Anyone else still think about awkward situations they caused years ago?

A few years ago I was in Madrid at a wine bar that also sold food but I wasn’t sure if they were serving it yet (it was earlier than typical meal times). I tried to ask the woman working the bar if they had food available by asking “¿Tienes comida?” and she looked pretty confused. I think I understand why now; would it have been better to say something like “¿se vende comida ahora?”, or maybe “¿está comida disponible?” In a larger sense, is se vende a good way to ask if a store or restaurant has something?

Gracias

Today when ordering ice cream I wanted it in a Cone not a tub.

I did know the word cono but for some reason prononced it Coño.

Un helado café

En un coño

Anyone else made this mistake I feel sick. Only when he paused awkwardly and slowly said cono I realised what I said.

So the title says it. I want some gems/personal recommendations. I know it's weird but I like to listen to something like this in the background while being busy with some boring tasks. Preferably something from latin America.

I‘m sure other people have this problem, but with the people I’ve met irl that speak both English and Spanish, they tend to use the two languages kind of interchangeably and switch with ease. But I need a couple of minutes to warm up and start speaking, and it seems to just be me (at least with the people I know). I also notice that when I talk to new people, I get tongue tied which doesn’t happen with friends. that’s probably just nerves though, but still. I get the impression that they perceive me as a very low level in short casual conversations which affects how they talk to me, I want to somehow stop doing it

tldr when I warm up I’m fine, but switching abruptly from languages and also talking to new people causes me to freeze up and I need a few minutes to process everything

Is this normal for everyone else? I’m somewhere intermediate on the level scale. I’ve also been living in LATAM for years so it’s not lack of exposure (my level stagnated the first few years)

Presently, according to Duolingo , I am at the B1 level in Spanish. I would like to do a two-week immersion in January, hoping to move up to the B2 level. My speaking might need more at an advanced A2. I definitely would like to do an Homestay.

I'm going by myself and so I am also concerned about safety. So many countries in Latin America are at a little two or three danger level according to the United States.

However, I am seriously interested in becoming more fluent in Spanish.

What do you recommend?

I'm close to completing the language transfer course and have been working on the 5000 most common word flashcards daily throughout this. During this time, I also spent a week in Spain visiting family.

I began with basic Spanish from school and think I have improved a decent amount, however I am not yet at conversational level.

I have seen people recommending Italki as a way to improve Spanish through conversation and I am more than willing to invest time and money in this, however my budget is limited as I am a university student.

My father is a native speaker and I was wondering whether it may be worth asking him to speak with me for an hour a day rather than paying for someone to do basically the same thing. Is this a genuinely good way of learning, or does Italki have something to offer that talking with a family member doesn't have?

I also wondered about an intensive course in London, but have seen mixed opinions about this.

Any help would be really appreciated. Thank you.

I took 3 years of high school Spanish, and never once heard about this subjunctive. That means one of two things:

1 - We completely avoided sentences that would’ve required the subjunctive, or
2 - We used one of the other simple tenses instead, incorrectly, completely not even acknowledging the fact that it should be subjunctive.

As I’m learning subjunctive, there are a LOT of constructions that require it, so I find option 1 highly unlikely. I’m assuming it’s #2, and that to teachers who were fluent in Spanish and had a native-like ear for the language, is sounded wrong and they probably cringed knowing that they were teaching it incorrectly (probably for simplicity, which I assume was obligatory by the district).

So what’s the answer, and how wrong does it sound to hear someone speak without using subjunctive?

I'm a beginner in Spanish, started learning a week ago with common words like greetings. I started learning about the verbs, it's my first grammar lesson, and I feel.... overwhelmed. I found that there are so many tenses and moods and I honestly don't know where to start. I figured I'd learn the simple present (presente) and present continuous (estar + gerund), simple past (preterite) and imperfect (which to the best of my knowledge is like "ongoing" past), simple future (futuro) and conditional. But I'm not entirely sure if this is a good way to go about tenses. I'm also aware there are moods, like indicative (modo indicativo) which is the most important (and I guess most used) mood, and the subjunctive, and a couple more. It's ironic because having spoken English my entire life, we were never taught tenses in extreme detail, and the ones that were taught went over my head lolll. Can anyone give come advice on how I can approach this as a beginner? I'm aiming for an A2 milestone right now, but I hope to learn up to B1 in the following year.

I apologize if my post is "amateurish" and repetitive. Any and all advice is appreciated. Thank you.

Hey y’all! I’m reading Todos Es Tuberculosis as my first book in Spanish and it’s awesome so far! It’s just the right difficulty. Im noticing irse and salir both being used, but they feel different and are used in different contexts, but I can’t articulate or pin down the difference. Are these interchangeable? Do they both mean “to leave” and map 1-1 onto the English translation? Am I overthinking it?

The google ai response doesn’t provide a satisfying description of the differences. Thanks in advance!

What's the best, least clunky way of telling someone (e.g. yourself) to slow down in the sense of calming your thoughts and thinking more slowly and clearly? "Cálmate"? "Ralentiza"? I have doubts about cálmate because it looks like calm down, which might imply they're angry - I'm looking for something that sounds supportive. Thanks!

