Veo que 'la palabra del día de hoy' es 'mala pata,' (bad luck). Well, let's hope that's not a bad sign in itself. Funny, I always thought the Spanish word for bad luck was mala suerte, but I suppose one needs a variety of ways to express that things are not working out quite the way we'd prefer them to.
This once again adds support to my theory that Google Translate is very limited in just how helpful it can be as a language learning resource. When I typed in 'bad luck' and clicked the Translate to Spanish button, it came up with, wouldn't you know it, mala suerte. Worse, when I clicked on the phrase for alternate translations, mala pata never made an appearance at all. In fact, various combinations of the word suerte were all that ever displayed.
I have a feeling that a good unabridged online/offline Spanish dictionary would be more beneficial. Even more distressing was that when I used an online Spanish thesaurus, mala pata still did not come up as an synonym. Now I'm really perplexed. Is the source that is pulling my Spanish word for the day unreliable? I even googled mala pata and nothing anywhere near bad luck popped up. Looks like I'm having muy mala pata today with my Spanish studies. Or is that mala suerte?
And now that I'm harping on dictionaries, I'm p.o.'d at Amazon for failing to provide a setting to change the default dictionary in First Generation Kindle Fires (the kind I have). This means that I cannot attach a foreign language dictionary to the books I have collected on the device. I did, however, find a partial solution to this (no thanks to Amazon, mala suerte). There is a free ebook reader for Kindles called 'Moon Reader' that displays ebooks in a format similar to Kindle's. The user manual says that there is a way to attach alternate dictionaries to Moon Reader documents, though it looks complicated and I haven't tried it yet. In the mean time, if I tap on a word I get a menu and one of the options is 'Translate.' That will take me to Google Translate and the Spanish definition of the word selected. This is cumbersome, but maybe if I can figure out how to attach the Spanish dictionary to Moon Reader I'll be in for some smooth sailing and no more mala suerte with dictionaries.
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