Help/ayúdame
I was on the phone with my boyfriend's mom and she asked how I was doing and I told her in Spanish; "estoy bien y tu" and my boyfriend looked at me liked I killed someone and told me I was being disrespectful I didn't understand why.
I was born in South Carolina and learned Spanish from my parents I thought I could speak Spanish well but I guess not.
So help me!
3 Answers
The words: Estoy bien, ¿y tú? are grammatically correct and they are a valid answer to ¿Cómo estás?. The only thing that comes to mind is the nuance of respect between the two ways of addressing people in Spanish: tú and usted.
- The you formal question is: ¿Cómo está usted?. Then, your answer should have been Yo estoy bien, ¿y usted?. We use usted when addressing to people we owe some respect to, or to elders
unknown elderly(unknown and acquaintance both). I think this is similar to when in English you address someone as Mr/Mrs + surname and at some point they (may) say to you: No, please, just call me Marie. In Spanish they'll say to you: por favor, tutéame, of verb tutear (to address as “tú”, i.e. informally, removing all courtesy treatments).
To sum up. Maybe your boyfriend was expecting you to be more respectful to his mother because you addressed her as a friend, which is just fine sometimes, but you never know. As we say in Spain: cada familia es un mundo (every family is a world itself).
[Revise my English, please]
You say you learned Spanish from your parents; that's the reason for my surprise that you did not learn that there is a respectful/formal way of talking to your elders/superiors. I knew this even before I started learning Spanish. However, I am only learning to "tutear" and don't mind if others "tuteame." My purpose is basic communication.
Because you learned Spanish from your parents, you naturally use tú with them and you are correct, but your mother and your boyfriend´s mother are two completely different people. He can refer to his mother by tú but you can´t - not until she tells you that you can.
Don´t feel bad about this. It´s not so much a mistake in speaking the language as it is a lack of knowing the culture.
