or to avoid translation and understand just at a glance” She explains to Traveler.es this teacher who is in favor of studying and teaching foreign languages with very visual and attractive materials.
And there you are, don't deny it, swearing and perjuring that you knew them, that you studied them all and that you don't understand how now you're unable to remember them. breathe. Not everything is lost. Ana bets on the game when it comes to memorizing the false friends and she leads by example in her classes. "Sometimes we have played to create a crazy dialogue based on laughter and thinking about the mess you can get into if you use them wrong, you remember them".
We know, there are many, and you may not be able to remember them all for your next trip. Don't worry, you can always have this infographic at hand and if not, Ana has selected a few to watch out for.
“If we catch a cold and go to the pharmacy saying we're constipated, they'll probably give us something to treat the constipation. If something or someone annoys you in an English-speaking country, do not say that it bothers you because annoying would be what for us is abuse. If you want to report that you're pregnant, maybe they think you're embarrassing or if you're looking for a library, they'll probably direct you to a library."
Furthermore, she remembers: “It is very important to know how to ask in another language what street our hotel is on, where the nearest metro stop is or how much something costs ".
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'Fake Friends'