Bliss and other stories (part 1) Many times it takes a lot of effort to grasp the real meaning of a word in a foreign language, when and where to use it. And many times too there seems to be too many words with the same meaning and you cannot figure out which would be the one you really need. When learning English the fact that there could be more than one English word for a Spanish one did not bother me that much. Later, when learning German it turn out to be rather annoying, and now as I learn Chinese I must confess I sometimes become desperate. On the other hand, it usually happens that you cannot explain the exact meaning of a word in your mother tongue to someone who is learning it, especially why we use a particular one instead of another which appears to have the same meaning. But this phenomenon not only happen with your mother tongue, it also happens with a second language. To me, that is the case with the word “bliss”. It is not as common a word as “happiness”, but at first glance both have the same meaning for someone whose mother tongue is not English. In fact, if you look it up in a dictionary you will find that in both cases they mean “felicidad” or “dicha.”