Learn Spanish to Make Yourself Misunderstood Part I

One of the interesting benefits of learning a second language is that you can make yourself misunderstood when you want to. While this might not appear much of a benefit there are some circumstances in which it can come in handy. It is something I had wondered about, before starting to learn Spanish, when I noticed that foreign football managers seemed to lose their fluency in English when asked a question they didn’t want to answer.

In my own situation I found the old “no hablo Español” routine handy on more than a few occasions. Here are a couple of the most embarrassing ones.

“La tenía enferma”. When you enter Bolivia as a tourist they give you either a 30 or 90 day stamp on your passport. If you leave the country for a few days they’ll probably not check your passport for old Bolivian stamps, especially if you speak very little Spanish. As I had been living in the country as a tourist for about a year I was now running out of free pages to open it at before handing it over so decided to be even more unintelligible than normal, even although I had started to learn Spanish reasonably well. Unfortunately, I got a border official who seemed to scent a problem in the air and who started flicking through my stamp filled passport counting the entry stamps. When he asked me why I had so many I theatrically skimmed through my small dictionary, shrugged and then said “la tenía enferma”, while vaguely pointing in the direction of my leg. This translated as “I had it sick” or even, “I made her sick of me” and made no real sense in the situation. It worked however, and with my wallet just 20 bolivianos lighter I entered the country once more.