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La lengua española ha florecido en todo el mundo, convirtiéndose en una de las lenguas más habladas entre las de todo el mundo. El valor de saber hablar no puede ser subestimado, como ahora, según un artículo del Guardian, Estados Unidos es el hogar de la segunda mayor cantidad de hispanohablantes en todo el mundo, superando a España y sólo ser golpeado por México. El artículo escrito por CNN que también está vinculado en mi página lo tiene correcto cuando dicen que es muy importante conocer español en los Estados Unidos con un número tan alto de hablantes de español, un número que sigue creciendo! A pesar del número cada vez mayor de personas que hablan la lengua española en los Estados Unidos en la era moderna, los hispanohablantes todavía no están recibiendo un campo de juego igual al de los que hablan inglés. Según un estudio realizado por Nic Subtirelu en el año 2015 que fue registrado en el artículo vinculado de linguisticpulse.com, los trabajos que mencionan español en la descripción del puesto ofrecerán un salario medio de 33.280 dólares al año, mientras que los trabajos que no mencionan español en el Descripción de trabajo ofrecen un salario medio de 48.000 dólares al año. Esta discrepancia muestra la desventaja que enfrentan los hispanohablantes en el mercado de trabajo en los Estados Unidos, a pesar de que los estados unidos tienen una población española tan grande. La barrera del idioma, tal como se discute en el artículo de borderzine, puede ser realmente la culpa de por qué los hispanohablantes no persiguen puestos de trabajo más altos pagados o incluso la ciudadanía estadounidense en muchos casos. Esto es porque el conocimiento de la lengua inglesa se requiere en la aplicación para la ciudadanía de los EEUU. Esta parte del proceso de solicitud desalienta a muchos monolingües españoles de intentar encontrar un trabajo mejor remunerado o de convertirse en ciudadanos de los Estados Unidos, porque no sienten que tienen el tiempo para aprender un nuevo idioma entre su trabajo duro.

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EL PASO - When Juan García Aleman, an 87-year-old retired shoemaker who worked for the boot-making Tony Lama Company for 20 years moved here from Juarez in the 1950's he didn't need to speak or read English in the workplace.

Jesus Saucedo, a 29-year-old who was born in California but went to Mexico with his parents at age three, now lives here and struggles as a community college student with limited knowledge of English. He says he has difficulty communicating effectively at his fast-food job and is hesitant to pursue a leadership position.

Their personal stories, different in many ways, are connected because of the language barriers they faced as residents of a border city that is predominately Hispanic and bilingual. For example, U.S. Census statistics from 2010 show that 75 percent of El Pasoans speak Spanish at home, and only 24 percent of the city's 700,000 resident are monolingual speakers of English.

Dr. Cheryl Howard, an anthropology professor who formerly taught at UTEP, said, "Since the population of El Paso is more than 80 percent Hispanic, I am not at all surprised that so few people speak English only. Even Anglos in El Paso need a basic knowledge of Spanish to work, to feel at home here, to interact with their friends and neighbors."

As immigration from Mexico and other countries has grown over the last three or more decades, area residents' use of English and Spanish has become more common at home and in the workplace. El Paso's proximity to Ciudad Juarez has contributed to increased bilingualism as residents of both sides maintain family and work ties. For example, many El Pasoans have relatives who live in Juarez or other parts of Mexico and many Juarenses also have family on the U.S. side and routinely cross the border bridges to work and shop in El Paso.

Spanish language use and bilingualism is becoming increasingly common in other parts of the country with high concentrations of Latinos. In Miami, for example, with a population of 413,892 residents - 60 percent of them Hispanic - 58.5 percent of them speak Spanish at home, according to the U.S. Census. In Los Angeles, a city with a population of 3.8 million, less than 50 percent of residents speak English as their first language and 37.7 percent speak Spanish at home. In New York City, with a total population of 8.3 million - 28.6 percent of them Hispanic - 25 percent of residents use Spanish at home.

Aleman, who was born in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, moved with his father to work in Juarez in 1945. After he met and married Consuelo, who was a U.S. citizen living in Juarez at the time, the couple moved to El Paso in the 1950's and started a family.

Aleman's wife and five children are bilingual, but he never learned English. Aleman said he did pass his U.S. citizenship exam 10 years ago only after he was allowed to take the test in Spanish because he was over the age of 50 and had lived in the U.S. over 20 years.

Aleman recalls having to study the U.S. Constitution and other details of government in the exam book in order pass the one-hour exam.

Although he still remembers that the first President of the United States was George Washington and why Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, he says learning English has been a life-long challenge.

"It's not spelled how it's pronounced, like Spanish," he said recently from his Lower Valley home. He admits he's at fault for not taking the exam earlier in life. "It was procrastination on my part because free English classes were offered to us," he said. "All we had to do was go and study."

Saucedo is currently focused on learning English in his classes at El Paso Community College. He returned to El Paso five years ago and has been frustrated by attempts to communicate at his fast-food jobs. A former crewmember at Burger King and manager at Taco-H, he currently works at Wendy's as a team leader.

"It's been easier here than if I lived somewhere else where Spanish is not common," said Saucedo who hopes to be a chef one day. "However, when it comes to work it can be tough. Say, for example, I was offered a job right now as manager I would not feel prepared."

Melissa Lopez, executive director of the Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Center, said her organization provides legal services to the undocumented and helps legal residents who want to apply for citizenship. The center offers both English and citizenship classes.

"The most important thing is for people not to be scared of the English part (of the citizenship exam) because people get scared and don't try. Even if your English isn't perfect keep working on it," she said. She also feels El Paso schools should stress bilingual ability.

"I believe there is no excuse for not making every high school graduate from this region fluent in both languages, with a working knowledge of a third," added Lopez. "Instead, we appear to denigrate Spanish in our schools, and treat children who are English Language Learners (ELL) or whatever buzzwords are used these days as having some kind of mental defect rather than an asset.''

According to Lopez, immigrants can apply for citizenship in various ways. The most common is through naturalization where someone becomes eligible to apply for citizenship after five years of legal residency in the U.S. If an immigrant is married to a U.S. citizen, they can also apply for citizenship after three years. In either case, the immigrant must not have a criminal record or owe any taxes.

Children born outside of the U.S. who have U.S.-citizen parents can also apply for citizenship through a more complicated process, according to Lopez.

The Diocesan Refugee Migrant Center first screens cases to see if an immigrant is eligible for services according to immigration status and income based.

If an immigrant qualifies for financial assistance the center doesn't change a fee for services but he or she is responsible for paying immigration filing fees. The cost to file an application is $680.

Individuals who don't qualify for financial help must pay a fee of between 10 to 20 percent of what an immigration attorney would charge. The center has three immigration attorneys on staff and nine accredited representatives with legal authority to give immigration legal advice.

Because a key requirement of applying for citizenship is knowledge of English, the Diocesan Center offers language classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 3-5 p.m. and citizenship classes on Thursdays from 3-5 p.m. The classes are open to the public.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website provides tools to help immigrants who want to become naturalized. Educational products are available on the site as well as lesson plans and activities, training seminars and additional information. A civics and citizenship toolkit is available to organizations that wish to provide naturalization help to immigrants.

