We continue with our series of Learn Spanish from the News where I take short news clips and turn them into short Spanish lessons by teaching you some of the language contained within said news clip.  This one is about how the Prado Museum has adapted to the recent pandemic by opening an outdoor exhibition of some of its most renowned works.

We’ll have a look at the clip first (it’s only one minute long), I want you to try to understand as much as you can, then we’ll cover some of the more difficult/unique/obscure language used within it, after that I’ll offer you a short quiz you can take about what we just covered so you can apply what you learned before, lastly, I’ll post the clip a second time for you to watch in order to see how much more of it you can understand (and it lets you work on  your listening comprehension, which is very important).  Here’s a direct link to the clip if you prefer that, or you can play the embedded version below.

“…y encontrarse cara a cara con ella.”

“La cara” is “the face”, in Spanish, and “a” just means “to”.  “Cara a cara” is how you say “face to face” in Spanish, word-for-word how we say it in English.

“Encontrar” literally means “to find”, making it reflexive turns it into “to find oneself”, but when you combine it with “con”, which means “with”, it’s used to mean “to meet or encounter someone”, in this case “ella”, which means “her” and refers to the woman in the painting.  Very easy to remember since you can see how the literal meaning of “encontrarse con”, “to find oneself with”, means “to meet [someone]”, right?

The full phrase with translation:

Llegar a la plaza mayor de Sigüenza y encontrarse cara a cara con ella…

Sigüenza is a city in central Spain, just a bit northeast of Madrid, since I’m sure some of you are wondering.  The translation:

To arrive in the main plaza of Sigüenza and meet her face-to-face…

“Pues es un lujo, vamos, es un lujo…”

“Lujo” means “luxury”, and although “vamos” literally means “let’s go” (it’s the imperative 1st person plural form of ir, which means “to go”), in this context it means something more like “come on” in the sense of (full translation next):

“Well it’s a luxury, I mean come on, it’s a luxury…”

Oh and “pues” is a filler word that most commonly means “well“, which it does here.

Lastly, the painting they’re talking about which is on display at this outdoor exhibition is Goya’s La Maja Desnuda.  I wanted to be able to tell you what a “maja” was, and led me down an interesting little rabbit hole.  I’ll simply quote from Wikipedia:

Majo (masc.) or maja (fem.), also manolo and manola, after the most popular names, were people from the lower classes of Spanish society, especially in Madrid, who distinguished themselves by their elaborate outfits and sense of style in dress and manners, as well as by their cheeky behavior.  They flourished from the late 18th to early 19th century, and to some extent later. Majos and majas were one of the favorite subjects of some 19th-century Spanish painters.

Now the irony of this is that our best guess as to who the subject is, is one María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva-Álvarez de Toledo y Silva, 13th duchess of Alba, who is most decidedly not “lower class”.  So this was a duchess pretending to be a cheeky, lower-class, Spanish libertine so she could be painted nude by the great Francisco Goya.  How naughty.  The famous painting of her cheeky grace, La Maja Desnuda, follows (click to open a much larger version in a new tab):

La Maja Desnuda de Goya es una de las obras maestras que el Museo del Prado ha sacado de nuevo a las calles…

An “obra” is a “work”, typically in the sense of an artistic work or, occasionally, a structure of architectual importance (so again, something with artistic value).  It commonly refers to a painting, sculpture, play, or film.  “Maestra” means what you think it does: “master”, so an “obra maestra” is a…masterpiece.  Yes, very good.

“Sacar” is a verb which means “to pull out, take out, remove”, so when they say “que el Museo del Prado ha sacado de nuevo a las calles” that means it’s something the museum has taken out again (“de nuevo” = “of new” = “again”) to the streets (“las calles”).

Full phrase:

La Maja Desnuda de Goya es una de las obras maestras que el Museo del Prado ha sacado de nuevo a las calles…

Translation:

La Maja Desnuda by Goya is one of the masterpieces that the Prado Museum has taken out to the street again…

Hemos querido mostrar la riqueza del Prado en cuanto a temas.  Por eso el visitante podrá ver…

“La riqueza” means “the richness”, in this case the richness of the museum’s works, more specifically the richness in terms of the different themes of artwork that it offers, because he then says “en cuanto a temas” and “una tema” is…can you guess…a theme, yes.  “En cuanto a” is a very common expression you should definitely learn and it means, “with regards to”.  I regret to inform you that there is another very common expression that differs by just one word, “a”, and means something entirely different: “en cuanto”, which means “as soon as”.

“Podrá” is the future 3rd person form of the verb, “poder“, which means “to be able to, can”.  “Por eso” means literally, “because that”, so what do you think a better translation of it would be in English?

If you said, “therefore” or “because of that”, well done, that’s what it means.  The full phrase once more:

Hemos querido mostrar la riqueza del Prado en cuanto a temas.  Por eso el visitante podrá ver…

Translation:

We wanted to show the richness of Prado with regards to themese.  Because of this the visitor will be able to see…

And then he goes on to list some of the various types of paintings the visitor will be able to see at the exhibition.

En volver a poder hacer acesible nuestro patrimonio a todos, pues, es maravilloso.

“Volver” means “to return, come back”, so when he says “en volver a poder…”, that means “in coming back to being able to…it’s marvelous” (did you guess that “maravilloso” means marvelous?  if so, well done).  This refers to them being able to at least somewhat reopen the museum again after the pandemic.

“Hacer” means “to do or make” and “acesible” means what it looks like: “accessible”, so yes, it’s just the literal translation: “to make accessible”.

“Patrimonio” means “patromony”, that is their heritage, referring to the general cultural heritage of Spain.

The full phrase once more:

En volver a poder hacer acesible nuestro patrimonio a todos, pues, es maravilloso.

Translation:

In returning to being able to make our heritage accessible to everyone, well, it’s marvelous.

Obras que permiten conocer nuestra historia, y el arte occidental.

