A
s an English speaker, you'll often hear that a certain word in another language doesn't translate well into English. What you hear less often is that the reverse is sometimes also true. I'm a reasonably proficient Spanish speaker, and my wife is a native Spanish speaker, so I'm constantly asking her how to say things in Spanish. There are a few very common words in English that are pretty difficult to translate. The first isn't that weird -- it's the verb "to mean". Obviously, "to mean" has a variety of uses, but in English they all feel very unified -- "to mean" centers around "purpose". A word can mean something, a person can mean to do something, an object can be meant for something. In Spanish, these facets are broken up into separate words: to say "What do you mean?" you have to say "¿A qué te refieres?", which is literally "To what are you referring?" A person can intend to do something with "intentar", and an object can have a "proposito", or purpose. It's interesting that English captures all this in one go.
The other two are a little more wild. I use the term "to figure something out" all the time. It's such a basic an obvious phrase that it's actually a little difficult to break down into simpler terms -- something like "apply mental effort in order to solve a problem". But this phrase simply doesn't exist in Spanish! And there's no really good work around either. Generally I'll say something like "tengo que investigar como hacerlo" which is literally "I have to investigate how to do it", but it doesn't really mean the same thing. How do you tell someone "Figure it out!"? It's impossible, which is sad, because I simply love that phrase.
The last one on my mind is "to realize", which is again pretty surprising. "Darse cuenta" is similar in some respects -- it means literally "to give account to oneself", and is mostly used as "to notice". But in English, "to realize" is to have a sudden mental event of coming to understand something that had eluded one earlier. It's actually a description of a fairly specific phenomenon, but it's fascinating that Spanish doesn't handle talking about it well.
I find it noteworthy that all of these words are very "internal" -- they seem to refer to ways that we categorize the mind interacting with the world, and lend a lot of credence to the idea that language shapes the way we view things. I sure would have trouble making it through the day if I couldn't figure things out!