petesede

I think it makes it more confusing to learn english, but at the same time, almost everyone already understands this because most languages have similar things. Spanish from Spain and spanish from latin america are very different, so it wouldn´t surprise anyone from either of those places that UK and USA speak different versions of english. Even in central america, Mexico and say Panama have different pronunciations. Mexico rolls their RRs much stronger than most other countries in latin america.

to me, that would be a little rude. Not only are you butting into a private conversation, but then you are asking them to be a teacher. In a best case scenerio, the only thing I might do is wait until they were done talking, then greet them in the language and go from there... but I would never ask anyone out of the blue to help me learn.

It isn´t just business that is doing this, it is also the internet. English is basically becoming the middle language for everyone. It is not hard to imagine, but I think in a hundred years, most of the world will be speaking english. Airplanes, and now the internet have just made the world so small... before airplanes, only a very small percentage of a population ever encountered someone from outside that language.

It is impossible for computers to be able to explain everything correctly and put things in context. For example, translate ´what´s up?´ It makes no sense in any language but english.

I learned korean by translating songs. I would go out dancing, find a song I really liked, and then translate the words into english. I still remember a song about black cat named Nero because of that! Great song to dance to by the way.

I like duolingo a lot, and I am probably different than a lot of people in that I find value in memorzing long lists of words. I try to do 100 words a week. What I do is on one side of a paper have 100 words with their translation ( 3 columns). I just study that a bit for a couple days. Then on about the third day, I have tests, where i just have the word in english, and I write the spanish word. The first day of the test, I miss a lot, but then I do the same thing the next day. After the 4th test, I get pretty much 90% or above correct. Each time I take the test, I study just the ones i got wrong, so by the 4th test, I only have 15-20 to study, but still test myself on all 100.

I have so many bad ones in spanish. First off, my first week in central america I was working with a female doctor..and she kept referring to herself as ´doctora´... not knowing about the f/m thing, I also started referring to myself as ´doctora´ despite being a male. The other one was something in regards to my ´novio´ back in the USA... something like ´ yes, I have a novio back in the USA´.. My funniest one was when I confused the word for onion with the word for horse. I went to a very small store because I had forgetten to buy onions at the supermarket. At the store I said ´I want to buy a horse´.. and the woman said ´a horse?´ and I said ´ yes, I need to buy a horse, I am making soup´..

Words of the day are too common and don´t get you very far.. What I would recommend is a ´sentence of the day´ and make sure to include at least 3 different new words.. a noun, a verb and then either an adjective or adverb. Most ´word of the day´ things end up using a sentence as an illustatration anyway, why not make it a sentences that teachers more than one word. With 3 words per day, you are talking 1000 words a year, which is a decent vocabulary.

Those are so lame, they are probably not real ´pickup lines´ but just silly stuff someone thought up. Living in a big city in central america, the only thing I hear men using here is whistling. I am a guy, and if I am walking near a pretty woman and a man whistles, I usually turn to him and say ´thank you´ which gets a giggle out of the woman and an opening... thanks whistlers!

My pet peeve one The journey of a thousand mile begins with a single step. It bugs me when people are proud about goals they make or plans they have. Until you have acted, taken a few steps... don´t treat your goals as if they are accomplishments you should be proud of. Or to paraphrase the above. Put one foot in front of the other, and soon you´ll be walking out the door - random christmas special.

The most comical one for me in spanish is embarazada which looks like it would be ´embarrassed´ but it means pregnant. As far as insulting people accidently in spanish, the winner would have to be Estar and Ser. They are both words that mean ´is´ estar is for temporary things, while ser is for permanent things. But there are a lot of time where if you use the permanent form (ser) by mistake, you can really be insulting to the person or vice versa.

I am from Pa and Ohio, and I still recognize a few sounds I make that aren´t correct, but I wouldn´t call it an accent because it is very limited. The funny thing is I live in central america now, and after only a couple years there are some people where I can tell where they are from. Mexico vs Central America vs South America... and of course Spain is like an entire different ´spanish´..

This is a really great site, thank you for putting it together!

I am from the USA, but I never took this expression to mean arrogant. Instead it means someone who feels they have been disrespected in the past, and thus they feel they have something to prove. They are motivated by something from their past.

That dog won´t hunt .. I think you mean ´that dog ain´t going to hunt´.. or something similar to that. It just means something is unacceptable... usually in the context of someone behaving badly.

immersion is not all it is cracked up to be. I moved to latin america 2 years ago, and I would say ´book learning´ is a much better way to do it. There world is just filled with too much slang, local phrases and idioms.

Really this is one of the earlier things you should learn in spanish, the difference between Ser and Estar Ser is used for anything permanent. The only real exception is that it is also used for professions and jobs ( which may not be exactly permanent when you think about it). Estar is for temporary things. It is funny, because even if you use the same noun and adjective, using the wrong verb can get you in trouble because it can mean something completely different. If you use Ser, you are saying they are ALWAYS that type of person, which can be a huge insult.

yeah, living in Nicaragua, this would be my list also. I also see TKM ( te quiero mucho). It bothers me a bit when they do a bunch in a row that are changed because it is hard enough for me to understand their otherwise bad spelling, but then when you turn every q into a k... makes it really hard to learn.

English - harder pronunciation. Spanish speakers have to learn a lot of new sounds Spanish - gender-based, basically one more thing you have to memorize about every noun. Other than that, I think they are similar. In my opinion, english-speakers have an advantage because we can learn more from books and ´solo´.. Spanish speakers trying to learn english need to practice on someone because a lot of the difficulty is the way words sound, which is hard to practice yourself.

I agree with this.. I am not sure I would wait until middle school, but I would definitely wait until they understand that what you are teaching them is a different language. I would think 6-8 years old or something like that. If they are younger than that, sure they will be able to learn words and even non-english sounds.. but it will cause a lot of problem the first few years of school if they don´t understand what they learned isn´t ´normal´ for their current environment.

The saddest and most moving music I know in spanish is about a war hero who has lost part of his leg and can no longer walk to find his true love. it goes something like la cucarache, la cucarache, no puedes caminar, porque no tienes un parte de tu pierno... There is another one about a cow name lola who has a head and a tail... Just kidding. Actually, that is my favorite way to learn spanish. I hear a great song and I sit down and tranlate it.

Tagolog is very similar to spanish and has a lot of borrowed words. I would say it is almost as similar as portuquese is to spanish. Probably has to do with the 18th century explorers and stuff like that, similar to why central and south america speak spanish. A person who is fluent in spanish could probably understand most of what you are trying to say.

I think it would be very difficult in spanish to learn the verb endings by just listening to people talk. At some point, you just have to sit down and memorize the endings for past and future as well as different voices ( I, you, he etc). What is easier to learn are the words that are similar to english, but pronounced slightly different. I often ´learn´words while watching TV just by hearing them say something that I recognize from english. But meh.. those verb endings are going to kill you.

I used a site called spanishdict.com which had good videos. I didn´t really like the way they tested you though because it was timed... so ended up being more about finding the special spanish characters on your keyboard rather than actually knowing the spanish. There is a ton of good content on youtube, as others have mentioned.

Only thing you forgot is that ´was ´ is also the verb form for ´I´ in past tense along with he/she/it These should honestly be the first verbs you learn and memorize, and just like every language the conjugation of ´to be´ is very irregular. Heck, in spanish it is so irregular that there are two different forms of ´to be´.. ( yo soy, yo estoy etc)