Learn Spanish from Spain Archives - Learn Spanish with Andrew

Spanish Study Abroad (learning Spanish in Spain, Mexico, etc.)? You probably don’t want to do that…

Andrew — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 03:37:50 +0000

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

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Learn Spanish for Real #6: “Estar en el quinto pino” / “Donde Cristo perdió la zapatilla”

Andrew — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 03:27:26 +0000

It’s two-for-one day here on How to Learn Spanish!

We’re going to cover two phrases in one Learn Spanish for Real post, primarily because they both mean the same thing: something is really far away.

For the curious, this is from the Sochi Winter Olympics, a photo made famous by BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg. One stall, two toilets, great success!

“Estar en el quinto pino”

This phrase originates from the 18th century in Spain when Felipe V ordered the five pine trees be planted along what was then Madrid’s largest and grandest boulevard: el Paseo del Prado (“paseo” means promenade in this context and “prado” means “meadow”, for the curious). They were spaced very far apart with the first one at the very center of Madrid, at the start of the Paseo del Prado near Atocha, and the fifth one ending up at the very outskirts of the city.

By the 19th century the pines had fully grown to great size and, being on the main boulevard, were frequently used as reference points and meeting places. Additionally, in this time period public affection or even unchaperoned meetings between young lovers was frowned upon, and so the fifth pine became a popular meeting spot for lovers who wanted to be able to hold and kiss each other away from the disapproving eyes of the public. If I had to guess, I’d also bet it was popular as a meeting spot for adulterous couples and others who, for various reasons, couldn’t afford to be seen together.

So yes, it was basically a popular necking spot for the kids of 1800’s Madrid (I’m linking to the UD definition for that as it’s an American term, and an old-fashioned one at that, I know some of you won’t be familiar with).

It was known for being a place that was very far away from just about everything else of any interest, and so the expression “estar en el quinto pino” came to simply mean “far away”. “Estar” means “to be” in the sense of location, “en” means “at” in this case (it can also mean “in”), “quinto” is “fifth”, and “pino” is a pine tree.

Thanks to Secretos de Madrid and Expresiones Españolas para Erasmus en Apuros for their writings on this subject (go there and read those to get a bit more detail and some Spanish practice).

“Donde Cristo perdió la zapatilla”

This one’s a lot tougher to explain. I really did some digging around to try to find the origin and came up with nearly nothing. The best I could find was this page saying that it alluded to Christ’s constant treks across the desert of Judea and that if he lost a shoe there at some point then it must have been God knows (literally!) where out in the middle of the desert.

It just means that something is very far away or out in the middle of nowhere, that’s it. “Donde” means “where”, “Cristo” is Christ, “perdió” is the 3rd person preterite of “perder“, and “zapatilla” is “slipper/shoe”.

There are many variations of this expression, including but not limited to: “donde Cristo perdió la sandalia”, “donde Cristo perdió el mechero”, “donde Cristo perdió la chancla”, and “donde el diablo perdió el poncho”. An exhaustive list can be found in the following amusing discussion on the WordReference Forums entitled “Qué más perdió Cristo?” (“What else did Christ lose?”).

Well that was fun. Did you have fun? I had fun. Tell me about how much fun you had in the comments (and would like me to write about in the future), also… If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below! Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free. It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average. It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post Learn Spanish for Real #6: “Estar en el quinto pino” / “Donde Cristo perdió la zapatilla” appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Learn Spanish for Real #5: “¡Es un atraco a mano armada!”

Andrew — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 22:13:16 +0000

Literally, it means “this is an armed robbery”, or more colloquially, “this is a stick-up”. An “atraco” is a robbery or hold-up, “mano” as you likely know means “hand” (but note that it’s feminine, so it’s “la mano” not “el mano”, that’s why it’s “a mano armada” and not “a mano armado”), and “armada” means “armed”.

However, this is a common colloquial expression used to mean “this is a rip-off!”, implying either that something is severely overpriced or, worse, that it’s an actual scam. It’s very akin to the expressions “this is highway robbery” (more common in British English) or “this is daylight robbery” (I’ve heard Americans use this but I’d say it’s a bit old-fashioned, it’s not very common).

Another common way of saying this is, more simply, “¡Es un robo!”, which again I would just translate to “It’s a rip-off!”, though obviously it literally means “it’s a robbery”.

Are these expressions only used in this colloquial sense or are they also used to literally mean that something is an actual robbery / armed robbery?

They’re used to mean both, so yes they can (and frequently do) refer to an actual robbery (“robo”) or armed robbery (“atraco a mano armada”).

