We have all played a version of this parlour game where you get others on your team to guess a word without using it yourself. If you are friends of Jeff and Stacia, you have probably played it many times.

When it is your turn, you talk your way around the chosen word and hope that your team mates will quickly figure out the excellent clues you are giving them—for example you might describe “astronaut” as someone who likes to be out of this world.

We’re getting good at this game, because we play it all the time. With our fledgling Spanish vocabulary we talk our way around words all the time – simply because we don’t have the one we really want.

Our Spanish teacher had us do a version of this game on Friday. I call it the miscommunication game.

I started with the verb “Dormir”, to sleep. I thought it would be simple—what you do at night—but Tom had different ideas. He was going through the seemingly infinite variety of list of reflexive verbs we had learned, like “to go to bed”, “to get undressed”, and “to brush your teeth”. After several minutes of trying to convey this basic human need, in desperation I resorted to singing “Frere Jacques”. Time over, no points.

So it was now Tom’s turn to give clues about his verb. He gave out excellent clues. Unfortunately, the clues were for “Sentir” (to feel) – a verb very close in spelling (but regrettably not in meaning) to his assigned verb “Sentar” (to sit) — 5 points for presentation and creativity, 0 points for execution.

He had both the teacher and I wiping the tears of laughter from our eyes.

It is not a coincidence that our host mother would look up from some of the conversations with Tom, nodding her head in a “that’s nice dear, but I have no idea what you are saying” sort of way.

We are refining our skills in this game and will be ready for future parties.