According to the website, citizenship comes with important responsibilities such as voting, serving on a jury, and the ability to travel with a U.S. passport.

Other benefits include the opportunity to apply for a federal job or government benefits, citizenship for children under 18 years of age, and being eligible to run for elected office.

Students who become citizens also are eligible to receive financial aid, and apply for grants and scholarships.

The website also includes a naturalization eligibility worksheet and a downloadable form N-400 application for naturalization.

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Language barriers still stop many Latinos from seeking better jobs and U.S citizenship

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EL PASO - When Juan García Aleman, an 87-year-old retired shoemaker who worked for the boot-making Tony Lama Company for 20 years moved here from Juarez in the 1950's he didn't need to speak or read English in the workplace.

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More Spanish Speakers in the USA than Spain

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More Spanish Speakers in the USA than Spain

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The United States is now the world's second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico, according to a new study published by the prestigious Instituto Cervantes.

The report says there are 41 million native Spanish speakers in the US plus a further 11.6 million who are bilingual, mainly the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. This puts the US ahead of Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million) and second only to Mexico (121 million).

Among the sources cited in the report is the US Census Office which estimates that the US will have 138 million Spanish speakers by 2050, making it the biggest Spanish-speaking nation on Earth, with Spanish the mother tongue of almost a third of its citizens.

By state the highest concentration is in the former Spanish colonies of the south and south-west, with New Mexico top at 47%, followed by California and Texas (both 38%) and Arizona (30%). Some 18% of New Yorkers speak Spanish while only 1.3% of West Virginians do. Perhaps surprisingly, more than 6% of Alaskans are Spanish speakers.

The report, El español, una lengua viva - Spanish, a living language - estimates that there are 559 million Spanish speakers worldwide, a figure that includes 470 million native speakers and those with some command of the language.

The Instituto Cervantes was established in 1991 to promote the Spanish language abroad and last year had more than 200,000 students registered on its courses. It estimates that 21 million people are currently studying Spanish and here, too, the US leads with 7.8 million learning the language, followed by Brazil and France.

The report adds that two-thirds of Spanish-linked GDP is generated in two areas: North America (US, Canada and Mexico) and the European Union.

Between them they account for 78% while Latin America only accounts for 22%. It calculates that altogether Spanish speakers contribute 9.2% of the world's GDP.

The Index of Human Development ranks Spanish as the second most important language on earth, behind English but ahead of Mandarin. It is also the third most widely used language on the internet, although less than 8% of internet traffic is in Spanish. The report says that Spanish is the second most used language on Twitter in London and New York. It also comes second on Facebook, a long way behind English though well ahead of Portuguese, Facebook's third language.

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US now has more Spanish speakers than Spain - only Mexico has more

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The United States is now the world's second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico, according to a new study published by the prestigious Instituto Cervantes. The report says there are 41 million native Spanish speakers in the US plus a further 11.6 million who are bilingual, mainly the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants.

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Why It Is Good to Speak Spanish in the US

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Why It Is Good to Speak Spanish in the US

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It's hard to argue against that answer to the first question: It's clearly better for immigrants to speak the language of their adopted country. They will be more competitive for jobs and feel more connected to society. But the shortsightedness implied by the second question is troubling: a population that speaks several languages is helpful, not harmful, to America's economy and national security.

The conversation among conservatives about undocumented immigrants and what they perceive as a threat to American identity has indeed been ongoing. These days, it's tied to a virulent, anti-immigrant sentiment -- focused on "brown people"-- and apparently aimed at using "the other" to galvanize the base, especially during the campaign.

In this context, language is an easy target; it's the way foreign origins are most obviously expressed. We hear an accent, or English that's difficult to understand, and tag the speaker as an outsider, someone whose allegiances might not be clear.

This is why Donald Trump criticized fellow presidential candidate Jeb Bush for answering questions on the campaign trai l posed to him in Spanish in that same language; Trump turned what some might consider an admirable and politically useful skill into a mark of snobbery or out-of-touchness with "real" America.

And it's why some viewers took Vanessa Ruiz, a Hispanic news anchor in a heavily Hispanic state (Arizona), to task -- not for mangling Spanish-language words, but for pronouncing them correctly -- i.e. in a manner "Americans" could not understand.

Our nation of immigrants has plenty of words borrowed from other languages -- did you eat a taco today, or maybe have a latte? -- but our ethos of assimilation means even those words have to sound "right" to us, which often means they in fact sound wrong.

Taking things one step further, Trump ally Sarah Palin asserted recently that people who don't want to "speak American" in America have no business living here. And at Wednesday's earlier, second-tier CNN debate, Sen. Lindsay Graham said immigrants must "learn our language" to be allowed to stay in the country.

This blunt instrument line of reasoning is against our country's long-term interests. We need more, not fewer, multilingual people to settle in America -- and keep their native languages along with English -- if we want to be competitive in a globalized economy.

Yes, English is the world's lingua franca now, especially for business, diplomacy, and technology (which has greatly helped our nation's businesses to outsource to places like India), but mastering a foreign language has many layers of usefulness: it opens a window into how other people think and what they value, including how they feel about money (seen often through idioms). This is important knowledge for doing business with foreign entities.

Speaking multiple languages -- yes, Spanish among them -- simply creates more opportunities, more influence and potentially more profit as well.

It is surprising that Donald Trump has made linguistic ignorance one of his proud calling cards, given how heavily his businesses invest abroad, and how many foreign investors have a stake in his American-based enterprises.

The case for multilingualism can also be made for national security, an area Republicans deeply care about. Beyond the obvious benefits in espionage and other kinds of intelligence work, having new Americans who are able to keep their native languages -- Arabic, for example -- and not let them lapse, opens up the possibility of having a deep pool of interpreters for our involvements abroad.

If they are lucky, countries have nationals in service with fluency in the right languages, but it's common for armed services to have to utilize local people, indeed raising issues of trust as well as cost and logistics. This is one reason modern empires welcomed multilingualism and in fact invested in language schools for their personnel on the ground.

A multilingual America can only help the United States military, now that many operations abroad make heavy use of counterinsurgency warfare, with its higher and more diversified contact with the local population. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States had to depend heavily on local interpreters, and we are still involved in managing the difficult aftereffects of that engagement: interpreters our country hired and then left behind, and who are now subject to retaliation.

According to a 2009 report by the United Nations High Committee on Refugees, cited by Ben Anderson in his Vice News report "The Interpreters", one interpreter was being killed every 36 hours. Although the U.S State Department subsequently implemented a special immigrant visa program for Iraqi and Afghan translators and interpreters, the creation of this class of refugees is a testament to the power of language politics, and an example of the fallout from American insufficiencies in this area.

Isolationist tendencies have a long history in America, and desires like those professed by Palin, Graham, and Trump to hear only English around them come under this category. There is little question that people living in America should know how to speak English. But that is only part of a larger reality.

The world has changed. The ongoing refugee crisis and its extension into the heart of Europe shows that you cannot just shut out what you don't want to see and hear. It's not in our economic or national security interest to build walls around us, even of the linguistic kind.

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why it's good to speak spanish in america - cnn

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Why it's good to speak Spanish in America - CNN

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It's hard to argue against that answer to the first question: It's clearly better for immigrants to speak the language of their adopted country. They will be more competitive for jobs and feel more connected to society. But the shortsightedness implied by the second question is troubling: a population that speaks several languages is helpful, not harmful, to America's economy and national security.