A search of Reverso Contexto for this phrase shows it being used primarily in the literal sense with a handful of examples of the colloquial meaning “rip-off”. Reverso Contexto is a very useful tool, by the way, it gives you real-life examples of any word or phrase you search for being used in-context; they primarily draw from news stories and movie/TV scripts.

Scam/Con/Fraud

She’s very clearly saying that the recent financial crisis isn’t a crisis at all, but a fraud.

Estafa. The word you’re looking for is “estafa“. In this case, however, it doesn’t have any colloquial or slang meaning, it just plainly means “scam” or “fraud”. Here are a few examples of it on Reverso Contexto.

And “timo”, too!

Quick addition thanks to my friend (and Spanish tutor from Spain), Bea, who mentioned this one in the comments below after I initially published this post: the word “timo” is also a common slang term in Spain for “scam” or “swindle”, though it should be noted that it also has the literal meaning of “thymus” (a small organ in front of the heart responsible for producing T-cells for the immune system). If you do a search on Reverso Contexto you’ll get examples of both, though the slang meaning of “scam” or “con” is more common.

Additionally, I found a great example of it being used by a Spanish newspaper, El País (click the image to go to the article):

Ok, that’s all (I’m trying to keep these short, for you as well as me). On an additional, slightly related, note, I’m going to start doing another similar, short series of blog posts on the Spanish subjunctive since I know a lot of people have trouble with that (hell, I still occasionally have trouble with that). What I’m going to do is just provide a single example or two of it being used a certain way and then dissect the sentence, explain why the subjunctive was used here and why it was used in that particular manner, and then perhaps come up with a few additional examples as well as maybe ask you guys to do a few of your own.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free. It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average. It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post Learn Spanish for Real #5: “¡Es un atraco a mano armada!” appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Learn Spanish for Real #4: “Cogerse un cabreo de cojones” | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words

Andrew — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:42:13 +0000

Have you ever heard the expression “throw a shit-fit”?

Well, regardless, you do now know how to say that in Spanish!

…and apparently it’s available in t-shirt format, as you can see there on the left (that’s what “cabreo de cojones” yielded on Google Images).

This expression comes from Spain, as will most in the foreseeable future since that’s the dialect I’m learning because I’m going there on September 1st for a stay of two months, and the Spanish have a strange preference for slang terms utilizing the word “cojón/cojones” (that’s a superb article on the subject, by the way), which literally means testicle/balls.

The Story

So this one comes, again, from my Spanish tutor, Silvia (highly recommended if you’re interested) while we were having one of our usual sessions the other day…

What happened was that Silvia was telling me a story of how when she was taking English and French classes back-to-back somebody else doing the same was in the English class with her, mispronounced an English word by pronouncing it would be in French, and the professor “se cogía unos cabreos de cojones”- they threw a shit-fit, that is they became very (irrationally) angry.

What does it mean and what’s the difference between it and “tener un cabreo de cojones”?

“Cogerse un cabreo de cojones” simply means to become very angry. To break it down for you, “coger” means “to take”, making it pronomial (adding that “se” to the end) results in it meaning something like “to catch” as in “to catch a cold”, a “cabreo” is a fit or rage, and the “de cojones” part is where it gets interesting since “cojones” literally means “balls” [as in testicles].

Now, as you hopefully learned by reading the recommended article from above on the many uses of “cojón/cojones” in Spanish, that word can have many different meanings and is probably one of the most commonly used slang/curse words in all of Iberian Spanish (Spanish from Spain, Iberia is the peninsula where Spain is located). In this case it simply amplifies the intended meaning, that is it says that the “fit” (cabreo) this person is having is really bad, they’re very angry.

“Tener un cabreo de cojones”, on the other hand, means to maintain said fit of anger for some period of time. The becoming angry part was described by “cogerse un cabreo de cojones”, but to describe that someone is currently (still) angry you would need to use “tener un cabreo de cojones”, e.g. “Silvia tiene un cabreo de cojones porque su perra, Violeta, acaba de comerse el bocadillo que dejó en la mesa.”, which means “Silvia is very angry because her dog, Violeta, just ate her sandwich that she left on the table.” Yes, she does actually have a dog named Violeta, by the way (who I’m sure would eat her sandwich, given the opportunity, though I’m unaware of this ever happening, to be fair and avoid slandering Violeta).

Edit: Silvia has been kind enough to send me a photo of Violeta to post here for you all (she’s a mutt, rescue dog I believe):

Violeta

Ok, that’s it for this edition of Learn Spanish for Real, I hope you found it educational and I look forward to doing many more (I’ve no lack of material), also… If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below! Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The previous edition of Learn Spanish for Real was (if you’re interested)…

Learn Spanish for Real #3: “Llorar como una magdalena” – from Spain! | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words

The post Learn Spanish for Real #4: “Cogerse un cabreo de cojones” | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Learn Spanish for Real #3: “Llorar como una magdalena” – from Spain! | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words

Andrew — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 01:33:29 +0000

Mary Magdalene weeps over the body of Christ.

