¡Qué tonto soy!

Hopefully you won't need to use this expression much.  But on occasion, I think we'll all find ourselves using it at some point.  In fact, I'm posting about this because I found myself needing it today.  But more on that later.

First let's talk about tonto.  And I'm not referring to the Lone Ranger's faithful Indian companion.  If you don't know who the Lone Ranger is, and don't mind learning a bit about old American TV shows, you can check out this link. Or maybe you just want to take a walk down memory lane.  Anyway, I digress.

Let's get back to the word tonto in Spanish, which is what we're here for. 

Tonto means silly or dumb, which can be an insult, heavily dependent on the context of how it's used, and your tone of voice.  There are a number of phrases that involve the word tonto, like no seas tonto - don't be silly or no te hagas el tonto - don't act stupid.  Tonta if you're talking about a woman.

Now that we know something about the word tonto, let's get back to our expression.

¡Qué tonto soy!

I'm so stupid

Our translation sounds a bit harsh, but it's meant to be used in those situations where you make a silly mistake, and you say to yourself "I can't believe I did that" or "I'm so stupid". 

Pan comido (easy), right? We're almost done here, just one more thing to talk about.

Remember in the beginning of this post I said I actually needed this phrase today?  Well I'm about to tell you why.

I just posted about a very witty phrase "¡Ya llegó para quien llorabas!".  Well, that's what I wrote.  It should've been "¡Ya llegó por quien llorabas! ".   ¡Qué tonto soy!

I corrected the original post, but I want to make sure my faithful readers are aware of my blunder.  Learning Spanish is hard enough, and you don't need me to make it any harder for you!  If you haven't read about "¡Ya llegó por quien llorabas! ", you can find the entry here. 

¡Adios!

¡Ya llegó por quien llorabas!

I think you'll find this bit of Spanish amusing.  So let's get down to business.

The meaning of this phrase seems so obvious now, but when I first heard it, I was lost.  Sure, I understood what my amiga told me, I heard each word loud and clear.  To bad I still didn't understand what it meant.

Let's take a look at our phrase.

¡Ya llegó por quien llorabas!
The person you've been crying for has arrived now.

Well, that makes everything crystal clear now, right?  I'm guessing your answer is no.  Literal translations often leave us confused, so let's talk about what this means in plain English. 

You probably won't be surprised to hear  that this phrase really has nothing to do with crying.  It's just a very clever and playful way of saying "I'm here now", or maybe "I'm finally here".  I suppose in English we might say something like "you can stop crying now, I'm here", with the same level of playfulness.

A good time to use this phrase is when you have someone waiting on you and you show up a little late, but really, you can use this phrase anytime it seems appropriate.

If you want to say this to a group of people, all you need to do is make a small change:

¡Ya llegó por quien lloraban!


  That's it, short, sweet and to the point!

¡Hasta la próxima!

¿No te ha llegado mi correo electronico?

So there I was, just chatting away, and then the big question came - "¿no te ha llegado mi email?" .

Wow. It looks so simple seeing the words typed out on the screen. But at the time, all I heard was "llegado" and "email". Thankfully I'm becoming somewhat skilled at avoiding the "deer in headlights" look, and I was able to put two and two together (without having a blank stare for more than 2 seconds) and figure out that my amiga was asking me if I got her email. Which I didn't, for those of you who are truly curious. Anyway, up until then, I had only used recibir when talking about receiving email. And to be honest, I haven't had a whole lot of conversations about email in the first place.

Of course, I decided I need to figure this whole thing out. So here's what I learned...

It's very common to use llegar to talk about receiving email, as well as recibir. In fact, you can use them to talk about receiving letters too. But when you use llegar, it has to go with a pronoun - llegarte, llegarme, llegarle. You don't need the pronoun for recibir.

Hmmm...all this talk about pronouns sounds way too much like grammar, so let's look at some examples using both llegar and recibir:

I got an email yesterday

Me llegó un email ayer
Me ha llegado un email ayer
Recibí un email ayer

I got your email

Me ha llegado tu email
Me llegó tu email
He recibido tu email
Recibí tu email
Sí, lo recibí

You haven't gotten my email?

¿No te ha llegado mi email?
¿No te llegó mi email?
¿No ha recibido mi email?
¿No recibiste mi email?

I haven't gotten your email

No me ha llegado tu email
No me llegó tu email
No recibí tu email
No he recibido tu email

My Colombian friend and the kind folks at Word Reference helped me out a lot. I've posted much of the information from Word Reference here already, but there's a note or two in the thread I started over there that's worth taking a look at. Haz clic aquí to see my thread.

So that it's it. Pan comido, right? ¡Hasta la proxima!