Learning the Language

The Spanish class I’m taking here focuses more on the conversational aspects of Spanish than grammar itself, which means I’ve learned a lot of neat phrases to use in everyday speech. Out of all of them, I think my favorite has been qué guay, which means “cool.” In my classes in high school, we learned chévere was “cool,” but that version is mostly used in the Americas, not Spain. There have actually been a lot of words and phrases I’ve had to change for that reason. Thanks to the advent of telenovelas from Latin America, though, it has become more common to hear such in Spain, according to my professor. So, even if I do say “chévere” instead of “guay,” or “piso” instead of “suelo” (floor), people get the gist of what I’m trying to communicate.
However, I did have trouble one day with my host mom using the phrase “la media naranja,”which means your other half, or soulmate. We did a whole unit on it my junior year of high school in order to learn about the use of the subjunctive tense. From all the times we practiced talking about the ideal qualities of each of our own media naranjas, I don’t think I could ever forget the meaning of that phrase. So when my host mom told me my media naranja was in the refrigerator, I was extremely confused. ¿Cómo?
However, I realized, after she had stared back at me blankly for a few seconds, that she was literally talking about half an orange (media = half, naranja = orange). I had only eaten half of it during breakfast, and had asked her to keep the rest in the fridge so I could have it after lunch. Sometimes things are exactly as they seem…