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Did You Know!

  • Everyone knows that Spanish and Castillian are synonymous. What not many know, however, is that all countries from Central America, except for El Salvador, use the term, “Español” to refer to this language whereas all the countries from South America, except for Colombia, use the term, “Castellano.” In Spain, the latter is also often used to distinguish the north-central standard from other dialects, such as Andalucian.
  • Modern Spanish, Mexican in particular, has quite a few words coming from English and replacing their standard Spanish counterparts in regular speech. Some examples include words like “chequear” (to check) and “clique” (click). What you perhaps didn’t know is that “carro” the Latin American word for “car” is not one of them! Instead, it comes from the Gaulish word, “karros,” (“cart”) and is older than the Peninsular “coche”!
  • Spanish is the language of choice when it comes to learning a second language across Europe and Americas. With almost half a billion native speakers across 44 countries over 5 continents, it is the second most spoken language on Earth. What you didn’t know perhaps is that there are already more native speakers of Spanish than of English worldwide! By 2060, 50% of Americans are expected to be native Spanish speakers!
  • With 228 million supporters, Real Madrid is the most popular and the richest football club in the world; FC Barcelona, on the other hand, has the biggest privately-owned stadium in the world! Though from the same country, the two clubs share a bitter rivalry that goes back to Franco’s days. While Barcelona represented opposition to the dictatorship, Madrid was seen as a symbol of nationalism and favored by the regime!
  • Despite FC Barcelona’s notably anti-nationalist views during the Franco-regime, the stance has largely reversed in more modern times with the club president, Joan Laporta, a self-proclaimed nationalist mandating all foreign players on the team to learn Catalan! Though largely similar, Catalan and Spanish are different languages. Barca fans are typically known as “culés,” the Catalan for ass. The Spanish word is “culo.”
  • Being a Romance language like Italian, Portuguese, French, and Romanian, Spanish owes much of its existence to Latin. However, what you didn’t know is that after Latin, the language that has the greatest influence on Spanish is far from European – Arabic! Spain is studded with cities and towns having Arabic names. The name, Madrid, for example, comes from the Arabic, “magerit,” which means “the place of many streams”!
  • It’s well-known that Mexico has the largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, way more than even Spain. What you didn’t know is that Mexico City is the oldest city in North America, that the Zapotecs of Mexico developed the first writing system in the Americas, that the National University of Mexico is the oldest university in North America, and that North America’s first printing press was used in Mexico!

Pedro Teaches Conjugation – The Simple Present Tense Of Spanish


For most Spanish leaners, the present indicative tense, or simple present, is invariably the first step into the utterly confusing and demotivating world of Spanish verb conjugations. While conjugations eventually come naturally once you have acquired even a basic level of proficiency with the language, you are often left with no choice but to memorize them painfully until that stage comes. And memorization using traditional rote method, as we all know, is far from efficient, inspiring, or even interesting. So, is there any trick to commit these conjugations to memory without any repetition whatsoever? Of course there is!

The Spanish Preterit: Once And For All


Past actions in the Spanish language can be expressed in two ways depending on whether they were completed once for all or otherwise. Spanish grammar categorizes them as the preterit and the imperfect. While the imperfect handles all habitual, continuous, or repetitive actions and verbs denoting a state of being, preterit covers pretty much whatever is left – actions that were performed and also concluded well within the past. This article delves into the latter and tries to make life easier for those of you who are still struggling to remember and recall the preterit conjugations. Rest assured, they only appear scary.

Tú Or Vos? The Culture Dilemma


English, as we know it today, is a very simple language when it comes to addressing people. You have just one word (you) that can be used for strangers and acquaintances alike regardless of your level of intimacy with them. With Spanish, life gets a bit complicated because depending on where you are and who you are with, you must carefully choose from three different pronouns to sound appropriate. While knowledge of and usted is commonplace, it’s vos that’s relatively unknown to most Spanish learners. Here, we will try to explore voseo – the usage of vos – in different cultural contexts throughout the Hispanic world.

Tricks To Instantly Recall The Spanish Imperfect Conjugations


The Spanish language, like its other Romance cousins, is notorious for its myriad spirit-throttling conjugations. The first conjugation set any novice learner memorizes is the one for the simple present tense. While that one was relatively easier, it turns out there are many more such sets to be mugged up – for at least a dozen other tenses – and that’s where it starts to get intimidating. In this article, we’ll see how simple mnemonic cues and tricks can be exploited in committing one such set to memory – the Spanish imperfect tense. This is the tense for habitual or incomplete actions in the past and is quite important.

Tips On Using The World's Largest Language Learning Community


In the process of acquiring Spanish, we have used and abused an insane amount of free resources both offline and online. It is only with hit-and-trial that you eventually appreciate what works best for you, be it learning Spanish or acquiring any other skill. One of the resources many learners have used quite extensively is Livemocha and this article is going to focus on our experiences – and those of many other Spanish learners all over the world – with it. Having ransacked all that Livemocha has to offer in terms of Spanish, we have managed to put together our own list of strategies around squeezing it for maximum juice.

Positive Emotions In Spanish


Expressing one’s emotions is perhaps the single most important aspect of human communication in any language. Almost every real-life communication involves expression of the speakers’ feelings and sentiments, positive or negative, in varying degrees. Hence, it becomes obviously imperative for anyone learning Spanish to learn to be able to express themselves and their emotions efficiently in that language before they set out on any confident conversation with a native speaker. Regardless of circumstances, these expressions often form the pivot of any conversation that goes beyond asking for directions or ordering a cerveza.

Irregular Spanish Imperative Made Easy With Vin Diesel

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Few real-life Spanish language interactions can last meaningfully long without the use of the imperative. This is the quintessential tense you speak in whenever you make a direct request or a command. Hence, it’s imperative that you master this tense quite early on while learning Spanish. While the English imperative is pretty straightforward with a single word for both requests and for commands, both negative and positive, Spanish has different words for each one of them! This article attempts to make it easier to master some of the most heavily used words of command (used with ) that are also irregular in conjugation.