“Permiten” is the present plural form of “permitir”, which means “to permit”.  “Conocer” means to know, but in a deeper way than what is implied by merely “saber” – “saber” is used to indicate knowledge of simple facts.  “Conocer” means something more like “to be familiar with”.  This particular combination of words is a common one you should learn and get used to, you’ll often see “permite conocer” and similar variants.  The best translation in English would be “allows [one] to know” or “allows [one] to become familiar with”.  See this excellent article from Spanishland School to learn more about distinguishing between “saber” and “conocer”.

“Occidental” means “western”.  There’s actually an identically spelled word in English that means the same thing, it’s just rarely used.

The full phrase:

Obras que permiten conocer nuestra historia, y el arte occidental.

Translation:

Works that allow us to know our history, and western art.

…con una calidad que nos permite situarnos frente de estas obras y observar cada uno de sus detalles como si estuviéramos en el propio Museo del Prado

Ok, I’m not going to tackle this whole phrase, just the tough bits.  “Calidad” means “quality”, “situar” means “to situate or place”, so what do you think “situarnos” means? “Situate ourselves”, yes.  In this case she’s talking about physically situating oneself in front of the paintings.

“Cada uno” is an extremely common phrase that you should know if you don’t already: “cada” means “each” and “uno” means “one”, and this whole phrase means exactly what the literal translation of it means in English, “each one”.

Now we encounter…the subjunctive.  It took me a good few years to get used to this and really understand what it means when it’s used in Spanish, so don’t feel bad if you’re having trouble with it.  Just don’t give up, be patient with yourself, give it time.  The verb in question here is “estar”, which means “to be”, in this case referring to physical location.  I’m already tackling the subjunctive so I’m not even going to try to start into “ser” vs. “estar” (there’s a whole book about this which is really quite good, if you’re interested).  Ok, so when you see the phrase, “como si”, it’s almost always going to be followed by the subjunctive because, as I explain in my article about the Spanish subjunctive, one of the things the Spanish subjunctive is used to express are hypothetical situations and “como si” means “as if”, so what they’re saying here is “as if we were” with regards to location.  Check out some more examples on Reverso Context of the phrase “como si estuviéramos” to get an idea of how this is used.

“Propio” is a semi-common word that means “proper, actual”, so when they say “como si estuviéramos en el propio Museo del Prado”, they mean, “as if we were in the actual Prado Museum”.

The whole phrase again:

…con una calidad que nos permite situarnos frente de estas obras y observar cada uno de sus detalles como si estuviéramos en el propio Museo del Prado

Translation:

…with a quality that allows us to place ourselves in front of these works and observe each of their details as if we were in the actual Prado Museum.

Ok.  I think that’ll do it for now.  I know there’s a bit more at the end but it’s not especially interesting or difficult Spanish, you can sort it out on your own, plus this is long enough as it is.  Let’s have a short quiz and then take a look at the video once more to see how much more you can now understand.

Now have a look at the video one more time and see how much better you can understand it:

Are you learning Spanish?

As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later.  A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher.  I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself.  You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane.  You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted.  They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).

Also, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.

Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts.  My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).  You can find other similar lessons to this one in the Learn Spanish from the News category here, not to mention other similar categories such as Short Spanish Lessons and Learn Spanish from YouTube (I use short, fun YouTube videos to teach the Spanish they use just like with the news clip above).

Cheers,

Andrew

And here is the latest installment of Friday Linkfest where I just post a few links to resources I think will help you learn Spanish or languages in general along with a short description.  If you have any suggestions for next Friday’s post please shoot me an email via the contact form (or at andrew -at- traceylanguages.com).  Let’s get started.

• SpanishLand School on YouTube.  This is a channel I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere but I’ll do it here again.  It’s a husband-and-wife team, the wife is Colombian, and they put out a lot of good content, and very consistently at that.  I’ll post one of their most recent videos directly below so you can sample their content and see whether you want to subscribe to their channel or not.  I’ve just realized that I wrote a post about them a month ago but screw it I’ll leave this here as I don’t think I promoted that post very much so hopefully not too many of you have already seen it (if you have, sorry, I’ve no affiliation with them, I just forgot I wrote that).

• Rompower.  This is an Instagram account (you do follow me on Instagram, right?).  She’s a Spanish journalist who posts common errors that native speakers make in Spanish, and then corrects them.  She has totally figured out how Instagram works in that she always posts a really nice picture or video of herself, and then puts the actual Spanish lesson in the description.  This is probably more for intermediate students and up, but even if you only know a little bit of Spanish you could probably still benefit from it even if you can’t understand a lot of what she says.
• Lyrics Training.  Nifty idea, though be ready to type fast and rewind repeatedly (which is fine, it still works fairly well).  The way it works is that you play a music video from YouTube that’s been embedded on their site (this is how they manage this without having to pay any royalties for the music, which allows them to offer this to you for free) and fill in the blanks in the lyrics that are shown below the video.  How many blanks there are varies based on the level of difficulty you choose.  It’s free and they offer a variety of languages including, of course, Spanish.
• Grimm Stories and Andersen Stories.  These two sites offer all the original fairy tales by the Grimm brothers as well as those by Hans Christian Andersen in multiple languages, including English.  This means what you can do is essentially treat it like a parallel text (this is traditionally a book meant for language students that is written in the foreign language on the left page and in the student’s native language on the right page).  The way you do this would be to have the story you’re reading open in your target language in one tab and then also open that same story in your native language in another tab; you then use the version in your native language as a translation to help you understand the version in your target language.
• Newspaper Map.  I know I’ve mentioned this site elsewhere but it’s been a while so a lot of you won’t have heard of it.  It just lets you find all the newspapers in a particular city, region, or country by simply clicking and zooming on a map.  Use this to find foreign language newspapers to help you learn your target language – it’s a lot easier and more intuitive than googling “Spanish language newspapers” or “Colombian newspapers” or something like that and then sorting through the results trying to find what you have in mind.

Ok I think that’ll do it for today.  Be sure to check out previous editions of Friday linkfest for more recommended links of a similar nature (all are language-learning-related).  Lastly…

If you’re learning Spanish…

As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later.  A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher.  I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself.  You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane.  You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted.  They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).

