How to Spanish

Someone who I would guess is 10-15 years older than me said hi, and I used tú in response but now realize that might have been a mistake? In this context I'm not sure.

Do people (intentionally or not?) consider whether your convo partner is the same gender as you when making that choice?

I don't think it's a mistake. Most people today don't put as much emphasis on tú vs usted

If you're feeling insecure, you can always ask ¿nos podemos tutear? which is "can I use tú with you?"

Or if you want to ask further you can say something like: Me di cuenta de que estaba tuteando y no pretendía ofender. ¿Nos podemos tutear? which is "I realized I was using tú and I didn't mean to offend. Can we use tú with each other?"

It's been interesting to see how they translate certain things - for example, there's a skeleton commander who teaches you how to fight

In English his name is "Schelemeus" which is a play on "skeleton" and an Ancient Greek sounding name

In Spanish, his name is translated as "Uesopos"

Never let anyone know your next move not even yourself

But then they didn't watch it

And they just did - so I sent my reaction, then I sent a follow up with the timestamp of exactly how long I've been waiting

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And to make it funnier it was El Ministerio del Tiempo and it was about the Inquisition so my reaction was the nobody expects the Inquisition

It kind of went:

Friend: THE INQUISITION?!????

Me: *gif of nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition* Me: *timestamp of how long I've been waiting to send it in my drafts*

Friend: ...You waited over a year to send me that??

I misspoke the word cavernícola which is "caveman" - gender neutral but ends in A

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I said "cavernículo" ...which is like "cave-ass"

It's a separate expression!

The term for "fresh water" (or freshwater as an adjective) is agua dulce

Literally that would mean "sweet water" where "sweet" is thought of as the opposite of "salty"

But for example, pez de agua dulce is "freshwater fish" vs pez de agua salada "saltwater fish"

So in any situation people are looking for drinking water etc it's agua dulce

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Sometimes you'll also see agua potable which is "potable water" or "drinkable water" or "drinking water", or in some situations agua limpia which is "clean water" to mean the water is unused or new

So I was trying to figure out the context of an expression involving la peineta which is a word related to el peine "comb"... now I thought la peineta was also "comb" or a specific kind of comb like the ornamental ones... and to be fair, it does mean "comb"

But the expression that I actually was looking at was hacer la peineta for Spain... which is "to give someone the finger" or "to flip someone off"

I know the general expressions are pretty literal in default Spanish - and I know some of the Latin American versions; like I know sacar el dedo, mostrar el dedo, I also know that some countries call it una pistola which would normally mean "gun" which is a whole other bit of confusion

Surprisingly, this is the first time I've come across this one

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It's exactly the same level of edgelord but I got used to Doom in English

So now "Victor von Death" is throwing me off so badly

This is going to depend on context

The two have different meanings in regular Spanish, but as filler words they can translate to the same thing

Doing so for the Switch almost always changes the language of the games

Though there are some games like Pokemon that will give you language options right up front; same with some Playstation games you will often have the option to change the language settings somewhere (usually in options)

This can be done for Spanish, but also for multiple other languages. And in the case of Spanish (and I think sometimes Portuguese) you'll have the option to change it between European and Latin American [For Portuguese it would be European vs Brazilian]

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Again, this is really more for people who need a sustained challenge and already know the important basics of a language, but that's my preferred way of practicing my reading

Although some games do actually have dubs as well - though in the case of Spanish often times it's European Spanish which isn't a bad thing [and sometimes the settings are old-fashioned so it makes it feel more historical] but it is something to be aware of

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This can also be really fun just if you like translation and you're good at the language you can see how some people do certain choices like jokes or idiomatic expressions, or the names of enemies etc