Real quick I just thought I’d share with you an interesting new expression I learned today from one of my Spanish tutors, Silvia (she’s very good, check her out if you’re in the market!), when I realized it would make a great 3rd installment in our Learn Spanish for Real series! What did Silvia say to me that inspired this post?

Vas a llorar como una Magdalena

The context of this was gas prices (petrol prices, for our British friends 😉 ). We were talking about the possibility of me renting a car while in Spain (probably not), which then led to comparing gas prices between the U.S. and Spain, which led to her saying “Cuando llegas a la gasolinera, vas a llorar como una Magdalena.” I had never heard this expression before so she explained. It’s very interesting.

Spain, previously having been a very Catholic country (not so much now, only on paper but not in practice really), has a lot of expressions based in Catholicism and the bible – this is one of them. “Vas a llorar” means “you’re going to cry” (“vas” is the informal way of saying “you are” with the verb “ir“, “llorar” is the infinitive of the verb meaning “to cry”), whereas “Magdalena” means Maria Magdalena, or Mary Magdalene as we know her in English. So what the expression is saying is “You’re going to cry like Mary Magdalene.”

Why was Mary Magdalene chosen to express this? Because she’s known for crying. In the Bible it makes a point of stating that she cries when her brother dies, when Christ is crucified, and on several different occasions when she repents for her sins.

Interestingly, there’s even a song called “Llorando como una Magdalena”, though regrettably I can’t find the origin of it so I can’t tell you where or when it got started, but there are several performances of it on YouTube if you’re interested:

Thanks to Significado y Origen de Expresiones Famosas for the background information.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free. It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average. It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The previous edition of Learn Spanish for Real was (if you’re interested)…

Learn Spanish for Real #2: “Carajo” | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words

The post Learn Spanish for Real #3: “Llorar como una magdalena” – from Spain! | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Learn Spanish for Real #2: “Carajo”

Andrew — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:10:05 +0000

Welcome to the second installment of a category of posts I do called Learn Spanish for Real: Spanish Slang, Colloquialisms, and Curse Words! This post will be a sort of continuation on the first one in that we’ll be examining the same sentence from the same video, but a different word. The words in question, “carajo”, is a light Spanish curseword currently in use in most parts of the Spanish-speaking world.

Today’s Word: “Carajo”

This is a clip from one of my most-recommended movies for Spanish students to learn conversational Spanish from because not only does it have excellent subtitles in both Spanish and English (the Spanish ones are word-for-word and the English ones are a solid translation of the Spanish that you can use for reference when learning it) but it’s also a very good movie that gives you a great deal of insight into certain parts of Colombian culture and teaches you a ton of their colloquial Spanish with slang galore as well as quite a few Spanish curse words. It’s called Maria Full of Grace and is available very cheaply from Amazon on DVD. Additionally, I have a list of sites where you can watch Spanish videos with Spanish subtitles, including several such shows on Netflix (probably the best source of such videos now, them and YouTube). Also, if you’re particularly interested in learning Colombian Spanish, I strongly recommend you check out a podcast called Español en 3000 – it’s excellent and focuses mainly on Colombian Spanish.

Now, I would like to provide you some context so you can understand the scene, the conversation, how the word is being used, and why:

In this particular scene our protagonist, Maria, has just quit her job at the flower factory because her boss had repeatedly refused her requests to go to the bathroom because she was sick to her stomach (she’s pregnant but doesn’t know it yet) which then resulted in her throwing up all over the flowers which he made her clean up despite knowing that they were ruined and would have to be thrown out (he told her this then told her to clean them off anyway).

Shortly after this we come to the scene you see above where she’s at a party with her friends, drinking and dancing, and one of her friends is telling the rest what happened and that Maria got fed up with her boss and quit. Her boyfriend then proposes a toast (“brindis” means “toast”, from “Esto se merece un brindis” which means “This calls for a toast”) and says

“Porque es una berraca, carajo.”

Which could best be translated as, “Because she’s a badass, damnit.” (what does “berraca” mean? see my post on berraco/berraca here!)

Now, “carajo” is a fairly common curseword throughout the Spanish-speaking world. It’s in common use in all Spanish-speaking countries (including Spain) to the best of my knowledge, however the severity of it varies from one country/region to another and even from one social group or class to another. Generally it’s not thought of as being too strong anymore, particularly in Spain where it’s also a slang term for “penis”. It could usually be considered a rough equivalent to the English “damn”, “damnit”, or “hell” depending on how it’s used (see examples below).