Also, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.

Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts.  My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).

Cheers,

Andrew

In this series, “Learn Spanish from the News”, I’ll take short news clips and use them to teach you some of the Spanish used in them.  Today we’ve got a clip just a bit over a minute long from RTVE in Spain talking about the reopening of The National Gallery in London.  I’ll post the video directly below so you can view it and do your best to understand it, then I’ll cover a few words and expressions used in the report, there will be a short quiz you can opt to take, and finally I’ll post the video again so you can see how much more you understand.  Let’s get started by having a look at the clip (here’s a direct link to it if you prefer that), just do your best:

“La Gallery Nacional de Londres reabre sus puertas después de más de cien días cerrada…”

As many of you already know, “abrir” means “to open”, so what do you think “reabrir” means?

Right, “to reopen”.  So what is said here is, “The National Gallery of London reopens its doors after more than one hundred days closed…”

“Cerrada” comes from the verb, “cerrar”, which means “to close”.

“Cita previa para entrar…”

A “cita” is a date or appointment, and “previo/previa” means “previous”, so they’re saying you have to have made a reservation in order to get in along with other requirements.

“…y pantallas plásticas para el personal de una de las pinacotecas más grandes del mundo.”

If you’ve never heard that word before, don’t feel bad: this was the first time I’d ever heard it.  “Pinacoteca” means “art gallery”, so what they’re saying is, “plastic screens for the staff (“personal” in this context means employees or staff) of one of the largest art galleries in the world”.

Tip: Search Google Images for words that you don’t know, especially if they’re physical objects or concepts well-represented by images, this helps you remember what the word means, gives you a better idea of the exact meaning than what a written definition can give you, and if you’re making electronic flashcards in Anki, Memrise, Quizlet, etc. then this gives you an image you can use (e.g. put the image on the front of the card and the word on the back so when you see the card you only see the image and then have to think of the word, “pinacoteca” in this case).  Here’s what came up for me when I searched for “pinacoteca”:

“…este museo nunca había cerrado tanto tiempo, incluso durante la segunda guerra mundial mantuvo sus puertas abiertas aunque sin cuandros en las paredes.”

• “incluso” means “even” but only in the sense of “not even”, that is it serves to emphasize something.  If you want to say that one thing is even with another, you might use “igual” (literally, “equal”).
• “mantuvo” is the 3rd person preterite tense of “mantener”, which means “to maintain”.  The conjugation of “mantener” follows that of the verb it’s based on, “tener”, which is irregular, hence why it looks a bit odd.  “Tener” is a really common verb and several other common verbs, such as “mantener”, are based on it and have identically irregular conjugations, so yes it’s worth learning.  So “mantuvo” hear means “maintained”, as in “the museum maintained (kept) its doors open”.
• “cuadro” literally means square/rectangle (it can also be an adjective meaning the same thing), but in this context it means “painting”, because paintings are generally rectangular in shape, so it became kind of slang for “a painting”.
• “pared” just means “wall”, so “en las paredes” means “on the walls”.

So what we get here is this: “…this museum had never been closed for so long, even during the second world war it kept its door open, although without paintings on the walls”.

“Antes de la llegada del coronavirus, un día normal, se calculaba que cerca de quince mil personas podían visitar la National Gallery…”

“Llegada” just means “arrival”, as you’ve likely guessed, since “llegar” is the verb which means “to arrive”.  “Se calculaba” is what I wanted to focus on here: you can probably guess that “calcular” means “to calculate”.  Now, the way that you do the passive voice in Spanish is by making a verb reflexive, usually when it wouldn’t be.  Here, “calcular” just means to calculate and it wouldn’t normally be reflexive, so the way we say that “it is calculated” (the passive voice leaves out the subject, so we don’t know who caclulated it and it’s implied it doesn’t matter) is by saying, “se calcula”.  Now, you’ll note that it’s “se calculaba”, not “se calcula”.  This is because they’ve also put the verb, “calcular”, in the Spanish imperfect tense, which is a past tense but one that implies that the action, though started in the past, is still ongoing, so I would assume that although the caclulating (of the number of visitors) began in the past, they’re still doing it.

The full translation:

Before the arrival of the corona virus, a normal day it was calculated that around fifteen thousand people could visit the National Gallery…

Also note that “podían” is in the imperfect tense (the verb is “poder“, which means “can, to be able to”), implying that not only could people visit the gallery in the past but that they could now as well (using the preterite form of poder, “pudo”, would imply people can no longer visit the gallery).

“…que han pedido cita a través de la web, con varios días de antelación.”

This is a very common phrase you need to get to know in Spanish: “con antelación” and the corresponding, “con (amount of time) de antelación”.  “Antelación” means something like “advanced notice” or “anticipation”, and it’s almost always only ever seen accompanied by “con”, so it’s a lot like the word “notice” in English: usually accompanied by “with” and implies a certain amount of advance notification prior to an event.

So what they’re saying here is, “…who have requested an appointment through the web, several days ahead of time [literally, ‘with several days of notice’].”.

“Todos dicen sentirse felices, a pesar de las limitaciones…”

“A pesar de” is also an extremely common phrase in Spanish you need to know if you don’t already.  It means, “in spite of” or “despite” and can take two forms: “a pesar de” and “pese a”.  They both mean exactly the same thing: “in spite of”.

“Pesar” literally means “to weigh”, and despite some cursory searching I’ve still no idea how it came to mean this when combined with “a”, so if anyone knows and wants to leave a comment, they’re more than welcome.  The full translation of the above phrase is:

Everyone claims to be happy, in spite of the limitations…

Also note the odd phrasing, “Todos dicen sentirse felices”.  Remember that in Spanish, the infinitive of verbs is simply the infinitive form of the verb and the “to” is implied, so the way you say “to feel” in Spanish is simply “sentirse“, not “a sentirse”, therefore how could we possibly translate “Todos dicen sentirse felices…”?

