No real “lost in translation” moments come to mind for me although it certainly isn’t easy to communicate with Chileans sometimes. As I have mentioned previously, they are very fast talkers and often drop syllables entirely. Additionally, they have all kinds of unique words that aren’t used anywhere else. So that definitely took some getting used to. Sometimes people will be rather stubborn about understanding you. It is as if they see that you are from the US and automatically assume that you can’t speak Spanish. Even if you are able to clearly communicate what you are trying to say in Spanish, they will be dead set on not being able to communicate. This is frustrating but happens rarely. For the most part, people are understanding about my lack of finesse with the language and will try and speak slowly as to better facilitate my learning and our communication.
A favorite “Chileanism” that I have learned is the word “po”. It is basically a filler word that Chileans insert into almost any context. They tag it along with yes or no, thank you, or hello, or essentially anything! At first, it was difficult to understand what it meant but I have come to embrace that it really means nothing, just used to fill space.