Some common phrases you may hear using the word “carajo” and their rough English equivalent:

“¡Carajo!” – “Damnit!”
“¿Qué carajo?” – “What the hell?!”
“¡Vete al carajo!” – ” Go to hell!”
“¡[any statement], carajo!” “[any statement], damnit!” (this is how it’s being used in the example phrase above)
“¿Qué carajo es esto?” – “What the hell is this?”
“No veo/escucho un carajo.” – “I didn’t see/hear a damned thing.”
“¿En qué carajo estabas pensando…?” – “What the hell were you thinking…?”
“No me importa un carajo.” – “I don’t give a damn.”

What does “carajo” literally mean? What did it come from?

Well, originally it referred to the crow’s nest on a Spanish galleon. Now, this was one of the least desirable posts on the ship because sailors would tend to get very sea sick up there due to the ships movements being amplified at the top of the mast (basic physics: mast acts as a lever arm, any movement at its base translates into faster movement over a greater distance at its tip). Nobody wanted to go to the carajo.

Consequently it was frequently used as punishment: sailors would be “sent to the carajo”, they’d be told to “go to the carajo” (“¡Vete al carajo!”), hence the origin of the phrase “Vete al carajo” meaning something like “Go to hell”. This in combination with the fact that “carajo” (the place and the word) just took on a very negative connotation in general led to it evolving into a sort of general purpose curseword like our “damn” or “hell”.

I hope you found this interesting and useful, and remember, if you’d like to learn more everyday colloquial Spanish (not just curse words, I promise!), check out the links below to additional resources and related articles (on my site and others).

Additional Resources and Further Reading

A great way to learn to speak and understand modern, everyday Spanish is through Spanish-language popular media such as movies, TV shows, books, etc., but the problem is that people just don’t know how plus there are some tools that can help you do it much more effeciently, here are two things I strongly recommend that address both those problems:

1. Yabla. This is a service that collects popular media in various languages and then integrates it into their custom online software platform that’s specifically designed to help students learn the language being spoken in the videos. Spanish is their biggest language that they have the most videos and material for. The videos can be searched and sorted by topic, length, difficulty, and dialect, then once you select one you’ll have verbatim Spanish subtitles and an English translation, both of which you can selectively turn on and off. Clicking any Spanish word in the subtitles pulls up its definition in the dictionary to the right of the video and automatically adds it to your flash cards. Every video has quizzes of varying difficulty where certain Spanish words in the subtitles are blanked out and you have to fill them in while listening to the video. You can also pause and play the video back at ¼, ½, ¾ etc. speed. This is such an excellent service and it’s super cheap at only $9.99 per month, plus you get a free trial without even needing to sign up (just check out the “free videos” they offer as samples) and they do offer special discounts for teachers and organizations. Check out their site here, or go to my review of Yabla here for lots more information including many screenshots of the software in use so you can see how it works.

2. The Telenovela Method. This is a book I wrote which is currently in its second edition and teaches people how to do the method that I used to get conversationally fluent in Spanish in six months, which is to use popular Spanish-language media. There’s a method to doing this in that you can’t just sit there passively and somehow absorb the language (of course that doesn’t work) but instead you must study the material: I tell you how to do that. I’ll show you how to learn the vocabulary and grammar painlessly by using stuff that you find interesting and entertaining (pick anything you want, whatever show, series, movie, or book that interests you). It’s called the “Telenovela Method” not because telenovelas (Spanish soap operas) are preferred but because that’s what I started out with ten years ago and learned Spanish from myself. Please check it out here on Amazon, it’s currently got 19 reviews, of which 18 are 5-star and 1 is a 4-star rating.

As I mentioned, I have a whole category of blog posts, which this article is part of, that teach you general conversational Spanish, focusing on slang, expressions, colloquialisms, and profanity called: Learn Spanish for Real: Spanish Slang, Colloquialisms, and Curse Words.

There are two excellent Spanish-slang references/dictionaries I can recommend you: Urban Dictionary (yes really – it’s a bit informal but I’ve found it’s more likely to have whatever Spanish slang word I’m trying to look up than any other single source) and Así Hablamos, a user-generated source of Latin American slang and colloquial speech.

Interested in Colombian Spanish, specifically?

Again, I really recommend you consider subscribing to the podcast Español en 3000 (this link goes to my review of them, or you can just go straight to their site here if you prefer).

Check out the series of posts I did on it based on the time I was in Colombia (3 months in total in 2018, split between Bogotá, Medellín, and Cartagena):

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

Cheers,
Andrew

The previous edition of Learn Spanish for Real was (if you’re interested)…

Learn Spanish for Real #1: “Berraco / Berraca”, from Colombia! | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words

The post Learn Spanish for Real #2: “Carajo” appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.