So we’ve all heard about those linguistic traps for the newbies to a given language.  Words and idioms that are almost, but not quite, pronounced or structured identically, but with embarassingly different meanings.  Like the Japanese words for “cute” and “godzilla ugly” that differ only by the length of a vowel sound.  shudder Or John F. Kennedy’s classic faux pas, “I am a jelly donut”.  (“Resident of Berlin” differs from “Jelly donut originating in Berlin” only by an article.)

Since Susan and I are struggling to learn intro Spanish, we’ve been trying to keep an eye out for some of these.  So far, we’ve identified only a couple of clear ones, though I’m sure that there are many more out there waiting to trap us.  ;-)

• Año means “year”, while ano means “anus”.  Yay.  There’s an easy one to screw up while describing yourself.
• If you’ve had a few years of French in High School (as both of us have), you would be tempted to pronounce the European city Paris as “pah-ree”.  However, your Spanish instructor will point out that en español, those sounds are interpreted as “parí”, meaning “I gave birth”.  Not the best way to describe your recent holiday trip.

We have also been running the reverse exercise: what are the linguistic traps in English?  It’s hard to figure them out as a native speaker, of course, because the words are so transparently different to us.  But we did notice that “can’t” differs from a very naughty word only by a vowel sound.  ;-)

Any other ideas out there?  Or suggestions on other Spanish traps to beware of?