What’s the difference between mientras and durante? The usefulness of comparing languages for learning and teaching languages
have memories in my mind that I don't know why they're there and that come to the conscious level at the most unexpected moments. And sometimes, they give me ideas. I just finished writing and publishing an article on the blog, I have to go to sleep because I have to work tomorrow, but first a concept came to mind that I read in a book during my childhood, which has little to do with linguistics: comparative anatomy. I'm quite sure I read it in a book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or one by Jules Verne. Comparative anatomy, in case you're interested, is the science that compares the morphology of living or extinct beings and determines, so to speak, their "kinship". Remembering that concept reminded me of my own method for learning languages, that the concept of comparative grammar exists, that the concept of phylogeny is common to both anatomy and languages. And of an anecdote, which is why I titled this post. I'll continue writing tomorrow. This paragraph exists simply so you know that this article exists thanks to something that came to mind while I was brushing my teeth and so you know that I wrote this paragraph with enough references to, tomorrow, after work, remember the content I wanted it to have when I thought of writing it.
I learn languages, and I try to teach my own. This leads me to seek contact with people who speak the languages I learn and who are interested in learning Spanish to exchange our languages and, inevitably, our cultures. Because I insist, although it has little to do with the content of this post, that one of the best things about learning a new language is that with it we learn a new culture and, in many cases, many new cultures. In my case, furthermore, learning other languages led me to become interested in my own one. When I learn something, I want to know everything right now.
Native speakers of any language, unless we dedicate ourselves to studying the grammar and different rules of our own language, have a common problem: regardless of our cultural level and our command of our own language, even though we know how to use it without making mistakes, in most cases we don’t know how to explain why we choose a certain word or construction over other existing ones. And that happened to me. What I’m going to tell you next allowed me, on one hand, to advance much faster with my German learning, the language I was learning most actively at that time, and ended up causing me to decide to pursue a master’s degree in Spanish as a foreign language.
In my eagerness to practice my German, I joined different social networks where you can look for people interested in doing language exchanges. One of my first contacts was an Austrian girl who, one day when I was walking home from work, asked me ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre mientras y durante? (What’s the difference between mientras and durante?) and threw me off. I thought, while walking, of example sentences, I was able to rehearse an explanation, I gave it to her, and I arrived home directly to look up, logically, the difference between these two words. Then, of course, I started thinking about why that girl had asked me that question. It had never occurred to me to think about something like that. And I realized that she, from what she had told me, was using an app for her learning, which I myself used, that, at least at that time, since what I’m telling happened several years ago, didn’t provide explanations about grammar. And both mientras and durante can be translated into German as während. Surely this app translated both words that way, and the method’s intention was for her to intuit when one usage or another occurred.
Brief grammatical explanation.
In its most basic use, mientras is a temporal conjunction that joins two sentences. Yo leo mientras ella desayuna (I read while she has breakfast). This can be translated into German as ich lese, während sie frühstückt. Durante, on the other hand, is a preposition that introduces, for example, a noun. Yo leo durante el desayuno (I read during breakfast), for example, can be translated into German as ich lese während des Frühstücks. I don’t know if that’s the most natural translation of this particular sentence, but that’s irrelevant. I suppose something like that happened to this girl in that app, something I don’t know why I never asked her about, and that was the origin of her doubt. And, furthermore, that day, while walking home trying to think what to tell this girl about the difference between mientras and durante, because in addition to wanting to know everything right now when I learn something, I want to answer everything right now when I do language exchanges, I realized that I had to start learning Spanish. Because as I said before, native speakers, beyond our level of linguistic competence in our own language, know a lot of grammar, because we need it to be able to speak well, but we don’t necessarily know how to explain it, because we speak the language naturally and don’t need to know the rules.
What started there was, for me, a journey. I began to study my own language, which made it much easier for me to understand structures of, at that time, German, but also later English and French, the other languages I learn. Furthermore, it led me to become so interested in my own language that some time later I applied for a place in the master’s program. Which led me to, nowadays, have this space on the Internet where I share my own language, my experience as a learner, etc.
This article aims, on one hand, to be motivational. But it will only be able to motivate those people already interested in learning foreign languages. Because we can’t choose what we like, but rather we experience something that exists in the world and we like it or not. That’s why there are people who tell me I’m crazy for learning languages. It aims to be motivational because a small fact, that question, had many consequences in my way of learning languages, led me to study at university again and today has me writing articles for my website, something I love to do. And, on the other hand, this article aims to share a method for learning languages. A method that surely isn’t for everyone, but that can help many of us: comparing. And when it comes to comparing one language with another to learn one that is foreign to us, the closest thing we have, the easiest to understand quickly, is to learn our own as if it, too, were foreign. Here I leave you a small exercise to practice the difference between mientras and durante.
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