Topic - Learning Spanish

Mexico has a wide variety of dichos or refranes – sayings, maxims, or phrases – some of Mexican origin and others evidently not. By analogy or through rhyme, the dichos are supposed to convey time-honored truths that admit no argument. But they can be, and often are, pronouced in such a smug manner as to [...]

The phone rings when you weren’t expecting a call, so you pick up the receiver and mumble the usual “bueno” into the mouthpiece. ¿A dónde hablo? (where am I calling?) comes a sharp, testy voice. The easiest way to clear up wrong numbers is to say where the person has called, but usually you don’t [...]

It’s said that even people who can waltz through a lie-detector test without so much as blinking will stumble if required to do arithmetic in a foreign language. This probably wouldn’t be very useful for Sherlock Holmes to know in these days of $1 calculators, since it’s rather hard to find anyone who can do [...]

A visiting Colombian student at one of Mexico’s universities complained about the expression ¿mande? the Mexican way of saying pardon? or of responding to someone who has called your attention. Literally, it means command hence the dismay of the student who failed to see why one would submit to the orders of the speaker just [...]

Thanks to modern technology, there’s no longer any need to learn how to put accents on Spanish words. Instead of bothering with complicated, picky rules, just announce firstly and loudly that the keyboard on your palm pilot, or better yet, your iPhone, “doesn’t DO accents.” Contemporaries will take this as a perfectly acceptable euphemism for [...]

Language is the instrument that provides access to a country’s culture, so being able to speak some Spanish will enable you to get the most from your visit to Mexico and, if you plan to live and work or retire here, having at least a working knowledge of the Spanish language will be essential for day-to-day living. [...]

Mexicans have three words for earthquake. Temblor – literally “tremor”- is the most commonly used, and is applied to most of the small and medium sized quakes that rattle parts of the country from time to time. Terremoto is reserved for the big earthquakes, like the one that struck this past week on the border between Guerrero and [...]

Modern methods for teaching languages tend to focus more on speaking and listening than reading and writing.  The average language teacher has probably lost count of the number of times he or she has heard someone say:  “I want to know how to speak the language, I don’t care about grammar.” One argument used for [...]

However advanced technology becomes, language remains the prime means by which we interact with other peoples and cultures, and is the principal way in which we learn from each other. If you’re planning to move to Mexico to live, work, retire or establish a home—full or part-time—learning Spanish should be high up on your list [...]

Everyone more or less knows that if you’re struggling to find a word in Spanish, you can add an ‘o’ or an ‘a’ to the end of an English noun – as well as “idad” for words ending “ity” and “ología” for “ology” and “ismo” for “ism” – and have a 50% chance of coming [...]