Yesterday, I met up with Jenna and Emilia at a cáfe for our 7th meeting. Even though we were missing our Mexican friends, we decided to have some practice in Spanish verbs with the help of Sanakirja and Span¡shD!ct.
We went through more than half of the list consisting of common regular and irregular Spanish verbs, which interestingly has words such as: asesinar (to assassinate) , cazar (to hunt), esposer (to handcuff). Other than that, most of the verbs are very useful to form daily conversations and it was also good that I could refresh my Finnish verb vocabulary.
In between our exercise, we had also discussed about words that have similar meaning but with a slightly different nuance. E.g. the verb escuchar (to listen to) vs oír (to hear/listen). One would use escuchar when the listening is done for the intention of understanding the content, whereas oír is used in more generic form of hearing something, like “I can’t hear you, can you please repeat?”. I read about this from a Spanish grammar discussion forum. This is also similar to Finnish language where both verbs “to hear/listen” – kuulla and kuunnella – are slightly different, as the latter refers to the act of listening for a longer period of time, as opposed to the former.
It is very interesting for me to find out about subtle nuances in a language by using different words or same words but different sequence in a sentence. Also, we talked about how one word can mean very different things in Spain and Latin America. For this, I wished we had our friends (and Spanish friends from Spain) to give us more examples then.
Otherwise, everything else was good and it was a good Spanish-Finnish-English language exchange evening.
Blog post by: Chrystal Giam, 13Media
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