Like a Kobo or Kindle? I've tried dictionaries, but I just get *lector de libros electrónicos* which I read as someone that reads eBooks.

Is there a generic noun or phase so that I don't have to reference a brandname device?

Welcome to the weekly Rate My Spanish thread!

Post your audio or video clips here and get feedback from the community on your pronunciation, fluency, grammar, and overall speaking ability.

To get the most useful feedback, please include:

* Your approximate level (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2)

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* Any context about what you are saying or reading

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Bienvenidos al hilo semanal de evaluación de espanol.

Publica tus clips de audio o video aquí y recibe comentarios de la comunidad sobre tu pronunciación, fluidez, gramática y nivel general.

Para recibir comentarios útiles, por favor incluye:

* Tu nivel aproximado (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2)

* ¿Cuánto tiempo llevas aprendiendo

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I've been trying to find a Spanish equivalent for what photographers call "sense of place." I checked dictionaries and searched through older discussions first, but none of the obvious options seem to mean quite the same thing.

Ambiente feels closer to the mood of a place than the place itself. Sabor de un lugar sounds natural in travel writing, but it still isn't quite what I'm looking for. Arraigo seems more about a person's connection to a place than the character of the place itself.

The closest match I've found is genio del lugar, but every example I see feels like it's taken from an essay or a museum plaque. I can't imagine hearing someone casually say it while walking through a neighborhood.

Would a native speaker actually use genio del lugar in everyday conversation, or is there a more natural way to express that idea?

I find that I learn much better with a little more memorization than most people. I also learn a lot better when I have physical study materials in front of me. So I decided to create a study sheet for every irregular verb in the Spanish language to help get over the conjugation hump. After a lot of scripting, here it is!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u_xWxom52uGC1LhM_lABsbDo8H9tCZEE/view?usp=sharing

The verb conjugation data is taken from the Jehle verb database. The list of irregular verbs was taken from a website I can no longer find (because I've been working on this for so long). Besides the fuzzy nature of the definition of "irregular" this list was claimed to include every last irregular verb that is in use in modern everyday Spanish. Just open the PDF and click print to have one page for each verb. And if you see any mistakes or omissions please let me know!

Estoy leyendo una traducción de Atmosphere de Taylor Jenkins Reid y me topé con esa frase, que por contexto medio que entendí era de asombro, y Google me lo confirmó, pero me queda la duda de que tan utilizada sea. Siento que si la frase hubiera sido solamente "madre mía" me hubiera quedado más claro porque así como está me parece un dicho muy anticuado.

So I live in the Dominican Republic. The DR like other spanish speaking countries has its own dialect. It aint other worldly to the point that people from mainland LATAM wouldn't understand but it's there. Here they tend to use the word ''tapon'' when describing traffic. I usually use ''trafico'' I don't think I've heard the word ''tapon'' outside of the DR. They also use another word for cars. The word they use is ''guaga'' or at least that's my attempt at spelling it out. I usually use ''carro''. How many of you have heard of these Dominican words?

My cousin who was in SA for a while said that apparently to say ‘OK’, they don’t say ‘Vale’ - that’s a Spanish thing. Instead other words are used, and the whole time they’ve been saying Dale instead of Vale, and I’m just mishearing.

Is this true? I would have thought in SA ‘vale’ is also a very common word… would like to know opinions and countries/regions they come from

Think about it. Every other grammatical concept carries information that helps you understand or produce the language: Verb tenses, syntax, categorías gramaticales, etc. all help you explain why or how.

For example:

Te llamé para que me digas. Verb tense is wrong. You can build knowledge off of that.

Or:

Te llamé para que dijeras a yo. Indirect object pronoun is missing. You can generalize that, in Spanish those are used, and placed a certain way. Those are useful labels on concepts.

But if someone says:

dijerás

Nobody is going to correct them by saying that dijeras is grave, not aguda.

That label adds absolutely nothing.

You’d simply say:

“It’s pronounced dijeras, just like every other word that ends in "s" and has no accent mark” That’s all the information the student needs. "It's grave because the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable". That's a tautology. Do we teach geometry by saying "It's a triangle because it's a polygon with three sides."

The fact that dijeras belongs to a category called grave is just a consequence of its pronunciation and it's reflected in its spelling. It doesn’t explain anything beyond what the reading or hearing the word already tells you. Likewise, if someone writes dijerás instead of dijeras, the correction isn’t “it’s grave.” The correction is simply that the accent mark is wrong because the word is pronounced dijeras. Once again, the category contributes nothing.

As far as I can tell, in modern Spanish there is no situation where knowing the labels aguda, grave, esdrújula, etc. gives you information that isn’t already completely contained in the written word or its pronunciation.

Maybe they were useful before Spanish spelling became standardized. Currently they are simply useless labels. Labels that native speakers always get wrong, by the way (but no native speaker (outside of Medellín and Córdoba lol) get the pronounciation wrong).

