According to her homework assignment where they had to use the word “convince” in a sentence.
OK, revised vocabulary for the next lesson:
[ul]let me[/ul]
[ul] have a sleepover[/ul]It did wake me up, though.
gulp
~VOW
Yeah, funny mistakes kids make.
Ha! A bit like American girls who visit Mexico and tell people “Estoy caliente” (“I’m horny now”) or “Soy caliente” (“I’m always horny”), when they mean to say “Tengo calor” (I’m [feeling] hot”).
In most American classrooms, at that point the teacher would have to report to child welfare authorities or risk facing criminal charges themselves. Are things more laid back where you are?
Even obvious mistakes in a foreign language? A number of kids made similar mistakes such as “I convinced my mother to do homework later.”
Many, if not most of the kids at this level struggle with the construction “let me” and none of them would have known “sleepover.” When people are just learning a foreign language, these things happen.
Fortunately, there is reasonability here. It’s obvious what the student meant.
Actually, it strikes me as more likely that she persuaded her father to sleep with one of her classmates.
Or, if you want to get SUPER nitpicky, she persuaded her classmate to permit her father to sleep with her.*
Either way, convincing is getting someone to accept an assertion as factual. Getting someone to undertake an action is persuading.
*ETA: unless it was a boy classmate, in which case she persuaded HIM to let her father sleep with HIM.
ETA (again): I think she should get a “B.”
Unfortunately we live in the era of Zero Tolerance.
How does “always” get in there?
I was contrasting two verbs that are both translated as “I am,” but one (estoy) is used for temporary states, while the other (soy) is for permanent conditions. (I’m skipping over some subtleties, but that’s the basic idea).
They both mean “I am,” but I provided both sentences, for completeness (I’ve heard both out of the mouths of gringas), and inserted the extra words to show why there are two possibilities.
Really? Wow, I’d be likely to make that mistake too, apparently. Is that a colloquialism? Because I always thought caliente meant hot (literally).
I hear enough spoken Spanish to know that “calor” is used to mean hot, as in “its really hot outside”. But although I’ve wondered why no one every used “caliente” in that context, I never asked.
Now I’m really glad I didn’t.
It does mean that, but if a person says they feel heat (in English, “I’m hot”), they say “I have heat.”
Similarly, if you were born in 2000, in English you ARE twenty, but in Spanish you HAVE twenty years.
Not colloquialisms; just standard Spanish. (“Estoy caliente” specifically meaning “I’m horny” is probably not universal, though; in some places, I think, it’s just meaningless).
Right. Again, “calor” is the noun (“heat”). “It’s really hot” is “Hay mucho calor,” literally “There is a lot of heat.”
Alternatively, you could say “Hace mucho calor” (“It’s making/doing a lot of heat.”) But never “Es/está caliente,” unless you are describing some hot object.
Fellow student in my German class in college on a chilly day: “Ich bin kalt!”
German professor: “Es tut mir Leid. Dein armer Mann.” (“I’m sorry. Your poor husband.”)
That was the day we all learned that “I am cold” is “Mir ist kalt.” “Ich bin kalt” is “I am frigid.”
Along the U.S./Mexico border, people do a lot of fudging. A lot of times, you can take an English word, add “-ado” or “-ada”, and come up with the Spanish equivalent.
But . . .
“Embarazada” does not mean “embarassed”.
It means “pregnant”.
How often does that really happen? I mean, girls trying to say “I’m [feeling] hot”? I can’t even imagine it gals in the U.S. talking to someone and saying “I’m feeling hot.”
Reminds me of one of the most maddening things I’d seen in Taiwanese education: A student correctly wrote, “I am a police officer” (as part of an English assignment.) The teacher marked him as “wrong” with red ink and instead corrected, “I am a police.”
When I was teaching refugee students and the head teacher asked students for examples of unhealthy foods, one student wrote, “Sugar, candy, and 500 hamburgers.”