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I've taken a lot of foreign language classes in my life. At different times, I've studied German, French, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese. The teachers that I encountered in these classes, not to mention many of my colleagues now, frequently talk about the value of language learning and multilingualism. Among the many reasons we provide for why people should study languages is an economic advantage. Specifically, additional languages are supposed to serve as assets on the job market.

For the past week or so, I've been working with a large collection of job ads I collected from careerbuilder.com, trying to understand the discourse of these advertisements and what it might tell us about the way inequality is reproduced in the United States. One thing I was interested in exploring with this set of data was whether bi- or multilingualism really was the boon to people's incomes that it is often presented as by language teachers.

Unfortunately, my research tells a much grimmer tale. On the careerbuilder.com job market, Spanish is not really treated as a marketable skill. Indeed, it is far more likely to appear as a requirement or a preferred qualification ("a plus") in jobs offering wages in the bottom half of all incomes in the United States than for those offering wages in the top ten percent (according to the US Census). I estimate that Spanish is mentioned in listings advertising jobs that pay less than $35,000 per year ten times more frequently than in listings for jobs that pay over $95,000.

Amado Alarcón and Josiah Heyman recently published a paper in the journal Language in Society (version of record here), in which they examined the use of bilingual call centers along the border between the United States and Mexico. Interestingly, many of the jobs that mention Spanish in my data pertain to call centers. Alarcón and Heyman claim that the call centers that they studied view Spanish-English bilingualism among their workers as "not worthy of special compensation or development" (p. 18). This is the picture I see in my data as well. At best, Spanish may offer a competitive edge in securing a low wage job, but it seems to offer its speakers very little in terms of increased compensation.

It may seem as though I am suggesting that Spanish and Spanish-English bilingualism among US Latin@s (or others in the US for that matter) is not worthwhile. This is not my position, although I sense that the devaluing of Spanish (and other languages besides English) on the US labor market contributes to the tendency for immigrant groups to lose their heritage languages over time. Rather, I believe that there is a case to be made for Spanish-English bilinguals to have their linguistic abilities valued by companies and treated as important skills. Certainly, companies are increasingly paying attention to Latin@s as a consumer group. Knowledge of Spanish is clearly a relevant asset to understanding that group, and I hope Spanish speakers will continue to make the case for the valuing of their abilities, and I hope companies will listen.
Some notes on my methods
I collected the data using a web-scraper built in R. The program cycled through the 58 categories of jobs listed on careerbuilder.com. It downloaded about 2500 job listings from each of the categories.

To perform my analysis above, I took only the advertisements that included a base salary in the General Information. This left me with around 32,000 ads. I turned each salary range into an estimated yearly salary. To do this, I took the highest number in the range. If it was an hourly rate, I multiplied it by 40 hours and then 52 weeks to simulate full time employment in order to make each wage comparable (although of course many of the jobs are actually part time only).

I searched for spanish in the entire corpus of job ads and separated the corpus into those ads containing s panish and those not containing the term. 916 of the ads contained the word spanish. I examined many of the instances of spanish to ensure that they were discussing the language as a possible qualification for the job. This was true for all of the cases that I observed.

I then computed the median base salary for each of these sets of job ads and performed a statistical test (Wilcoxon rank sum test) to determine if they were significantly different. They were. (See the graphic above.)

I also looked at the frequency with which spanish showed up in three categories of jobs: those with low, mid, and high wages. These wage categories correspond to the following income classifications based on the 2013 US Census's Annual Social and Economic Supplement:

Low wages = bottom 50% of incomes in the US

Mid wages = everything in between

High wages = top 10% of incomes in the US

I examined the frequency with which the job listings containing the word spanish fell into each of these three categories and compared it with the distribution of these categories in the corpus more generally. The distributions were significantly different. (See graphic above.)

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Linguistic inequality: Spanish on the job market

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I've taken a lot of foreign language classes in my life. At different times, I've studied German, French, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese. The teachers that I encountered in these classes, not to mention many of my colleagues now, frequently talk about the value of language learning and multilingualism.

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El primer enlace en mi página responde a una pregunta que me ha vuelto loco desde que empecé a aprender español, ¿por qué vosotros no se enseña en los Estados Unidos? La respuesta a esto es simple, en realidad-vosotros simplemente nunca logró pegarse en América Latina cuando el español llegó al nuevo mundo. Cuando empecé a aprender español, tuve un profesor de españa, y se tomaron muy en serio enseñándonos las aplicaciones prácticas de vosotros, pero una vez terminada esa clase, nunca aprendí nada sobre vosotros de nuevo, casi como si hubiera sido olvidado . La falta de vosotros en las Américas es indicativa de diferencias lingüísticas en todo el mundo. La siguiente imagen, el gráfico circular, refuerza este punto, ya que muestra lo frecuente que es el español como idioma en todo el mundo. Con tantos lugares con una población de habla española relevante, las diferencias lingüísticas y los matices están obligados a formarse. También es notable cómo rápido español creció en las Américas después de su introducción, pero lo bajo que el porcentaje está en Europa en comparación. La página que describe ejemplos específicos de variación lingüística entre América Latina y España es muy divertida, ya que señala un montón de ejemplos de pequeñas diferencias que se suman a crear dialectos totalmente diferentes. Esta página da una gran idea de cómo cuando una gran cantidad de pequeños matices se unen, pueden crear algo completamente diferente. Aunque he profundizado en las diferencias entre español de España y español de América Latina, hay mucho más de diferentes dialectos españoles en todo el mundo, como lo demuestra el último enlace en mi página que habla de diez dialectos diferentes alrededor del mundo. Esta página habla un poco sobre el nombre del dialecto diferente, de donde se originó, y algunos de los pequeños matices que la hacen única.

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Most American students of Spanish never hear the subject pronoun vosotros until they have a teacher from Spain. Until then, students learn the ustedes form. Both, vosotros and ustedes, are used to address a group of two or more people directly in an informal setting. In American English they are the equivalent of you guys or the form y 'all used in the south of the U.S.

While you are more likely to encounter a Spanish speaker from Latin America than one from Spain, it is important to be familiar with vosotros as well. If you travel to Spain, you will hear vosotros ALL THE TIME except in the Canary Islands and in some parts of Andalusia.

Maybe in Spain we use vosotros so much because we have a quite relaxed way of treating each other. Young people, for example, only use ustedes with older people when the situation is formal; once a situation becomes more informal because people get acquainted (student/teacher) everybody may use vosotros. Age is an indicator to take into account; older people use vosotros with younger individuals. For example, radio and television hosts use ustedes when talking to a mature audience, but vosotros if the audience is young. A pop artist would use vosotros to talk to his or her young public, but an opera singer would prefer ustedes. In stores and restaurants young customers are addressed with the vosotros form. I will conclude by saying that if you are older, you can use vosotros with everybody except in formal situations; and if you are young, you should use ustedes to stay safe; the adults will tell you when you can transfer to vosotros.