“Everyone says to feel happy”, and in this context you could interpret “decir” more like “claims” than “says”, so “Everyone claims to feel happy” would be a closer interpretation.

Lastly, note how “sentirse” is reflexive: yes, “sentir” just means “to feel”, but it means to feel something external.  When you feel in Spanish, it’s an action you’re taking upon something or someone else: you feel the texture of an orange, you feel the heat in the air, when you apologize you do so by saying, “lo siento”, literally “I feel it”, meaning that you feel the hurt you have caused the other person.  So if you want to describe an internal feeling that you have, guess how you do it?

Yup, you say that you “feel yourself”.  So if you want to say you feel good, you say, “Me siento bien”, literally “I feel well myself”.  “I feel bad” would be, “Me siento mal”, literally, “I feel bad myself”.  If you, like the presenter in this news clip, want to say that everyone feels happy, you would describe how it is that they feel internally, that is the sensation that they are feeling within themselves: “todos dicen sentirse felices” (literally, “everyone says they feel themselves happy”).

Quiz!  Apply what you just learned, it’ll help you immensely when it comes to remembering it (which will help when you watch the video again which is immediately below the quiz)!

Now have a look at the video one more time and see how much more you can understand

Are you learning Spanish?

As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later.  A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher.  I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself.  You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane.  You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted.  They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).

Alright, that’s all.  Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment letting me know what you liked, didn’t like, what I could do better, what you had trouble with, questions, etc.

Cheers,

Andrew

I get the appeal: sounds like fun, makes sense on the surface, get a little cultured, get a little drunk, catch of a bit of clap, come back home fluent in Spanish.  However, it usually doesn’t work like that (fun-drinking-STDs yes, fluent in Spanish, no).  I say this as someone who speaks Spanish quite fluently, started learning it on their own about twelve years ago, and has since spent three months in Spain and eight months in Latin America (three in Colombia and five in Chile). 

I advise you to first learn a language from home, wherever you live (doesn’t matter where: you need an internet connection, that’s all you need), and then travel to the country where it’s spoken as a reward/vacation and/or in order to practice and refine it.  I shall now explain why.

If you speak English…

…which you do if you’re reading this, either as a native speaker or a non-native who speaks English at a fairly high level, then you’re going to have a very hard time not resorting to English to communicate.  This is especially true if you’re in some sort of school or program: most of your fellow students will also speak English, you will hang out together outside of class and therefore you will speak English most of the time that you’re not in class, and if you are going to do that why didn’t you just stay home and take a Spanish class?  It would have resulted in pretty much the same thing (Spanish in-class, English outside of class).

English is by far the most widely spoken second language throughout the world, especially in Spanish-speaking countries.  You’ll never have trouble finding someone who speaks English to help you with whatever you need and consequently it will be very difficult to avoid that temptation (or necessity, sometimes) unless you already speak fairly good Spanish.

People who have done it talk about how it doesn’t work very well…

I spent almost three months in Spain in 2015 and barely made any progress the first month because I wasn’t intentionally doing anything to make progress, and those things I did which really helped (online study, tutoring sessions, and language exchanges) were things I could’ve done at home.  This was my big takeaway from that trip: not only can you learn a language at home just as well as you can in the country where it’s spoken, it’s often easier because you’re not dealing with all issues and problems posed by traveling abroad (getting clothes washed, coordinating flights/trains/rental cars, where to get groceries, how to get tickets for this/that, how to get internet, lost/stolen passport, oh no my toilet’s broken how do I get it fixed…etc.).

I’ll tell you something else I learned from that trip: you really, really want to learn the language to a fairly decent level first (around B2 preferrably, per the CEFR scale) before you travel to the country where it’s spoken, that way you can treat it like a vacation and a reward to yourself and enjoy yourself while you’re there rather than spending all your time working on trying to learn the language.  My Spanish was probably high-B1, maybe low-B2 when I landed in Spain, and that definitely made things much easier for me, but I was still struggling the whole time to understand people and that really made my experience there less enjoyable and more stressful.  I’m to the point now where I kind of don’t want to bother travelling to a foreign country for any substantial amount of time (more than a couple of weeks) unless I’m already around C1 in the language spoken there – sounds excessive, I know, but that’s my opinion at this point.

Benny Lewis spent six months in Spain in 2003 and barely learned any Spanish at all…and he was trying to learn Spanish the whole time.  It wasn’t until he refused to speak English and insisted on intentionally studying and using Spanish every day that he started making significant progress.  He mentions meeting a lot of expats who had been there years, sometimes decades, who barely spoke the local language.  The folks over at Happy Hour Spanish and Olly Richards at I Will Teach You a Language recount similar experiences and observations.

This takes a lot of time and money and isn’t necessary

Doing a study abroad program requires a substantial investment of both time and money, in the planning as well as the actual execution while you’re there.  This is in addition to the fact that, nowadays with the internet and what we know about language-learning, it’s not only not necessary but doesn’t even offer much of an advantage over just learning the language at home.

The overwhelming majority of the things you can do to learn a language that really work well can be done from home just as well as they can from the country where your target language is spoken, sometimes better if wherever you would’ve ended up has poor internet connectivity.  Here, look:

• Interactions with native speakers where you talk to them and they help and correct you: language exchanges and tutoring sessions via video confrencing apps like Skype.
• Expose yourself to lots of media in your target language (e.g. the news in Spanish) and look up and learn what you don’t know: you can do this just as well from home as you can from anywhere because this is all done online now.
• Read newspapers, books, etc. and look up and learn new words, grammar, expressions, etc.  Same as above, plus if you insist on paper books you can get plenty of stuff in your target language online from Amazon and similar retailers.  Every newspaper has a website now and the overwhelming majority are free.
• Learn about the culture of the country where your target language is spoken which simultaneously teaches you new terms and expressions in your target language: search YouTube for videos about the cultural and historical aspects of wherever it is your interested in and I assure you that you will not be lacking for videos in your target language talking about them.  Check out my “Learn Spanish on YouTube” section for tons of good suggestions and help with this.  No, this isn’t as good as being there, not even close, I admit it, however it’s something you can do right now and which will help prepare you before you travel there.

