¡Qué tiempo hace!

cats: Multilingualism, Open letters to you, To Elsadate: June 28th, 2018Author: Mamá

It’s not easy to learn many languages at once. We can all agree on that, right? So it’s no surprise that, very often, we say funny things when we don’t intend to. And it’s not just about the individual words; not even just about the order of words in a sentence (thanks for the verbs at the end, German!). Once you think you’ve got the pronunciation and vocabulary down, here comes intonation and slaps you in the face!

I fully understand your frustration, Troglodita número dos, although it caught me off guard how annoyed you were at me when I didn’t manage to correctly interpret your message to me. You were 5 years old and had not yet entered your more rebellious phase, but your little face showed me how very disappointed you were in me.

It was a grey, rainy day in Luxembourg (shocking, I know). We were having lunch all together, so it must have been a weekend. At one point you turned to me and said:

Mamá, ¿qué tiempo hace?

So I looked out the window and back at you, and said:

Lluvia.

You took another bite of food and, after swallowing, repeated:

¿Qué tiempo hace?

I wasn’t sure if you hadn’t heard me or if you were playing, so I repeated in the same tone:

Lluvia.

Again, I didn’t see anything in your face that told me anything was wrong, and yet you said:

¿Qué tiempo hace?

At this point, I became convinced that you were just playing a game but I didn’t mind keeping it going while we ate calmly:

Lluvia.

This was too much for you, so you quickly retorted:

¡Para de decir lluvia!

And this is where it became clear to us all that I had not understood the conversation that you were trying to have with me. You were mimicking my way of speaking but you weren’t used to changing your intonation from a question to an affirmation when using “question words.”

You knew very well that the weather was lousy; you by no means needed me to explain that to you and I was totally clueless as to your intent!

We all still laugh when remembering that very annoyed little 5-year-old sternly ask me to stop saying “lluvia” but, I assure you, you’ve now perfectly mastered the intonation:
¡Qué tiempo hace!

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