That said, as the Spanish saying goes: No pongo la mano en el fuego - I don't put my hand on the fire - for this explanation. There is no definitive rule. Language usage fluctuates and changes constantly. What doesn't change, however, are the verbal endings. Here you have the most common tenses in the vosotros form of regular verbs in the -ar, -er and -ir families.
VOSOTROS FORMS OF REGULAR VERBS HABLAR (TO TALK), CORRER (TO RUN) AND ESCRIBIR (TO WRITE)
PRESENT: hablÁIS, corrÉIS, escribÍS

PRESENT PERFECT: habÉIS hablado, habÉIS corrido, habÉIS escrito

PRETERIT: hablASTEIS, corrISTEIS, escribISTEIS

IMPERFECT: hablABAIS, corrÍAIS, escribÍAIS

FUTURE: hablarÉIS, correrÉIS, escribirÉIS

PRESENT SUBJUNTIVE: hablÉIS, corrÁIS, escribÁIS

IMPERFECT SUBJUNTIVE: hablARAIS, corrIERAIS, escribIERAIS

COMMAND: hablAD, corrED, escribID

As you know, irregulars require individual attention, they have special needs, so we will deal with them in a future post. And now I will use vosotros as I sign off: Espero que estudiéis mucho español esta semana. I hope that you (guys) study a lot of Spanish this week.

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Most American students of Spanish never hear the subject pronoun vosotros until they have a teacher from Spain. Until then, students learn the ustedes form. Both, vosotros and ustedes, are used to address a group of two or more people ... Continue reading →

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Why There Are Differences in Dialects (Latin America vs. Spain)

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Why There Are Differences in Dialects (Latin America vs. Spain)

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photo: Kenneth Freeman

We are frequently asked about the differences between the Spanish spoken in Spain and the Spanish of Latin America. While there are distinctions between the varieties of Spanish, the first thing to make clear is that Spanish speakers can all understand each other, whether in Cadiz or Cusco, Salamanca or Santo Domingo. It's like an American speaking English with a Brit and an Australian... normally no problem at all.

This said, there are some differences between the Spanish of Spain and the Spanish spoken in Latin America. There are also differences between the types of Spanish spoken in different parts of Latin America. And in different parts of Spain!

For a start, what is the language called? In Latin America, it is normal to call it castellano (Castilian, after the Castile region) as opposed to español (Spanish). This is also true in parts of Spain, where regional languages such as Galician and Catalan are official languages that could also be labelled "Spanish".

Why are there differences?

When Spanish colonisers travelled the world to spread the word of god and take precious metals in return, they brought with them a language that was in the process of changing back at home.

A linguist called Marckwardt came up with the term "colonial lag" to describe a situation where the language spoken in colonies does not keep up with innovations in the language in its country of origin. An example in English would be the use of fall in the USA and autumn in Britain; when British colonisers went to America, fall was more common than the Latin version in British English. The older, Germanic word fall later became obsolete in Britain but has remained in common use in the USA. This process happens with vocabulary but also with grammar.

Later on, immigrant groups from different parts of Europe brought linguistic traditions with them to Latin America. In turn, these groups met different local linguistic traditions, creating variations in local dialects.

Voseo

When the Spanish colonies were founded by different groups, they took with them the Spanish that was spoken in Spain at that time, along with elements of their local dialects. The Spanish spoken in the colonies then started to develop in slightly different directions as there was limited communication with Spain (telephones were still hundreds of years away). Some elements of older Spanish were kept, others dropped.

One of the clearest examples of that process is the use of vos, primarily in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Originally a second-person plural, vos came to be used as a more polite second-person singular pronoun to be used among one's familiar friends. It was commonly used in Spanish when the language reached the southern cone of the Americas. It fell out of use in Spain but stayed in Rioplatense Spanish. Nowadays, just like 150 years ago, at a bustling Buenos Aires cafe, you are much more likely to be asked "de donde sos?" than " de donde eres?"

The use of vos and its distinct conjugation now appears to be growing in parts of Latin America where it had previously been used by minority groups, such as Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Importantly, people will understand you all over the world if you use tú or vos.

Ustedes

Latin American varieties of Spanish do not use vosotros (you, plural, informal), preferring the formal ustedes. This means that learners in Spain have to remember another verb ending.

For example, in Spain you may say Cuál fue la última pelicula que visteis? (what was the last film you saw?) to your friends, but you would probably say Cuál fue la última pelicula que vieron? to their grandparents. In Latin America, you would use the second form for both.

Ustedes is also used in the Canary Islands; only the Balearics and mainland Spain use vosotros. If you only use the Latin American form, you will be understood perfectly well in Spain. In fact, people will probably just consider you polite!

Vocabulary

The vast majority of Spanish words are universal, but some are not. Some examples include teléfono móvil / celular and ordenador / computadora, with the second of each pair being the Latin American form. There are also many more words that vary between dialects. For example, a pen is boligrafo in Spain but lápiz pasta in Chile, lapicera in Argentina and so on. Here is a great video by two Colombian brothers about the different words you will find around the Spanish-speaking world:

Overall, the differences in vocabulary are no greater than those between British and American English.

A word of caution at this point. In Spain, the verb coger (to catch) is used all the time, not just to mean catching, but also grabbing or fetching. For example, coger al toro por los cuernos, literally, " to take the bull by the horns". In Latin America, coger is a slang term used extensively to describe, ahem, the act of love.

Pronunciation

photo: Caitlin Regan

The largest differences in Spanish are in pronunciation, but even these aren't so big. For example, in many parts of Central America, s isn't always pronounced and some other syllables can go missing. In Argentina, the double-l that is usually pronounced like the y in yellow is pronounced like the s in measure.

Perhaps the most notable difference between pronunciation in Spain and Latin America is the "lisp" (although it is not technically a lisp) that is common in Madrid and some other parts of Spain. Legend has it that this pronunciation started with King Ferdinand, whose lisp was copied by the Spanish nobility. As is often the case, legend is probably wrong; the pronunciation is more likely to have come from sounds that existed in medieval Castilian, although that doesn't explain why it didn't make it to the colonies. Not all innovations in language are logical; see our post on English spelling for more about that.

You will inevitably soak up the local accent wherever you choose to learn Spanish but this will not stop you communicating with all Spanish speakers. Everyone has an accent when they speak and there is no "better" or "worse" accent. If you do pick up a distinctive accent when you learn a language, whether Spanish or any other, it is a part of who you are and your personal experiences. It can also be a good ice-breaker on your travels.

Should you learn Spanish in Spain or Latin American Spanish?

Some people say that Colombian Spanish is the clearest and most beautiful form of the language. Some say that Argentine Spanish is the sexiest Spanish. Others believe that the Spanish of Madrid is the most important, as that is the home of the Real Academia Española which regulates the language.

But it shouldn't be a question of Spanish vs Latin American Spanish. When choosing where to learn Spanish, focus instead on where you would rather be, what kind of adventure you would like to have and, naturally, your budget. Rest assured, whatever variety of Spanish you learn, you will be understood all over the Spanish-speaking world.
See all of our destinations for Spanish courses abroad.

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The differences between Latin American Spanish and Spanish in...

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photo: Kenneth Freeman We are frequently asked about the differences between the Spanish spoken in Spain and the Spanish of Latin America. While there are distinctions between the varieties of Spanish, the first thing to make clear is that Spanish speakers can all... #argentina #chile #colombia

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Even within a single language or language group there may be major differences in speech. The term dialect refers to those differences in intonation and pronunciation - and even words and expressions that exist in some branches of a language while absent in others.