I’m sure there’s more but that’s most of it I believe.  Regarding the last one: yes, you definitely do want to travel to the country where your target language is spoken, it does have its advantages, but that’s all: some advantages.  It’s not at all necessary anymore.  Do it, but treat it like a vacation or reward, a time when you’ll refine your target language, not when you learn it from scratch as a complete beginner.

This really won’t work unless you’ve got decent social skills

Ok, you’re going to travel to Spain/France/Mongola/wherever and learn that country’s language by interacting with the locals, going out to bars and restaurants and talking to people left and right, constantly interacting in their language thereby learning it.  Do you usually act that way at home?  Are you good at approaching strangers cold like that?  Can you make friends quickly?  Does the culture of your target country even lend itself to this (you may have trouble in German-speaking countries, for example)?

If you’re a socially awkward shut-in, this really isn’t going to work for you, this method of learning a language from scratch by traveling to where it’s spoken.  The only reason I was able to substantially improve my Spanish in Spain was because after the first month I started doing language exchanges with locals nearly every day, and the only reason I was able to do that was because one of my Spanish tutors was kind enough to point out a local website where I could post classified ads advertising that I was a native English speaker looking for people to practice Spanish with in exchange for helping them with their English, and the only reason that worked is because I was a native English speaker and English happens to be a very highly demanded second language in Spain (and almost everywhere else in the world at the moment).  I had a lot of luck, in other words.

There’s another problem: if you don’t speak the language before you go there then you won’t speak it when you get there and therefore you won’t be able to practice speaking it with the locals.  This sounds stupid but a lot of people get the idea in their head of going abroad to learn a foreign language, get there, then realize, “I don’t speak this language…I can’t practice it because I don’t speak it.  These people around me aren’t language teachers I’m paying to teach me their language, so they won’t.  Oh damn.”  You need to already speak the language at some kind of decent-ish level before you get there in order for this to work.

I have ranted enough

I have ranted enough.  You are tired of me and so am I.  My laptop’s even tired of me, the battery’s going to die in 18 minutes it tells me.  I have said enough, and I genuinely hope this helps people, despite the tone of this post.  What I really want to convey is this:

You can do it, now, from wherever you’re at, without spending much if any money.  Just start, right now.  Get a tutor or language exchange partner on iTalki, find some videos on YouTube in Spanish that interest you, sign up for an online group class (GoSpanish is great, I talk about them below), look up what you don’t know, put it in Anki, and start learning.

After six months or a year of this then you can go to Spain/Mexico/Germany/wherever and have a much, much better experience that you would have if you did it now.

If you’re learning Spanish a great way to get fluent is online group classes…

As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later.  A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher.  I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself.  You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane.  You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted.  They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).

Cheers,

Andrew

And here are just links to resources I’ve found recently that I think will help you learn Spanish or even just languages in general.  I’ll include a short description with each one.  I try to do these every Friday though that doesn’t always happen.

• DeepL Translator.  Launched in 2017, claims to be more accurate and nuanced than Google Translate.  Got a 2020 Webby award for “best practices” and another for “technical achievement”, generally praised, the French newspaper Le Monde said its French translations, at least, definitely were better than those of Google Translate.  Here’s its Wikipedia article. Try it out and tell us what you think in the comments below.
• Fundéu (Fundación del Español Urgente).  This is a foundation advised by the RAE (Real Academia Española) and other experts who specialize in answering questions about modern usage of Spanish and recommending better alternatives to certain terms (particularly anglicisms).  You can search their site with terms relating to a question you might have to see if they’ve already addressed it (they probably have because if you’ve thought of it odds are extremely good someone else has before you, probably several someones, and Fundéu has consequently addressed it) or you can go to the categories page and start sifting through what’s already there to see if you can find something to interest you.  You can even contact them via their site, email, or social networks, and they claim they will get back to you directly (I’ve never tried this out but it’s what they say).
• LangFocus.  This is a YouTube channel for serious language nerds (frankly I’m amazed he has as many subscribers as he does, not because he’s not good but because I’m surprised that many people are interested in this stuff).  However, if that’s you (it is some of you all) and you don’t know about this channel yet, you really need to check it out.  I don’t watch every video he puts out but I do watch a lot of them, especially if I’m considering learning a particular language and want to get an idea of what it will entail and overall how difficult it will be.
• Vanfunfun.  Another YouTube channel, this one in Spanish, and I must warn you that it’s not intended for Spanish students, so he speaks at a normal, native level and rate of speed (so if you’re not B2-ish or better, probably don’t bother).  He talks a lot about books he’s read that he likes as well as linguistics (lots of videos on the etymology of words).  If you’re interested by these things, want to practice Spanish, and you’re at least already at an intermediate level, then give him a shot.

Ok, it’s late, that’s all I’ve got this time.  I hope that interests you guys.  Please leave comments with any suggestions you might have for sites to include in the future.

Are you learning Spanish?

As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later.  A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher.  I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself.  You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane.  You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted.  They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).

Cheers,

Andrew

In this series of articles I call, Spanish Lessons from YouTube Videos, I take a video, typically something made by and for native speakers (not a Spanish lesson), and then use it to teach you a bit of the Spanish they use (words, phrases, expressions, grammar, syntax).  At the end of this post, for the first time ever, I’ve put a short (5 questions) quiz to help you remember what you just learned.

I can, of course, only cover a bit of the Spanish used in the space we have here (and you don’t want to spend 6 hours reading a 53-page long blog post dissecting every single thing they said), so you learn in manageable chunks that will only take you about 5-15 minutes, and I get to keep my sanity by not having to write a short novel.  However, please note that you can always click the “CC” (“closed-captions”) button in the bottom right of the video player to turn on the Spanish subtitles (if they’re not Spanish click the gear icon next to the “CC” button to change settings) and continue learning on your own.  Let’s get started.

