Today was our first meeting as a group for the Each One Teach One course and we met at Pella’s cafe this afternoon.
Our first topic was basically just small talk about the weekend, for example my weekend trip to a reindeer farm. We soon switched to talking about the northern light, which are called “Nordlichter” in German and “aurora boreal” in Spanish, as the chances to see them were quite high during the weekend. It seems like all foreigners want to see the northern lights during their stay in Finland in winter. Jorge was able to see them even from his kitchen window and I was able to see them from the train window. Unfortunately, Ádám was not able to see them.
After some small talk, we started learning to introduce ourselves in German and Spanish.
(English / German / Spanish)
- My name is … – Mein Name ist … – Mi nombre es …
- Your name is … – Dein Name ist … – Tu nombre es …
- I am … – Ich bin … – Soy …
- I am called … – Ich heiße … – Me llamo …
- Hello – Hallo – Hola
- Good morning – Guten Morgen – Buenos días
- Good day – Guten Tag – Buenas tardes
- Good evening – Guten Abend
- Good night – Gute Nacht – Buenas noches
In Spain, the commonly used greetings are only the three mentioned above.
Some vacabulary we asked each other randomely were for example:
- hospital – Krankenhaus – hospital
- building – Haus – casa
- I am cold. – Mir ist kalt. – Tengo frío.
If you translate “tengo” directly, then it means “I have”. Therefore, the use of the verb in Spanish in this case is quite different to the use of the verb in English and German. For English and German, the verb to be used is “to be” instead of “to have”.
- I have a cold. – Ich habe eine Erkältung. – Estoy resfriado.
- cold – Erkältung – resfriado
Besides the different use of the verb, other differences we noticed and talked about are:
There is only one translation for the verb “to be” in German, that is “sein”, but there are two in Spanish, these are “estar” and “ser”. For foreigners, to differentiate between the two and to use them correctly is really hard, but natural for Spanish people. The same can be said about the articles “der, die, das” in German. To use them correctly is natural for Germans, but difficult for foreigners. In English, there is only “the”.
Regarding writing sentences, differences we talked about are that only in Spanish there are accent marks and Spanish has more punctuation marks than German, e.g. “¿”.
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