Alright, so this “en cuatro” thing. You hear a phrase, you think you get it, ’cause words are words, right? Not always. Especially when you’re piecing together another language. My little tussle with “en cuatro” wasn’t some neat dictionary lookup, nah, it was more like stumbling around in the dark until the lights flickered on.
I was messing around with learning Spanish, bits and pieces here and there. “Cuatro,” yeah, “four.” “En,” okay, “in” or “on.” So, “in four.” Seemed dead simple. But simple translations? They can really lead you down a weird path if you’re not careful. My real lesson came from a place I didn’t expect: a YouTube workout.
There was this fitness instructor, super popular, from somewhere in South America. Energy like a firecracker. I’m in my living room, trying to keep up, mostly looking like a confused octopus, hoping I don’t smash a lamp. She’s rattling off instructions in Spanish, and I’m catching maybe every third word, mostly just mirroring what she’s doing on screen.
So, we’re in the thick of it. I’m sweating like mad, lungs burning, pretty sure I’m about to keel over. And then she beams, this huge smile, and yells, “¡Perfecto! ¡Ahora, en cuatro!”
I just stopped. Dead stop. “En cuatro?” My brain just kinda short-circuited. In four? Four what? Four more of those god-awful burpees we just survived? For a hot second, I actually thought she meant count to four and brace for impact. I’m staring at the screen, gasping for air, totally lost. She’s there, still smiling, waiting. The music’s just pounding away.
Then, slick as anything, she drops to her hands and knees, all set for the next round of punishment – some kind of plank or donkey kick, who even knows. And bam! The lightbulb finally went on. “Oh! On all fours!“ That’s what she meant. Like a cat, or how you crawl. Not “in four seconds” or “in four pieces.” Just get down on your hands and knees. My “practice” that day was less about fitness and more about decoding a language bomb while my body was screaming for mercy.
Sounds pretty basic now, looking back. But in that moment, with the workout haze and the language gap, it was a real head-scratcher. It really drove home how much you need context, how seeing it, living it, beats just knowing the words cold. That was a rough rep, linguistically speaking.
What ‘Four’ Really Meant
Later, I did the sensible thing and actually looked it up properly. And yeah, “on all fours” is a big one. Turns out, like a lot of phrases, it can have other shades of meaning too, some a bit more, let’s say, colorful, depending on who’s talking and where. Made me laugh, thinking back to my pure, sweaty confusion with the workout video.
But for me, “en cuatro” will forever be linked to that instructor and the sheer panic of not knowing if I was supposed to do four more things or just collapse. It’s funny the things that stick with you. It wasn’t about fancy grammar rules; it was about being in the thick of it and figuring it out the hard way. That’s usually how the real learning happens, isn’t it? A bit messy, a bit frustrating, but you get there.