Today’s video is from one of my favorite YouTubers, Mariebelle, a Mexican who married a German and now lives in Germany.  She makes videos about her experiences in Germany and all the various, interesting cultural characteristics of the country that she observes.  In this video she talks about some of the “rules of behavior” (“reglas de comportamiento”) in Germany.  I’m going to embed it below but if you’d simply like to have it open in another tab, here’s the link to it.

No Meter la Pata

Let’s start with one of the first things she says which is a common colloquial expression in all Spanish dialects, so it’s really worth learning: “no meter la pata”.  In this context, “pata” literally means “leg of an animal” (the word pierna is used to refer to the leg of a person), and the verb, meter, means “to put or insert”, so literally it means “to not insert the leg”.  What it actually means in modern speech is, “don’t screw up”.  Here’s the context in which it’s used in the video:

…algunas reglas de comportamiento que son bien vistos por los alemanes que creo que pueden ser interesantes para ustedes, sobre todo si tratan con personas alemanas, para no meter la pata…

What this translates to is:

…some rules of behavior that are well-regarded by the Germans that I believe could be interesting for you all, especially if you deal with German people, in order to not make any mistakes…

To help you remember it, and because I know a lot of people just enjoy learning about this type of stuff, I’ve just finished researching the etymology of this expression, and boy are you all in for some fun.  Feel free to skip to the next phrase below (“dar la mano”) if you prefer.

There are 3 possible explanations, none of which appear to have much in the way of credible, original documents to support them:

1. It refers to when an animal puts its leg in a trap set by a hunter and becomes trapped so that it can later be killed by the hunter when he returns.
2. It comes from an ancient expression, no longer in use: “no mentar a Pateta”.  Mentar is a verb that means, “to mention”, and is hardly ever used any more (first time I’ve encountered it), and Pateta is an ancient name for the devil, so what it’s literally saying is, “don’t mention the devil”.  This became contorted, misconstrued, over time in daily speech to the more commonly understood, “no meter la pata”.  You see this same phenomenon in English where people hear phrases and mistake certain words for others that sound very similar and with which they’re more familiar, e.g. the famous “France is Bacon” incident, and “for all intensive purposes” instead of, “for all intents and purposes”.  Here are some more examples in English if you’re interested.
3. In the 14th and 15th century in Spain, “pata” could refer simply to the foot of a person (instead of the leg of an animal, as it does now), and they also had these devices known in English as “chamber pots” because, of course, there was no indoor plumbing and if you had to urinate or defecate in the middle of the night, you wouldn’t want to have to leave the house and walk all the way to the outhouse to do it.  If you got out of bed in the middle of the night and weren’t careful of where you stepped, you might literally put your foot in a puddle of your own urine and feces, hence “meter la pata” meaning, “to screw up”.

Sources for the above:

• ¿Cuál es el origen de la expresión ‘meter la pata’? – 20 Minutos
• ¿Cuándo y cómo se originó la expresión “meter la pata”? – Stackexchange

Right, well that was fun.  Moving on…

Dar la Mano

This literally means “to give the hand” and it’s how they say, “to shake hands” in Spanish.  The phrase as you hear it used here around 1:11 is:

Es que saludas a la otra persona dandole la mano.

Which translates to:

It’s that you greet the other person by shaking their hand

Literally she says, “[it] is that you greet the other person giving them the hand”.  “Dando” is the Spanish gerund of “dar” – the gerund is what is colloquially known in English as “the -ing form”, e.g. running, singing, sleeping, etc.  The “le” that you see tacked onto the end of “dando” here such that it reads, dandole, is the indirect personal pronoun that can mean either “him”, “her”, or “them” (I would translate it as “them” in this case as that seems to be her intent, she’s not specifying anyone in particular).  The reason it’s indirect is because what you’re giving them, the direct object, is “la mano”, the hand, and so the person it’s being given to is the indirect object in that the action is being directly performed on the hand and indirectly performed on the person it is given to.  Make sense?  Check out this article on direct vs. indirect object pronouns in Spanish if you need more help.

¡Que Onda!

This is a super Mexican expression, it’s very popular in Mexico and if you’re interested in learning Mexican Spanish in particular you’ll want to learn it.

You hear Mariebelle use it around 3:24 when she says:

Ya después de varios años que estoy viviendo aquí, yo sí he llegado a verlo de varias personas que llegan y les hablan de “tú” a la otra persona y yo, como que me quedo “¡Que onda!”, ¿no? Se me hace super super raro eso…

The whole translation of all that being:

Already after living here several years, I’ve seen it from various people that come and refer to you informally with the other person, and I’m like, “What the hell?!”, right?  It’s super weird to me…

For clarification she’s talking about somebody speaking about you with another person and referring to you with the informal personal pronoun, “tú”.

Now, “qué onda” literally means “what [a] wave!”, where “wave” here means something more like “vibe” in English, it’s talking about the “vibes” you’re getting from a particular person or situation.  It’s also commonly used as a greeting, similar to, “what’s up?” in English, probably coming from the meaning of “what’s vibing here?” or “how’s the vibe here?”.

Acostumbrar a

This is the manner in which one says, “to be accustomed to” in Spanish.  Note that this is simpler than how we say it in English – they only need two words to get the job done (“acostumbrar a”) whereas we need a minimum of three (“is/are accustomed to”).  Let’s look at the context from the video where she uses this expression.  It occurs at around 5:11:

Los alemanes, al contestar el teléfono, o al hablarle por teléfono a otra persona, acostumbran a saludar de una manera muy distinta…

This translates to:

The Germans, upon answer the telephone, or talking on the phone with another person, are accustomed to greeting [them] in a very distinct manner…

Yes, you can also say it in a manner more similar to that of English by saying instead, “estar acostumbrado a” – this literally means, “to be accustomed to”.  Many English speakers tend to do this because it’s more natural to them to phrase it like this, which is fine if you prefer as it’s also a very common way that native speakers will say it, though not in this example (from the video).

