¡Hola!

Sometimes I’m truly amazed by the places you can find new Spanish phrases…

The other day I was washing my hands in a public lavatory in Madrid’s Retiro park, when an old man came and stood at the next wash basin.

In a small room behind, the lavatory attendant was watching one of the hundreds of ‘tele-basura‘ Oprah-style afternoon talk shoes that Spanish TV is currently plagued by, and it seems they were talking about some celebrity’s new shoes!

‘Madre mía‘, said the old guy next to me, ‘sacan punta a cualquier cosa…‘

‘Sacar punta‘ literally means to sharpen your pencil, but it’s also used like this to mean ‘they squeeze a topic of conversation out of practically anything!’

If you’ve heard a useful/interesting Spanish phrase ‘out in the wild’ recently, please do leave a comment and let us know what it is!

Un saludo,

Ben

P.S. If you enjoy these ‘straight from real life’ phrases, then you’ll enjoy an audio I made a while ago, a special ‘Real Spanish Hunting’ mp3 with 20 more great phrases like these and details of just how I ‘found’ them – it’s available as an extra ‘secret’ bonus on the download page after you purchase anything from our store:

http://www.notesinspanish.com/store/

Hola!

I (Ben) had a great ‘in at the deep end’ Spanish learning experience this weekend! I offered to help translate for a friend who was running a deep relaxation course here in Spain.

He spoke in English, and I had to simultaneously translate into Spanish for the Spanish people who had come to the course.

All went well as I translated to the 70+ people present that they had to first lie down, relax their breathing, put their arms by their side… but things got tricky after that.

‘Put your hands on your cranium…’ OK, craneum is ‘craneo‘, I knew that one, feel your brain, ‘cerebro‘, relax, and on down the body he went, talking them (via me) through the face (cara), the lungs (pulmones), the heart (corazón)…

Then the first major problem arrived. ‘Put your hands over your liver’… said my friend.

Now, I always get this word wrong. Is it ‘hígado’, or ‘hidalgo’… One means liver, the other means nobleman… when I usually get this one mixed up, Marina always laughs at me (e.g. when I describe how alcohol is bad for your nobleman!) so I had to get this right!

And I had a split second to decide which one it was before I announced the Spanish instruction to 75 already-very-relaxed people! I went for Hígado, and luckily no-one made a squeak as they carefully lowered their hands to their livers…

Then, the final nightmare, with the instruction ‘Put your hands under your armpits’.

I know two words/phrases about armpits, one is ‘te canta la ala‘, which is a very very informal way of telling someone you know very very well that they didn’t use enough deodorant this morning, and the other word is ‘sobaco‘.

I knew it sounded a little informal, but it’s all I had, so I went for it: ‘Manos debajo de los sobacos‘… at which point 15% of the assembled relaxed people started giggling!

Someone lying on the floor near to where I was sitting opened their eyes, looked at me, and hissed ‘¡Axilas!’ That was the word I was looking for!!

Sobaco was way too informal still for the setting, whereas Axila was the correct ‘anatomical’ version.

In the end it didn’t matter at all. After 2 hours of simultaneous translation into anatomical Spanish, I felt like my Spanish had leapt to another level, and a lot of the now-very-relaxed Spanish people said I’d done a great job!

It was a great reminder of how it pays HUGE dividends to challenge yourself beyond your pre-conceived limits. Often you are ready to make the jump up to another level with just a tiny bit of help, just a tiny bit more effort (and it’s often when you think you are most ready to throw it all in and give up on Spanish for good!)

So forget about worrying about Spanish being too hard, or about making mistakes in public – forget all your worries, and jump in with both feet as I did this weekend!

Check out more of our audio, get the higher level worksheet pack you’ve been thinking about in our store, and amaze yourself with what you can do with your Spanish!