Spanish has a rich history that spans continents and epochs, and offers a prime launching point for examining the origins and proliferation of dialects. What follows is a basic explanation of the ten major Spanish dialects, where they are spoken, and how they differ:

SPAIN (Peninsular Spanish):

Castilian
This term applies to the official Spanish language, spoken in northern and central Spain.

Andalusian
This dialect, spoken in southern Spain, is the second-most popular in the country after Castilian. However it differs greatly from northern Spanish in the ceceo/seseo distinction, the emission ("elision") of the consonants 'd' and 'r', the aspiration of the consonant 's' at the end of words, and the dropping of final consonants. These factors result in a softer and more fluid sound than that of other Spanish dialects.

Murcian
This dialect is spoken in the Autonomous Region of the Community of Murcia in the southeast of Spain.

Distinct Language Groups
There also exist several distinct language groups in Spain: Catalan, the official language of Andorra and spoken in parts of northern Spain; Basque, the language isolate of an autonomous Spanish community in the Pyrenees; Galician, the Portuguese-influenced language of Galicia, in northwestern Spain; and Extremaduran, a three-branched language spoken in the autonomous community of Extremadura of western Spain.

Canary Islands:

Canarian
The dialect of the Spanish Canary Islands closely resembles the Caribbean Spanish dialect, characterized by the aspirated 's', elided consonants, and the pronunciation of the letter 'h.' The Canarian vocabulary is also heavily influenced by Portuguese due to Portugal's efforts to colonize the islands.

Gibralter:

Llanito
Llanito is a combination of Andalusian Spanish and British English. The existence of Gibraltar as a British overseas territory results in this peculiar language combination.

The Americas:

Latin American Spanish
This is the dialect of urban mainland Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and the majority of Central and South American countries. While there are differences in how Spanish is spoken amongst people in these countries, Latin American Spanish is usually referred to as thus in order to differentiate between it and the Spanish spoken in Spain. The difference is similar to English as it is spoken in England vs the U.S.; U.S. English speakers can understand each other with little effort even though someone from the Midwest speaks very differently than a person from the Northeast or a person from the Southeast.

Rioplatense Spanish
This dialect is spoken in the River Basin region between Argentina and Uruguay, as well as in both countries. The predominant difference between Rioplatense and other Spanish dialects is the intonation of its speakers, which resembles Italian more so than Spanish. The 19th-century saw many Italian immigrants to this region and particularly to Buenos Aires.

Caribbean Spanish
This dialect is spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and along the East coast of Mexico and Central America; it is characterized by elided middle consonants and omitted final consonants, as well as an aspirated 'r' that is pronounced like the Portuguese 'x.'

Africa:

Equatoguinean Spanish
This dialect represents the only official Spanish spoken in Africa; it has incorporated some vocabulary and pronunciation patterns from both native Guineans and immigrant Germans of Cameroon.

Coda
When you decide to take those Spanish lessons, whether it's for professional reasons, or if you want to travel, you will probably want to find out from your instructor or program director about the dialects they offer. Most of the time, the answer you'll hear is Castillian. That will be great about 98% of the time, but take the geographic, and cultural information in context, and make an informed decision! ALTA offers online language training to businesses and government agencies, so feel free to contact us for information.

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10 Spanish Dialects: How Spanish is Spoken Around the World - ALTA Language Services

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Even within a single language or language group there may be major differences in speech. The term dialect refers to those differences in intonation and pronunciation - and even words and expressions that exist in some branches of a language while absent in others. Spanish has a rich history that ...

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El primer enlace de mi página aborda el dicho común de que las cosas sólo son una cuestión de semántica. Este dicho común es lanzado alrededor mucho por la gente cuando están intentando conseguir un punto a través, pero no tienen las palabras para hacer tan, o si están siendo llamados hacia fuera para algo que dijeron que es levemente diferente que su significado previsto. Aunque es sólo un blog, las personas que dan sus ideas sobre el tema tienen algunas cosas interesantes que decir sobre la cuestión de la semántica. Mis dos enlaces siguientes están relacionados con mensajes de texto, más específicamente, cómo el texto habla ha evolucionado en su propio idioma. La charla de TED aborda la semántica de los mensajes de texto en su conjunto, y cómo texting ha evolucionado lentamente en una forma totalmente diferente de comunicación que sólo hablar el idioma que se está texting. Además, habla de cómo las diferentes palabras y las inflexiones se traducen a través del texto, y cómo la precepción de los significados de las palabras puede cambiar en su conjunto debido al hecho de que las palabras se leen y no se hablan. Esto se amplía más adelante en el artículo siguiente que habla sobre cómo el discurso del texto ha evolucionado en su propio lenguaje. Ha evolucionado a su propio lenguaje, porque aunque las palabras se forman de la misma manera con las mismas letras y sonidos, las inflexiones de las palabras y sus significados se perciben a menudo de manera diferente porque se leen y no se hablan. El enlace final en mi página es un enlace a un PDF de un libro que discute la semántica del inglés para hablantes nativos de español. Este libro me interesa porque a menudo discuto el aprendizaje del español como segunda lengua para los hablantes de inglés, pero nunca he abordado lo que es para los hablantes nativos de español para tratar de aprender Inglés. La semántica cubierta en el PDF se refiere a cómo se expresa y se percibe el idioma inglés, y cómo las cosas se expresan de manera diferente entre los dos idiomas.

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Is the phrase "it's just a matter of semantics" meaningless?

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I hear this phrase from time to time, and I really don't know what it means. Two people are debating, and one says "the difference between your position and mine is just a matter of semantics." ...

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R txt msgs, or the lang of txt spk, gr8 for 2day's society & pedagogies n composition, rhetorical, & linguistic courses? Or r troubled linguistics correct n worrying "that the proliferation of text messaging...will enforce sloppy, undisciplined habits"? ("Linguists"). 2 b able 2 answer this with ne sort of accurate social comprehension of the lang of txtng, 1 must hv a luv for not only linguistics but also rhetoric and new pedagogical techniques that reflect our field's staunch belief that students hv a right 2 their own lang & that lang's history "indicates that change is one of its constant conditions and...that attempts at regulation and the slowing of change have been unsuccessful" (Committee on Conference on College Composition and Communication). 1 must also b able 2 accept txt spk as a legit lang. Those who were taught only the doom & gloom of grammar rather than hw "modern linguists see grammar not as prescriptive but as descriptive" & rather than "teachers who approach the study of grammar as a fascinating analysis of an intensely important human activity, rather than as a series of do's and don'ts" are the h8ers to this significant teaching opp & exercise in semantics (Committee on Conference on College Composition and Communication). While linguists such as American University professor Naomi Baron worry that "so much of American society has become sloppy or laissez faire about the mechanics of writing," those who dig deeper into txt spk as a discourse community & who do not attach a lack of societal value or prestige 2 its use und that its yet another form of communication & another connection that educators can use 2 relate 2 our modern day students ("Linguists").

