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anyone fluent in spanish?

i work with a puerto rican fella who was telling me in spanish you have to say more than in english to convey your point..

i find this very untrue knowing enough. even though im not well knowledgeable in the spanish language, my gut says .. this is false..

i could be wrong.. any one care to clear this up for me?

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Since writing this post Anonymous may have helped people, but has not within the last four (4) days.
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wrong, care, false, clear, spanish
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Roccoflip
Rockster160
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Different languages are focused on different areas of speech. I’m not multilingual myself, but my more tongues-gifted friends say that English is is the language of expression.

However, given that, because languages have different sets of words and there isn’t necessarily a direct translation for every word, there are definitely some things that only make sense or can be communicated properly in the certain language. Generally the first language a person learns to speak fluently, their “native” language- is the language they “think” in, and what they find the easiest to convey thoughts in. Other languages tend to have to be thought in their native tongue and then translated before verbalizing. (Depending on their mastery of it.)

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soco
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Where in your dwelling space do you keep appliance manuals or owner's guides? I guarantee there is more than one written in multiple languages. Compare for yourself.

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Lano
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Based on my experiences with german and italian (im only intermediate level with those) this can be more or less true. Depends on the language and context.

Italian is a language where its easy to contract groups of two or three words into one, and like most languages that are more inflected than english (spanish included) you can almost always omit the nominitive pronoun (i,he,she,you,they,it,we).

If engkish is his second language, it may be he's not as versed in the idioms enough to take the shortcuts in language that we all routinely take, so it appears to him that english is clunkier than spanish.

On the whole, though, he's probably right, but it depends. Some things are easier in a certain language than others. Non ideal example off the top of my head: "matter of taste" in english versus "Geschmacksache" in german. Both mean the same thing.

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Anonymous
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If you have an android phone, download and use swiftkey keyboard. They have a really cool language translator built in. I haven't been able to use it with another language speaking person yet, but I can just say what I want to say and it will type it out in whichever language I choose.

Might really help you communicate better.

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