I gave a dictation to my beginner Spanish students last week. One sentence was, “I like my friends because they are fun.”
As I dictated the sentence, I saw that students weren’t liking it. Some started whispering among themselves. There was a couple of eye rolls.
“What?” I asked. “Is the sentence difficult?”
An uncomfortable silence that greeted my question was suddenly interrupted by a student who said, “I’m sorry, professor, but ‘I like my friends because they are diverse ‘? That’s weird.”
Other students began to nod.
Turns out the students mistook the Spanish “divertidos” (fun) for “diversos.” But I didn’t mind the mistake because it taught me something important.
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