Spanish:
“Me cago en la leche” I shit on the milk -> something bad happened, and I’m angry.
“Eres la leche” You are the milk -> you are great.
Clearly by getting their shit together
I mean German isn’t any easier: Umfahren means to run over someone And Umfahren means to drive around something
When pronunciation matters!
Articles matter in English!
Context
Skill issue
This is due to the legendary reputation of “the shit”, which is distinct from the ordinary “shit” we are all familiar with.
“The shit” has rarely ever been so equaled by a living being that its use is usually correlated with great admiration and flattery.
In some convoluted terminology, “the shit” can be referred to simply as “shit” confusing it with its inferior cousin.
Learn? They’re all shit at it.
I feel like “Tonality” is a big part of it.
By being shit
Then doing shit
Then becoming the shit.This post is bad shit.
I’ve learned a little bit of two other languages (Spanish and Japanese) and I’m pretty confident that most languages have a ton of nuance like this that you will never understand until you are actually totally immersed in that language and culture.
I mean, everything I learned in Spanish and Japanese is all super formal. Nobody actually talks that way IRL. There’s words that from a translator or dictionary mean one thing, but are colloquially used totally differently. Like calling testicles eggs or nuts. “Chupa mi heuvos.” They’re not saying to suck their literal eggs.
I know less Japanese than Spanish but I already notice that, like, “no” isn’t ever annunciated the way I’m being taught. Instead of “iie” I’ll often hear just “ya.” It teaches to end every statement with “desu,” but I have never heard a sentence end with a desu or desu ka in any Japanese media (which is more than just anime). It’s all way more casual. Questions are still understood to be questions if you use the right inflection; no need for extra syllables.
“Chupa mi heuvos.” They’re not saying to suck their literal eggs.
So…Chupa Chups are literally suck sucks?
In Spanish, chupa means either suck or lick depending on context.
Chupa chups are lick licks.
There are better cases for elision of sounds than iie and iya, as the latter is a different word, sort of like no and nope in English. For example in more formal contexts you’d use ~teiru at the end of verbs and pronounce the i vowel, but in casual speech it’s elided to sound like ~teru.
Raises hand. “Son of beetch.”
Learning slang, in which words aren’t meant literally, is pure memorization and no more difficult in one language than another.
