Sex, love and everything in between can be tricky to describe in any language and Spanish is no exception. Each country seems to have its own slang for that gray area that in English is referred to as “friends with benefits” or, if you are feeling crass, fuck-buddies. Here are a few Spanish synonyms from […]

A couple of weeks ago a Speaking Latino follower asked me for advice on how to learn “Puerto Rican Spanish as well as proper Spanish”. He was proactively preparing for a Study Abroad Program in San Juan that will last up to 6 weeks. I privately answered his question, but then I decided that these […]

Face it. Don’t deny that at least once in your life you have done a quiz from Cosmopolitan magazine. I used to work for a beauty company that places regular ads in Cosmopolitan, and they gave us complementary magazines every month. So in every issue they featured a Cosmo Test, a quiz or personality test […]

This is how to use italki to learn colloquial Spanish and Spanish slang. Plus, details of the steps for a class and what happens during an italki class.

When you start typing a search using Google it gives you suggestions based on what you are actually writing. This is called autocomplete and, acoording to Google, they “are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google.”  I did the exercise to learn which […]

I started collecting and translating Spanish slang in 2003. I had already lived in Mexico, Chile and Argentina as well as traveled to other Spanish-speaking countries. When I arrived in Puerto Rico it amazed me how different the language was from the other countries I knew, even with the country changes I had already experienced. […]

Recently Mattel launched a Mexican Barbie that caused a negative reaction in the Hispanic community. This new Latina Barbie is part of their new collection “Barbie Dolls of the World” that also includes dolls from Chile, Argentina, and Spain. This is not the first time that Mattel is selling a Mexican Barbie, but according to […]

You will begin to improve your local Spanish within days, if not hours, of stepping into a new country. As you experience your new local language be aware that 4 basic categories exist where you should focus your learning. Local Spanish differences fall into these 4 categories: Vocabulary Grammar Pronunciation Intonation Vocabulary is perhaps the […]

The most important and, perhaps, obvious answer to the above question is to communicate better. You will quickly learn (as with other languages) the same word may take on vastly different meanings with only a change in intonation. For example, in Argentina, when the word “boludo” is pronounced as in “bolUUUUUUdo,” you can bet that […]

Spanish is generally considered a simple language to learn in comparison with languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or even German. In Spanish, a word is pronounced just as you would expect with most sounds having only one spelling. Gallagher, one of my all-time favorite comedians, points out several pronunciation and spelling headaches in English that make life hard […]

You gotta be careful with slang.  You have to be pretty darn confident with a language to correctly understand, let alone use, slang. Making errors using verbal slang is one thing.  Often, what happens is that you are generally attempting to sound cool in that language, but with the slip of a vowel sound, you can […]