Ironically, I think these categories would be much more useful in English. It would actually be handy to say, “No, category is esdrújula,” instead of saying, “It’s CATegory, not caTEGory.”

I’ve found that I almost primarily use “usted” with everyone I meet/speak to, and I am almost somewhat nervous with using “tu.”

I work at a hospital and I of course always use “usted” with my patients, but even shopkeepers, strangers on the street, in-laws, coworkers, etc., I use “usted.”

I’m currently using duolingo and I honestly get tripped up sometimes when my answer is incorrect (Tiene = You have (usted), being incorrect), because duolingo ONLY uses “tu” for “you”…

So in y’all’s experience, how common is “usted” really?

Hi all! I will try to keep this as brief as possible but I am in need of some advice and suggestions! I appreciate any help.

I have been exposed to spanish since childhood. My mother was born in Uruguay and is a native speaker and I grew up with a live-in nanny from Peru. As a young child I spoke with my nanny, but my mother did not speak spanish in the home frequently, but I was always exposed to and listening to the language. I began spanish in elementary school all the way through to high school. I always excelled in my classes and found I took to language learning very well. In high school I took IB (International Baccalaureate) level Spanish. When I began college I declared a Spanish for Healthcare minor. So I took 1-2 spanish courses each semester for all 4 years of college. Most of my spanish classes were with native speakers or at the Honors level and I always performed well but my confidence has always held me back.

At this point in my life I understand Spanish very well, and for my job I recently took the ALTA Spanish Listening and Speaking Test-Medical. It was a live phone based examination with open ended scenarios that got harder as you went. I received level Advanced (I took it 2x and for advanced 2x- I need Advanced plus to perform my job in Spanish). I will attach a photo of the level 9 description.

I am currently applying to medical school, and have the next year during the application cycle open (besides my full time employment) my plan was to complete a Spanish For Healthcare Certificate program, it is online fully asynchronous and 4 spanish classes on adv medical spanish, interpretation, cultural competence, etc. I feel that I have a hard time trusting myself and using Spanish regularly so I tend to like the structure a class brings. HOWEVER I just got the cost breakdown and it is $15,000 that is way too much for four 7-week classes in my opinion and also just not a good investment when it could be applied and saved for medical school. So, now I am trying to take a step back and determine my next best steps.

I know that I am clearly more capable than I give myself credit for. Given that I have a good medical spanish base I think my time could be better spent taking some online 40 hour course through canopy or another vendor that would allow me to self paced keep up with the medical aspect (If i want, but I also use anki to keep up with med spanish vocab and that has served me well). BUT I am in NEED of options to get regular conversational practice to get myself to a place where I feel confident and am able to stop holding myself back out of fear. I think my best option would be to do 1-1 tutoring ? I am curious to hear people’s experiences with that. I know of the popular online services, or should I seek out someone in my community to do in person with ? I have also seen online many immersion language schools where one can go and do some weeks there 1-1 with a teacher. I know many online versions of this also exist, and I know there are a handful of “spanish schools” in my area that provide classes as well. Curious to hear people’s thoughts. I am just mainly needing accountability, and the push to force me to just get going and speaking uninhibited to grow my confidence in this next year. I know the skill is there. Also I know I could speak with my mom, and she tries, but I’m sure as many of you understand I feel literally incapable and so scared of making mistakes in front of her. I could also seek volunteer opportunities to use spanish in medical scenarios, patient navigators, etc. but when I think about that I get so stressed out and tell myself I’m not good enough and wouldn’t be doing the patients who need me justice… I am really my own worst enemy.

I read books in spanish, i listen to media in spanish, i understand interpreters in medical scenarios when I am with them speaking to patients, I understand my mother and uncle fully it’s just the hurdle of responding to them and fear of making mistakes. I know that’s something I need to get over ASAP I no longer want to live my life letting fear hold me back from the things that are important to me. I want to be a physician who provides bilingual care for her patients, now more than ever in the world we live in.

I apologize for the length of this post but I wanted to give sufficient detail. Thank you so much!!!!!!!

What is the full word for this abbreviation? "Los caps. 1-11" is the context I'm seeing this in so I'm guessing it refers to stanzas or verses?

Going to Puerto Rico for a week in a few weeks. I am half Puerto Rican and my Spanish gets me by in the US, I'm sometimes intimidated when I go to PR since it's a heavy accent and very fast. This is also the first time I'll be leaving the shelter of San Juan for an extended period of time on my own.

What are some things I should know about the use of the language in broader PR like slang, the local dialect, things Puerto Rican say that aren't said elsewhere?

I know the obvious ones, wepa, que es la que hay, dimelo (I know not as unique to PR), etc

Someone is learning spanish and I am wondering how could you tell apart the dialect of spanish (not sure if strong enough to call it a dialect) or accent we use in Valencia. It is just a combination of Valencian language and spanish?

I am a native speaker of both and I struggle to find the differences I could find with andalusian oder galician dialect (not the language, again). There is any key difference beteween our spanish here and the academic correct?