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> You might believe that 'estoy caliente' means that you're feeling really hot, because you learned that 'estoy' means 'I am' and 'caliente' means hot, but you would be confused when the room bursts into laughter and won't tell you what's so funny about it.

That's pretty funny - I was taught in my german class that "ich bin warm" directly translates to I'm feeling hot, but colloquially it means "I am gay". And here, the same phrase in spanish just means horny.

Transliteration is definitely littered with booby traps.

When I studied French in school, on my first trip to Québec some of us were eating dinner and someone came by to ask if we wanted anything else.

One of the girls in the group responded "Non merci, je suis pleine" -- word-for-word "No thanks, I'm full". And got a laugh, because the connotation was not "I'm no longer hungry", but "I'm pregnant".

I'm french, and I've never heard of that connotation for pleine. OTOH, if you tell me "je suis plein/pleine", I'll take it that you're drunk.

I was unaware of it until it happened. Was told it's a Québecois thing.

They also taught me the helicopter joke.

Québécois here, never heard it either. Maybe it's a regional thing or it was a different word.

Also possible they were messing with the American teenagers, since we were already being overwhelmed with differences between dialects of French.

Not in Utica, no, it's an Albany expression.

>More often than not I'd plug words and sentences into Google Translate, check dictionaries when I wasn't confident about a certain suggestion,

Ha, I do that too sometimes (GT), and when it doesn't work, I do this:

https://translate.google.com/#en/en/Blame%20Google%20Transla... and share it with the person I am talking or writing to.

Just first change the language of the right side text box inf GT to the target language you want, or in the URL above, change the second language code from en (English) to de or es (German or Spanish), for example.

Also, it's interesting that if you toggle the translation from lang A -> lang B to lang B -> lang A, the result is sometimes not the same as the original you first typed in lang A.

e.g. try the above phrase I used (Blame Google Translate) with DE (German) as the target lang.

All that said, GT is still a useful and fun tool. I play around with the audio outputs of the languages sometimes.

It’s super useful when you’re not treating it as a tool that does all the translating work and you copy/paste the result, but one that lets you explore how words fit together. I think you have to be comfortable enough with the grammar to get a feel for what seems to flow, though.

> The only problem was that my writing was miles ahead of my speaking

That surprises me because Spanish is one of the few languages that what you read is pretty much what you have to say. Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound (for example "que" that would be expected to sound k-u-e but actually sounds like k-e). The entonation is another story but despite of it, your pronunciation should be clear enough to understand you.

It’s mostly a case of confidence I think. When you write you have all the time you need to get the message right and tweak it to perfection, when it comes to speaking you don’t and you need to work on your sound in order to be understood. You can’t speak and instantly know how to write and it’s the same in reverse.

Speak too slow or sound unsure and plenty of people will default to English to give you a hand instead of waiting for you to figure it out. It has nothing to do with the phonetic simplicity, although it does help when you compare it to English, for example, which might as well be lawless because there’s practically no connection between the spoken and written form.

>That surprises me because Spanish is one of the few languages that what you read is pretty much what you have to say.

Sanskrit is like that too, pretty much, i.e. as far as:

"what you read is pretty much what you have to say"

goes. There is only one way to pronounce any letter or compound letter or word. In fact Hindi is too, except for regional differences in pronunciation, and both are unlike English in this respect, where a non-native speaker often fumbles to pronounce some words right (even apart from accent), because the right way to say a word can be very different from how it looks when written (if you try to build up the sound of the word from its component letters, at least in many cases).

Examples of this are: cut and put, argue and vague.

IIRC George Bernard Shaw made a well-known observation that I learned as a kid in English class; he is supposed to have said something like: in English, going logically by how you say / spell parts of other words, you could spell "fish" as "ghoti", i.e. "f" as in the "gh" of "laugh", "i" as in the "o" of "women", and "sh" as in the "ti" of "nation".

>Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound

In Spanish, the letter combination "ll" (two ells) sounding like a "y" is another unexpected one, as in "amarillo" (yellow) for example.

https://translate.google.com/#en/es/yellow

Click on the speaker icon under "amarillo" to hear it spoken.

"j" being pronounced as "h" is another one, at least for speakers coming from English.

Interesting stuff.