A Spanish friend was telling me about an email he’d received from his ex.
What I heard – Dijo que intente perdonar lo que pasó – was a lot different from what he actually said – Dijo que intenta perdonar…
I (mis)understood that she was asking him to try to forgive her, and thereby apparently taking responsibility for what happened, whereas in fact she was saying she was trying to forgive him, but laying the blame squarely at his door.
It’s not the first time I’ve had this problem and I’m pretty sure that it’s to do with the verb structure of Spanish compared to English. Our verb inflections are minimal and, in general, not vital to understanding, whereas in Spanish a single vowel change in the final unstressed syllable of a word can make an enormous difference to meaning.
Compare, for example, the phrase I walk to work with we walk to work. There’s no difference at all in the verb form. In regular English verbs, the only present tense ending change is in the third person – the final s in he walks to work – and even that is inaudible in phrases such as he walks slowly.
In fact English has very few inflections – changes in words that indicate distinctions such as gender, number, tense, person, and mood. Instead we use explicit pronouns, adverbs and other ways to clarify meaning.
Our native language encourages us in the belief that the endings of words aren’t really important and our ears are not trained to listen for them.
If you couple that with the English-speaker’s tendency to substitute a schwa sound (the weak vowel sound in the unstressed articles a and the, and in the first syllable of occur and the second of happen) for many unstressed vowels, our ears have to undergo a lot of re-training if we are to understand inflected languages like Spanish.
But, if you want to make the right kind of sympathetic noises at the right time, these details are important.
don't confuse the narrator 