Added note: There’s a very slight distinction in meaning between acostumbrar, when used as a transitive verb as it is here, and the pronominal version of the verb, acostumbrarse, and that is that the mere acostumbrar means that one is accustomed to something, whereas the pronominal acostumbrarse means that one becomes accustomed to something (very minor distinction but it is a distinction).  This is per the RAE’s definitions of the word (look at definitions #2 and #3, ignore #1, that’s for something else entirely).  To be fair, I suspect most native Spanish speakers aren’t even aware of the slight difference in usage and simply tend to use one or the other to mean either definition and you just have to discern which they mean from the context.

La plática

This is just a cute little informal way of saying, “the chat” or “the conversation”.  It comes from the verb, platicar, which is an informal way of saying, “to chat”.  Its use here occurs at 6:26 when she says:

…entonces, ya empieza la plática.

which means:

…then, now the chat starts.

Costarse

This is a very common expression throughout the Spanish-speaking world (common in all such countries) that means, literally, “it costs me”, but often does not refer to money.  It can refer to money, e.g. “Me costó tres cientos pesos” (“It cost me three hundred pesos”), however it’s more often used to mean that something costs somebody effort.  We would typically express this via expressions such as, “I find it difficult to”, “I find it hard to”, “I have trouble…”, or “It’s draining to have to…”.  Let’s look at how she uses it in the video:

Suena mi teléfono y yo contesto con mi apellido y eso me costó mucho, mucho trabajo porque al principio pues yo siempre contestaba con un “Hallo” o un “Guten Tag”…

This translates to:

My telephone rings and I answer it with my last name, and this is really difficult for me [she literally says that it costs her a lot of work], because in the beginning I always answered with a “Hallo” or “Guten Tag” [German for “Good day”].

So you can say that something is difficult for you and requires a lot of effort or patience by simply saying, “me cuesta”, or you can specify what it costs you as she did here by saying that it cost her a lot of work: “me costó mucho, mucho trabajo”.

Ok, I have to stop here.  This has gotten long enough for both of us.  Oh but we’re not done yet: there’s a quiz!

Yes, that’s right, I’ve decided to start putting quizzes at the bottom of posts such as these because they’re fantastic for helping people learn what was just taught because they make you recall and apply what you just learned.  These quizzes are short and free.  After the quiz I’ll repost the video so you can play it again and see how much more of it you can understand now (remember to turn on the subtitles if you need them).

Are you learning Spanish?  Would you like to use popular media like the above video, as well as movies, shows, music, etc. to do it?

I literally wrote the book about how to do that: it’s about how to learn Spanish from popular media like YouTube videos, Netflix series, movies, music, books, etc. You get to pick things that interest and/or entertain you, that are made by and for native speakers, and I’ll teach you how to learn Spanish from them.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out, it’s called The Telenovela Method.  It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the top right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts.  Also, for more posts of this type check out the Learn Spanish on YouTube category.  My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).

Cheers,

Andrew

I forget where I got the idea of “Friday linkfest” from but it was some other blog that came up with it. Anyway, what I (try to) do each Friday is just give you a list of links to helpful resources with a short description and/or review of each one. Let’s get started.

Spanish Language Blog, by Elina Varzi

This is a relatively new blog by someone (Elina, pictured left) who has been learning Spanish on her own for a while now and decided to share what she had learned with people (precisely how this blog got started 10+ years ago, so that’s part of why I like it).  A few of her posts that I like:

• 5 Funny Spanish Podcasts Every Spanish Learner Should Listen To
• 17 Instagram Account for Learning Spanish
• 10 Tips for Learning Spanish Efficiently

HiNative

I use this service so much, it’s fantastic.  This is basically just the “ask a native” service, that’s it, that’s the best way I can describe it.  I really recommend subscribing to their paid service (you can use it for free as well if you’re willing to answer other people’s questions about your native language, I just don’t have the time).  Whenever you have a question about the language you’re learning, you just post it here and you’ll have an answer from a native speaker within a few minutes, typically.  It’s extremely useful.

Coursera Course: “Learn Spanish: Basic Vocabulary Specialization”

I haven’t taken this specific course but I have taken a lot of Coursera courses in the past and they’ve always been very good, and this one has lots of good reviews, so it’s almost certainly excellent for beginners (that’s who it’s designed for).  If you’ve taken it, please leave a comment and let us know about your experience.

Menéame

This is just Spanish Reddit.  There, if you know what Reddit is, you’ve got it and I need say no more.  If not, Reddit is a social news site where all the content is submitted by and voted on by the users.  There are comments…many, many opinionated comments.  Menéame is just that, but in Spanish.  You can see news that’s of interest to people in Spanish-speaking countries and read their comments about it.  If you’re feeling brave you can make an account and comment yourself.

If you’re learning Spanish…

As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later.  A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher.  I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself.  You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane.  You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted.  They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).

Also, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.

Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts.  My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).

Cheers,

Andrew

This is by one of several YouTube channels I’m subscribed to which is in Spanish and intended for Spanish speakers (it’s not intended for non-native students so they speak at a normal rate and don’t explain the language they’re using).  It’s a comedy sketch channel called Videópatas and I think most of their videos are fairly entertaining.

A side note: YouTube’s automatic subtitles have gotten much more accurate over the years and, as long as the audio quality is good and there’s not too much ambient noise or multiple people speaking at once, they’re more than sufficient, so definitely hit the “CC” button in the bottom right hand corner of the video player to turn them on (you should get Spanish subs, if not then click on the gear icon next to the CC button to change the language settings).

“Tipos de hermanos” means, “types of siblings”.  This particular video is of a genre that they do quite often, which is, “Types of ________”, where they portray certain behaviors or personality types in a comedic or entertaining way.  This one is about siblings and some of the different ways in which they behave that are funny and most of us are familiar with.

