In yesterday’s post I wrote about the different grammar and vocabulary rules that come along with learning Spanish in different countries. Now I will discuss a few more reasons why learning Spanish is so difficult.
Idioms, Expressions and Slang
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| The Dominican Republic |
1. In Costa Rica, the people refer to each other as tico and tica and younger people might address each other as mea (which is our way of saying “dude”). “Que chiva” is an expression that is used when they think that something is cool and people often greet each other with the expression “Pura Vida,” which means “pure life” and symbolizes the idea of having and enjoying a beautiful life. Instead of giving the simple “de nada” after a thank you, most Costa Ricans say “con mucho gusto” (with much pleasure).
2. Dominican expressions can be very interesting because many letters are cut off and sometimes replaced with other letters. For example, instead of saying como estas, people might say, como tu ta or instead of tengo hambre you might hear tango hambre. This also depends on the socio-economic status of the person you are speaking to and the part of the country they are from. Many people address their friends as pana and before meals people almost always say “buen provecho.”
3. In Spain, many people call each other tio or tia. Instead of saying buenos días or buenas tardes to greet people, oftentimes people just say buenas. The expressions qué guay or qué chulo are used commonly and mean “cool”. Another expression is qué fuerte, which is our way of saying OMG or wow. Pijo/pija is a word that means snobbish or upper-class. I learned this word from my roommate last year, when after buying her Versace reading glasses; she said “qué pija!”
Learning expressions in different countries is one of the most difficult things of learning a language because you can know the meaning of several words, but when put together they can have a completely different meaning. Ah… the beauty of expressions!
Pronunciation and Accents
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| Costa Rica |
If you listen to a person from America speak and a person from England speak I am certain that you will hear a very big difference. So why should this be any different from people in Spanish-speaking countries? Another reason why it’s difficult to learn Spanish is because people have different accents. I got a good glimpse of this in college. Many of my professors were from or had studied in Spain, while some were also from Latin American and South American countries. One of my professors, whose accent was the most difficult to understand, was from Chile and had a thick Chilean accent when he spoke Spanish.
Although it is still hard for me to distinguish between the exact kind of accent a person has, I think that I have finally reached the point where I can tell that a person is not from Spain. Here are some differences in accents:
One example in the differences between Latin American Spanish and peninsular (Spain) Spanish is that the letters z and c (when coming before the vowels I or E) are pronounced ‘th” instead of “s.” In Latin America, the z and c are pronounced like “s.” So in Spain, you might hear crecimiento as if it was spelled crethimiento, whereas in Latin America, the letter c would make the “s” sound.
Another phonetic difference that you could hear in most Latin American countries is the absence of the “d” sound or the “s” sound in some words. For example, instead of the word nada, you may hear na’a, or instead of las dos casas, you may hear la’ do’ casa’.
In some countries, such as Argentina, people pronounce the “ll” as a “zh”(th) instead of pronouncing it as “y” like most other Spanish-speaking countries do. There is a young woman in my valenciano class who is from Argentina. Every time I hear her speak I am always baffled, because she sounds nothing like anything that I’ve heard before. Every time she reads she has difficulty pronouncing the words right. One of the things that she has the most difficulty with is pronouncing the words with the “ll.” She would pronounce a word like silla, as what sounds like sitha, instead of siya. Now I finally understand why…
There are so many other distinct characteristics of accents in different countries. People in some countries, like Venezuela for example, have a musical way of speaking, while people in other countries, like Spain and Argentina have a lisp. People in some Caribbean countries like Cuba and the Dominican Republic may be difficult to understand because of their tendency to substitute letters and their speed of delivery.
I would like to study more of this in the future.
Regional Dialects
So you’re probably thinking that since I’m in Spain and have been here for a while I’m safe now and can just stick to one accent, right? Wrong. Even in Spain there are so many regional differences as it pertains to accents. Think about the phonetic differences there are between people in different cities of the United States. Does someone from the Bronx, New York speak like someone from Montgomery, Alabama? No.
In Spain, there are distinct differences between people who live in Andalusia, Galicia, the Basque County, Madrid, Catalonia and other regions. Understanding these different accents can also be very difficult sometimes but it’s something that I plan to conquer. I think that I already have the Valencian region accent down!
Stay tuned for Part III: The Conclusion
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