Getting in the way

One of the delights and frustrations of learning a foreign language is that it's never job done; there's always grammar to correct, new vocabulary to learn and pronunciation to perfect. I've been learning Mexican Spanish pretty much since the day I met my wife, just over five years ago. I'm pretty fluent speaking Spanish at home with her and with close friends, but one of my primary goals for our six months in Mexico is naturally to improve further and gain confidence speaking to others in a wider range of situations.

Canicas de perico?

To keep track of my progress and be able to test myself occasionally, I like to keep a list of new words: I'm up to 46 so far. I've noticed that they tend to fall into one of four categories, including words that are essential for discussing things to do with the baby (pellizcar = to pinch, lamer = to lick, periquera = high chair), words that are essential for understanding the sports news (invicto = unbeaten, racha = streak, derrota = defeat) and words so obscure that I'll probably never need them again in my life (perico = parrot, canicas = marbles).

Most of these terms will be presumably be used sparingly at best, even those that fall into the first two categories. Every now and then, however, a truly useful new word comes along, one that feels like it can be bandied about almost every other sentence; moreover, once you discover it, you realise that other people use it all the time, and you wonder what on earth you thought they were saying before. This is the fourth category; for me it contains one word so far this trip: estorbar, meaning "to be in the way". As well as being convenient in many situations ("me estás estorbando"), it's also highly versatile, with a handy adjectival form estorboso. I don't have to specify whether something's too big, the wrong shape, too ugly; I can simply say "está estorboso". Get it out of my sight, basically.