While "the prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences language," according to Dr. David Crystal, linguistics professor & author of Txtng: the Gr8 Db8 and A Little Book of Language, txt spk is believed by many 2 b one of the gr8 lang innovations in modern times ("SMS"). "Nine Ideas About Language" by Harvey Daniels, former college professor, author & literacy education consultant, provides us with a relevant lens to analyze my contention that txt spk indeed has a place in society as a form of legit lang & should b accepted as such. Daniels' hands-on work with educators at various levels, his knowledge & research on content-area literacy & content-area writing, his "special focus on creating, sustaining, & renewing student-centered inquiries & discussions," & his combination technique of combining students' reading & writing strategies w their social skills 2 prepare them 2 b lifelong learners establish his overwhelming ethos 2 discuss matters of linguistics & rhetoric ("Harvey Daniels"). Though Daniels' essay does not specifically describe txt spk, it is easy 2 c how his ideas can easily translate 2 the lang & how those translations describe the journey from exercises in expressivism, such as txt spk, to exercises in "disciplined thinking [that] comes afterwards during revising," such as academic discourse, advocated by celebrated rhetorician Peter Elbow (Elbow).

Idea #1:
"Children learn their native language swiftly, efficiently, and largely without instruction"
(Daniels 4).
To give this idea the broadest applicability as possible, one could easily interpret the word "children" as a new learner of the language of text speak. Daniels clearly means children as such in his contention; he establishes their learning processes by stating they use "other speakers as testing devices for their own emerging ideas about language" (4). To properly analyze texting as a legitimate language under this lens, we must all be considered "children," or new learners, of this technology, as texting is a relatively new form of communication and we as a society are learning to use it and to develop it further together. Daniels' focus on children learning language through their own hypotheses more so than through imitating the language they hear and the structure of what they hear is in direct correlation with the contention that we as a society learn text speak by sending and receiving texts and advancing our own ideas and definitions of acceptable syntax and grammar more so than mere imitation; we discover "the underlying rules which make up the language," as it is our job as users of text speak (4).

Daniels' most poignant and applicable concept relating to the contention is his idea that "the main growth...will not so much be in acquiring new rules as in using new combinations of them to express increasingly sophisticated ideas, and in learning how to use language effectively in a widening variety of social settings" (5). It is clear that from the sheer number of text messages sent annually, which the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association found to be 4.1 billion per day in 2009, that we have adopted text speak as one of our native languages and have learned to use it swiftly and efficiently (Van Grove). Though no amount of research may ever convert die-hard traditional linguists into advocates of text speak as a legitimate language, they cannot ignore that society has entered a new era of technological expression.

Idea #2:
"Language operates by rules" (Daniels 5).
Dr. Kristen Turner, professor of English education at Fordham University, believes that such technology allows students to "be a part of a communication community, but they can manipulate the language in unique ways" (Verel). "Digitalk," as she refers to the language, did not develop out of random thoughts or boredom, Turner claims; she urges parents and teachers to realize the "sophisticated speech patterns...so we can illustrate how they're different than the patterns that are meant to be used in school" (Verel). In her recently published essay "Flipping the Switch: Teaching Students to Code-Switch from Text Speak to Standard English," Turner challenges parents and teachers to view text speak not as "deficient; rather we should embrace students' existing knowledge...and teach them to negotiate the technology-driven discourse within the confines of school language" (Turner).

Daniels' asserts here that language's foundation is based on a set of rules; that is explicitly applicable to text speak, as it, like the legitimate languages he refers to, "observes grammatical patterns to convey messages" (6). But how can the rules of text speak benefit society and our communication? I contend that linguists and educators can use the debate on text speak as a legitimate language and the breadth of its grammar, syntax and semantics to spark academic discussion and understanding of all variations of language and our ideas about them to promote the art of writing. Sali Tagliamonte, professor of linguistics in Toronto, believes that users of text speak, specifically teenagers, "demonstrate very clearly that their grammatical skills are intact and they very effectively mix it with other types of language" (MacLeod). Daniels relates that belief to learning the rules of language by noting that in learning language "we accomplished the most complex cognitive task of our lives" (6). By learning and using text speak, we as a society accomplish yet another complex cognitive task, and by doing so add to our society's repertoire of knowledge, comprehension, and skill in writing (6).

Idea #3: "All languages have three major components:
a sound system, a vocabulary, and system of grammar" (Daniels 6).
The National Council of Teachers of English asserts that "there is little evidence that languages 'evolve' in the sense that they become more expressive or more regular; that is, they simply change, but they do not...become better or worse" (Committee on Conference on College Composition and Communication). Consider that "Shakespeare freely used elisions, novel syntax, and several thousand made up words" and that "rules for using the oft-abused apostrophe were set only in the middle of the 19th century"; through the rule-breaking of one of our most beloved writers and the constant change in how we it is apparent that changes in the rules and applications of languages enrich all language (Huang). Besides the fact that the elitist rules of Standard English are being challenged by the all-encompassing structure of text speak, Crystal says that the technology "has introduced that kind of creative spirit into spelling again" (Huang). The naysayers can't shake their heads in shame at creativity and enthusiasm being reintroduced to issues of linguistics and rhetoric.

A recent study in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology supports the notion that the structure of text speak can spark academic discussion and understanding of all languages, as it showed that "children who regularly texted showcased a richer vocabulary, the ability to better express thoughts in writing, and were aware of the proper spelling of the words they were shortening in most cases" (Mick). Similarly, the National Council of Teachers of English asks educators to rethink our definition of grammar and understand that "the grammar of one American dialect may require 'he is' in the third person singular present tense," but that "the grammar of another dialect may require 'he be' in that same slot" (Committee on Conference on College Composition and Communication). While some traditionalists seem to consider it their moral duty to guard the master key to Standard English and its exclusive formalities, the NCTE and progressive linguists are unlocking the idea that semantics more so than grammar guides language, including text speak; more important than "right or wrong, proper or improper," educators have the opportunity to use semantics to teach students "how people give meaning to words and the way many of those meanings affect us emotionally rather than rationally" (Committee on Conference on College Composition and Communication).

One could argue that because text speak exists as a written language, there can be no sound system, therefore disqualifying it from being considered a legitimate language under Daniels' ideas. But text speak finds its way into spoken language, utilizing the vocal noises as implied in written text speak. Take for instance the word "IDK" in text speak: in Standard English it means "I don't know," and it is quite common to hear "IDK" spoken aloud as an answer to a question in a variety of linguistic circles. The same goes for such common text speak words as: "TMI" (meaning "too much information); "TTYL" (meaning "talk to you later"); and "BRB" (meaning "be right back"); "OMG" (meaning "oh my God); and "AFAIK" (meaning "as far as I know").

These words and others like them are widely believed by language traditionalists, worried parents and concerned citizens to be the language of silly adolescents and of social classes unworthy of linguistic research or inclusion into what is good and proper; by and large, that attitude not only reflects prejudice against social, cultural, political and economic differences, therefore reflecting prejudice against language varieties within those differences, but also snubs pertinent and relevant research that supports the link between text speak and improved literacy and Crystal's concept that text speak "isn't a cause of bad spelling: you have to know how to spell before you can text"(Crystal). So as educators, as those educated in linguistics and rhetoric, as those who believe in the power of informal and expressive writing and as those who understand that "students need to be taught mainstream discourses and become critical users of language while also having their home and street codes honored" as well as being offered a "variety of educational experiences that help them make informed decisions about their role and participation in language, literacy, and life," we can't afford to snub the use of text speak in writing or in speaking (Conference on English Education Executive Committee). As guardians of an academia that promotes and supports linguistic diversity, we are commissioned with the task of "work[ing] against racial, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic inequalities by creating humane classrooms where students and teachers learn to use language and literacy in critical and empowering ways" (Conference on English Education Executive Committee).

