The many sides of waiting

DuoLingo is trying to break my brain again, so that means I did some research online and you get a post! (Disclaimer: I know languages aren't puzzles, they are ever-evolving entities that don't have to make any sense. Nevertheless, the puzzle strategy can help me remember stuff, and it's basically my only strategy since I am so amazingly bad at memorizing.)

Multiple Meanings

I already knew that "esperar" can mean either "to wait (for)" or "to hope," two meanings that felt very different to me. I finally, almost always, remember that in Spanish you don't need a separate word for "for" when you're waiting "for" something. Which is easy to remember if you think of "esperar" as meaning "to await."

I feel bad that Spanish-speaking English learners have to figure out when to use each word. I mean, waiting for a bus and hoping for a bus feel like two different situations (although the former can turn into the latter, given enough time).

Related Words

And now DuoLingo is telling me that:

1) "Desesperado" means "desperate." (That's sort of like lacking hope, except you haven't totally given up. It's sort of like running out of time to wait, though you still have a little time left. Researching, the "des-" part, which I've always thought of as being a negative, actually means something more like "apart." Desperate people are separated from waiting or hoping and I guess have to take matters into their own hands.)

2) "Inesperado" means "unexpected." (Um? Yep, that was unexpected.)

So, first of all, it turns out "esperar" can also mean "to expect." So that's three meanings our poor English learners have to distinguish between. And there's also a Spanish word "esperado" that means expected or awaited. So now of course it can make sense in my brain that "inesperado" can mean "unexpected."

Related English Words

Supposedly English is a Germanic language but it seems like we got a bunch of our fancy words from Romance languages (like Spanish, but probably via Latin and French). So, if you know some fancy English, some Spanish is easier to learn, like since I know the word "quotidian," it's been easy for me to learn that "cotidiano/a" means "everyday" in Spanish.

English words that come from the same Latin root as "esperar" ("sperare") include:
* despair, desperate, desperation, desperado (all related to lacking hope)
* prosper, prosperity, prosperous (for hope or according to expectations)

Related English Words I'd Never Heard Of

But things also work the other way. I understood the English word "edifice" the first time I saw it after learning the word for "building" in Spanish ("edificio").

Some related English words that I'd never heard of:
* esperance – hope or hopefulness
* sperable – in the range of hope or something you could reasonably hope for (cool!)

Danger!

Another thing I learned from my online research is that even when you want the "to expect" meaning, you don't talk about things you expect but don't want. (Just like hoping.) If you expect a bad thing to happen, you'd say you "believe" ("creer") or "think" ("pensar") that thing is going to happen. Okay, woah, that could get new speakers in a lot of trouble.

Now I'm wondering if there's a different word for waiting for something you dread.