Now, obviously there is no way I can cover all of the Spanish used in it.  It’s only 3m24s long, yes, but there is still a ton of dialogue.  What I’m going to do is explain the labels they use for the different types of siblings that you see pop up in a funny text box at the beginning of each portrayl.  You can turn on the subtitles, like I said, and then look up whatever else you have trouble with.  You don’t need to be able to understand a lot of the Spanish they use in order to be able to understand the video because you’ll be able to glean the basic gist of it from the context that you can see.  Even someone who speaks no Spanish at all could basically understand what’s happening here.  Let’s have a look at it:

“La Hermana Gorrona”

Spanish tends to make nouns and adjectives out of verbs, English does the opposite: we make verbs out of nouns (e.g. “game”, the noun, came first, then the verb “to game” and “gamer”, someone who plays video games, came much later).  The only time you see Spanish doing the opposite (turning a noun into a verb like English) is with anglicisms (words imported from English into other languages), e.g. the way you say “to tweet” in Spanish is “twitear”, which came from the English verb, “to tweet”, which came from the English noun, “a tweet” (something posted on Twitter).

Gorrona is an adjective that originates from the verb, gorronear.  Gorronear is defined by the RAE as:

1. intr. coloq. Comer o vivir a costa ajena.

2. tr. coloq. Conseguir algo a costa de alguien. “Gorronea los cafés a sus amigos siempre que puede.”

Translation:

1. Eat or live at someone else’s expense.
2. Obtain something at someone’s cost.  “They mooch coffees off their friends as often as they can.”

So it means, “to mooch, freeload, or scrounge”.  Here are some more examples from Reverso Context if you’d like to see them.

So the adjective, gorrón/gorrona, just means someone who does this thing: a mooch, a freeloader.  As you likely already know, hermana just means “sister”.  So what do you think “La Hermana Gorrona” is going to be about?

The sister who mooches off you, of course.  She borrows without asking, she steals food, she begs for money constantly (which she doesn’t repay), etc.

Bonus for this scene: “Estaba entre la ropa tendida” means “It was amongst the hung clothes” (tender can mean to lay or hang something and the past participle is tendido/tendida, so “ropa tendida” is literally “laid/hung clothes”, I would presume here this means the clothes on the clothes line).  Searching Google Images for “ropa tendida” tells us all we need to know 😉

“El Hermano Adoptado”

I doubt this needs much explanation, but the verb for “to adopt” in Spanish is adoptar, and of course the past participle (the “-ed” form of the verb, e.g. “adopted”) is adoptado/adoptada (adoptado if the person is male, adoptada if the person is female).  So what do you think el hermano adoptado means?

“The adopted brother”, of course.

“La Hermana Gemela”

So you already know that hermana means “sister”, now what could gemela mean…?

Well…geminus is the latin word from which it is derived which means “twin, paired, or double”, so I think you’ve already guessed that gemelo/gemela is the Spanish adjective for “twin” (it’s actually both the noun and the adjective for “twin”), so hermana gemela means “twin sister”.

Bonus: Maldición means “curse, damnation”, so “Por favor, mátala y líbrame de esta maldición” means, “Please, kill her and liberate me from this curse” 😉

“El Hermano Competitivo”

I doubt you need much help here, but competitivo means “competitive”, so el hermano competitivo means “the competetive brother”.

Also, you see “Te he ganado” – this is how you say “to beat someone [at something]” in Spanish.  Yes, ganar literally means “to win”, but the way they say that a person or team has “beaten” another one in some type of competition is to literally say that they have “won” them.  A couple more examples from Reverso Context:

Y el 9 de marzo, en la segunda vuelta: “Por un pelito les ganamos”.

Translation:

And in the second round on March 9, “We beat them by a hair.”

Another:

¡Les ganamos una vez, y podemos ganarles otra vez!

Translation:

We beat them once, we can beat them again!

Oh, and with regards to, “¡Tomaaaaa!”: that’s the imperative (aka “command form”) of the verb tomar, which means “to take”.  In this context it means, “Take that!”.

Quiz time!

Applying what you’ve just learned greatly helps you retain it in your long-term memory, I strongly recommend you take the, maybe minute or so it’ll require, quiz below that tests you on the above Spanish you’ve just learned.  It’s only ten questions, most of which are multiple choice with a couple fill-in-the-blank questions.

Now have a look at the video again and see how much more of it you can understand.  Don’t forget to turn on Spanish subtitles if you want.

Are you learning Spanish?  Would you like to use popular media like the above video, as well as movies, shows, music, etc. to do it?

I literally wrote the book about how to do that: it’s about how to learn Spanish from popular media like YouTube videos, Netflix series, movies, music, books, etc. You get to pick things that interest and/or entertain you, that are made by and for native speakers, and I’ll teach you how to learn Spanish from them.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out, it’s called The Telenovela Method.  It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the top right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts.  My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).

Cheers,

Andrew

I thought I’d do something a bit shorter today, especially since I’ve got another post scheduled to come out in a couple hours (I use a short comedy sketch on YouTube to teach you some Spanish, definitely keep an eye out for it!), so I’m going to briefly recommend you a YouTube channel I’ve had an eye on for a while: Spanishland School.

The channel is run by Andrea Alger, who is Colombian, and her American husband, Nate.  The videos overwhelmingly feature Andrea since she’s the native Spanish speaker.  I’ve kept a weather eye on them for a couple of years now and noticed how consistent they’ve been in putting out content and how the quality of that content has consistently increased.  I’ve embedded one of their most popular videos about Colombian slang there below so you can have a look.

Beyond the videos, the actual service they seem to be offering is a monthly membership that gets you weekly group lessons and also includes some exclusive bonuses (podcasts, videos, transcripts, etc.).  I have not sampled any of this and therefore cannot comment on it much beyond that, I’m mainly recommending their YouTube videos because they’re quite good for anyone in the A1-B1 stages (that’s complete beginner to low intermediate on the CEFR scale).  They also have a free podcast called Españolistos you can check out and which I presume is available on the common podcast networks.

If anybody wants to add anything else about them you think is missing, if you’ve taken their courses or had other experience with them, please leave a comment.  I hope that helps you and you have a good day (weekend’s almost here, just hang on a bit longer!).

Cheers,

Andrew