In reference to the second element of Daniels' components of language, one cannot deny that text speak has its own vocabulary. In fact, it is the fact that the vocabulary of "nascent dialect of English that subverts letters and numbers to produce ultra-concise words and sentiments [that] is horrifying language loyalists and pedagogues" as much as how that vocabulary has seeped its way into society (Huang). Examples of commonly used vocabulary words in text speak include:

Idea #4:
"Everyone speaks a dialect" (Daniels 7).
L8R-later
STR8-straight
BTW-by the way
GTG-got to go/gotta go
LMAO-laughing my ass off
OMG-oh my God!
2MRW-tomorrow
420-marijuana
TY-thank you
YW-you're welcome
AYK-as you know
BTW-by the way
CUZ-because/cousin
H8R-hater
RUOK-are you ok
LUV-love
WKND-weekend
UR-your/you're
NE-any
WB-write back
F2T-free to talk
NUTN--nothing

But as a frequent user of text speak, I know that not only conversations via text speak but also the people I converse with become so familiar to me that any word in Standard English can evolve into text speak. The language has been "rendered uneducated and therefore unacceptable" by many linguists, but still other linguists and myself see it as a relaxed and often times informal mode of communication (Thurlow). The fact that text speak has evolved from Standard English and other languages and that is quite common for those of us who use text speak to be able to turn any word from our native language into language of text speak further supports Crystal's idea that users of text speak can properly use formal grammar and syntax; it seems that our attention to Higher Order of Concerns issues such as audience, purpose, and tone have led us to create this new language.

Idea #5: "Speakers of all languages employ a range of styles and a set of subdialects or jargons" (Daniels 9).
As for Daniels final element, text speak most certainly has its own system of grammar; that system is at the heart of the debate over text speak triggering the death of Standard English. Besides being a modern communication technique, text speak provides a broader definition to the word "grammar"; it progresses as a language through Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric, specifically invention, as text speak users discover new ways to overcome limited space and construct innovative and syntactic sentences. As far as its grammar affecting the grammar of Standard English, continue linguistic research such as studies at the University of Toronto have concluded that abbreviated words in Standard English found in the language of text speak "made up only a tiny fraction of the community and that even younger users were getting most of their grammar right" (MacLeod).

Idea #6: "Language change is normal" (Daniels 13).
The issue of dialect in text speak is similar to dialect in formal languages; while geography and culture dictate a variety of dialects, there is a standard dialect in Standard English, though it seems difficult for even linguists to define its boundaries, that is considered superior, and one must master the art of code-switching to be understood bilingually. Daniels states that "there is a good deal of natural pressure to keep language relatively uniform," but in addition to spatial isolation, "social, economic, occupational, educational, and political" isolation contribute to the maintenance of dialects (Daniels7, 8).

But how do those factors affect text speak? Pressure to maintain dialect is pressure to maintain identity, and in the informal and familiar world of text speak, the aforementioned factors are key elements in preserving both. Consider the case of the 13-year-old Scottish student who composed an entire narrative on her summer activities in text speak. Though even Crystal referred to this case as the "hoax essay from 2003" that is still making its rounds on the Internet and that someone sent him "as 'evidence' of the terrible state we're in," The British Daily Telegraph broke the news and quoted the student's teacher as saying, "I could not believe what I was seeing. The page was riddled with hieroglyphics, many of which I simply could not understand" (Crystal) (Thurlow).

Idea #7: "Languages are intimately related to the societies and individuals who use them" (Daniels 15).
Despite whether this essay actually exists, is it so ridiculous to believe that a student felt it was more audience appropriate or natural to write in text speak and she was clutching her identity as a frequent text user who found the language easier to express herself through than Standard English? According to the story, the teacher seemed to consider the use of text speak as an obstacle to the student's literacy and expression, but she could have easily embraced the fact that the student's use of and dialect in Scottish-English text speak was a specific rhetorical move to convey a true identity; she also could have used it as an opportunity to teach code-switching to not only the student, but also the entire class to further support their abilities to "navigate from how they talk at home to how they are expected to speak and write in school" (Verel). As far as the essay being applicable as evidence against the state of affairs of writing in the classroom, Crystal says that "if it was a regular happening, or (more to the point) if teachers were letting this happen, we might have cause to worry. But it isn't. They aren't. And we shouldn't" (Crystal).

Idea #8: "Value judgments about different languages or dialects are matters of taste" (Daniels 16).
Code-switching is a learned behavior, and Daniels states that because we "range between formal and informal styles of speech" that such an adjustment is something "speakers of all language constantly make" (9). He also notes that "learning the sociolinguistic rules which tell us what sort of speech is appropriate in differing social situations is as much a part of language acquisition as learning how to produce [different] sounds" (9). Text speak users are no different; the dialects, subdialects, and jargon we may use with our parents or relatives is certainly not the same we would use with our friends or classmates.
The rhetorical move of assessing and acknowledging one's audience is a move text users make with every text message sent. Text speak users not only choose their words carefully, but also choose our response time, our message length, and our overall tone with much thought and consideration for the audience at hand, the purpose of the conversation, and the tone we aim to set. For instance, I respond the quickest to text messages from my husband and best friends. I send them well-constructed text messages, and I exercise the most congenial tone possible as to convey my affection for them and their status in my life. Because there is not body language, facial gestures, or vocal noises associated with written text speak, users must consider other factors in ensuring our messages are conveyed as we intend them.

Idea #9: "Writing is derivative of speech" (Daniels 18).
On the other hand, when I receive a text message from a classmate I am not close with or a family member simply saying "hello," I am not apt to respond as quickly or as thoroughly. When I receive a forwarded text, usually in the form of a joke, a silly picture, or a chain curse, I rarely respond to the sender; if I do forward it on I consider who in my phone's address book would enjoy the forward or find it applicable, respectful, and/or relevant before I send it. I would never forward a chain curse about finding someone to love to my husband, nor would I end a text conversation with him without saying "I love you." And I would never forward my father a crude joke, nor would I send my professor a lengthy description about my weekend social events. I have learned the social regulations needed to code-switch, and I abide by them.

The mere existence of text speak as a language is change in language. As I noted before, many linguists believe that innovation in language is simply a natural progression, and one cannot deny that a language that has developed through short messages using alphanumeric keypads on cellular devices is innovation and progression.

Daniels states that there is "plenty of language change which seems to happen spontaneously, sporadically, and without apparent purpose"; text speak seems to adhere perfectly to that statement (13). Granted, we can understand that text speak originated from a need for convenience in communication, but will we ever understand why the language seems to have had such an influence in the worlds of linguistics and rhetoric? Why has it caused such a stir and such a rift between those who supposedly share common goals in the study of language philosophy? "Much text messaging lingo was first used in instant-messaging programs on personal computers, and some phrases, such as 'SWAK' for 'sealed with a kiss,' have been used for decades," according to Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary ("R ur txts"). Since we as a society have had so much exposure to the lingo, Crystal's belief that text speak is to be "the greatest opportunity for the development of the English language since the advent of the printing press in the Middle Ages" should not prompt so much shock and awe ("SMS").

The fact that today's society has become an instant-minded culture, one that is bothered by downloads taking over one minute to process and that considers the sound of dial-up modem to be ancient, is a key factor in understanding not only the origin of text speak, but also the elements of the language itself. The undemanding and unassuming language and syntax rules are ideal for our rushed pace of life. It's just a matter of looking beyond the idea that text speak is made up of mere abbreviations and persuading naysayers to see the value of the vernacular.

This idea seems to go hand-in-hand with Idea #5; both ideas suggest that cultures have their own identities and that maintaining those identities is important to all speech communities. Yet this idea seems to value our personal code over our academic code; it takes the stand that "the code we use to communicate in the most powerful and intimate experiences of our lives" with those closest to us is "as personal and as integral to each of us as our bodies and our brains" (Daniels 16). This opens the door like no other idea articulated by Daniels to consider text speak a language. Typically text speak is used among close members of a community, though the level of closeness may be different with each member, and in using words and phrases that are personal and relevant to only members of that community, text speak epitomizes itself as the code we use for our intimate experiences.

In "The Language of Texting," Crispin Thurlow and Michele Poff note "how speech styles constitute different types of social relationships and that style shifting provides a contextual cue for relationship maintenance and conflict management" (Thurlow and Poff). The essay also provides specific demographic information on communities and how text speak is used and even relied upon by their members; for instance, boys in Finland "typically place greater emphasis on speed [sending] single-word or question-answer texts in a single sentence," while girls in the same study say that "when communicating with boys, the text messages should therefore be very plain and properly written for the boys to understand them" (Thurlow and Poff).

"Especially when we consider the question of mutually intelligible American dialects, we are able to see that most ideas about language differences are purely matters of taste," according to Daniels (17). Be it the stereotype that Southern people are "either cruelly crafty or just plain dumb" based on our slower speech patterns, or that African American Vernacular English is ghetto and uneducated, one cannot deny that judgments are made based on how we speak (Daniels 17). Never is that more true than in text speak, specifically the written form.

As I said before, because written text speak differs from region to region and because there is no body language, facial gestures, or vocal noises associated with it, only the written words and the tone they set serve as the elements of judgment. The "ya'll" people from the South may use in text speak and the "you guys" people from New York may write will be judged due to the "history of experiences with each other" and the prejudices that arise from that (Daniels 17). While we may like to believe that all languages are equal, we as a society do not adhere to that belief, as we relentlessly judge others. Users of text speak know this all too well; in addition to our constant analysis of audience, purpose, and tone, we are keenly aware that due to the lack of face-to-face interaction in written text speak, every word we choose to text matters. The words we choose are yet another way we maintain our cultural identities as well as code-switch between the voices we want to use (i.e. academic vs. personal).

Text speak originated from the language and grammar of instant messaging. Instant messaging originated from the need to communicate without wait. Daniels states that specifically in the classroom, "we find ourselves feeling that only in the 19th or 16th century could writers 'really use the language' correctly...we teach this notion in our schools, encouraging students to see the language of written literature as the only true and correct style of English" (19). But by encouraging such a notion, we are ignoring the need for progress in and accessibility to language. Text speak would never exist if we ignored that need, and though I am sure some would be more than satisfied with that, I contend that text speak has provided us with yet another outlet to teach not only expressive rhetoric, but also Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric, audience analysis, and code-switching.

Committee on Conference on College Composition and Communication. "Students' Right to Their Own Language." NCTE.org. National Council of Teachers of English. n.d. Web. 16 Jan. 2010.

Conference on English Education Executive Committee. "Supporting Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners in English Education." NCTE.org. National Council of Teachers of English. n.d. Web. 16 Jan. 2010

Crystal, David. "On txtng reactions." DCBlog. Blogspot.com. Web. 17 Jan. 2010

"Daniels, Harvey A. "Nine Ideas About Language." Language: Introductory
Readings. Eds. Virginia Clark, Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, Beth Lee Simon. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 3-20

Elbow, Peter. "Exploring Problems With 'Personal Writing' and 'Expressivism'." 2002.
Web. 3 Jan. 2010.

"Harvey Daniels." Heinemann.com. Heinemann Books. n.d. Web. 18 Jan. 2010

Huang, Lily. "The Death of English (LOL)." Newsweek 2 Aug. 2008. n.p. Web.

"Linguists mixed on effects of text messaging." USA Today. 3 March 2003. n. pg. Web. 9 Oct. 2008.

Lo Dico, Joy. "Watch what you're saying!: Linguist David Crystal on Twitter, texting and our native tongue." Rev. of A Little Book of Language by David Crystal. The Independent. 14 March 2010. Web.

MacLeod, Murdo. "Msg is clear as joy." Scotsman News. 25 May 2008. n. pg. Web. 9 October 2008.

Mick, Jason. "New study claims texting improves language skills in children." Daily Tech. Daily Tech LLC. 25 Feb. 2009. Web. 15 Jan. 2010

"R ur txt msgs :) or OK?." CNN.com. CNN. 2003 February 13. Web. 9 Oct. 2009

"SMS greeted with delight by linguistics professor." Textually.org.Textually. 28 February 2005. Web. 9 Oct. 2009.

Thurlow, Crispin. "From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive
Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11.3 (2006): n. pg. Web. 5 Dec. 2009

Thurlow, Crispin and Michele Poff. "The Language of Texting." Washington.edu. University of Washington. n.d. Web. 20 Jan. 2010

Turner, Kristin. "Flipping the Switch: Code-Switching from Text Speak to Standard English." English Journal. (May 2009): n. pg. Web. 15 Jan. 2010

Van Grove, Jennifer. "WOW: 4.1 billion SMS messages sent daily." Mashable.com

Verel, Patrick. "Is txting killin Nglsh @ skool? No way sez Prof." In Focus: Faculty and Research. Inside Fordham Online. 1 March 2010. Web. 5 March 2010.

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Txtng Spks: How Texting is a Legitimate Language

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R txt msgs, or the lang of txt spk, gr8 for 2day's society & pedagogies n composition, rhetorical, & linguistic courses? Or r troubled linguistics correct n worrying "that the proliferation of text messaging...will enforce sloppy, undisciplined habits"? ("Linguists").

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John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

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Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there's much more to texting -- linguistically, culturally -- than it seems, and it's all good news.

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Introductory Semantics for Spanish Speakers learning English

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Introductory Semantics for Spanish Speakers learning English

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El primer enlace en mi página de este capítulo, el mapa interactivo que muestra la evolución y difusión de los lenguajes en toda la Península Ibérica durante los últimos mil años es mi página favorita que he podido encontrar para este capítulo. El mapa es muy interesante de ver, ya que muestra la transformación de la rapidez con que las lenguas se pueden propagar y evolucionar dadas las condiciones adecuadas, y la Península Ibérica durante este tiempo, con la caída de Al-Andalus, es el mejor ejemplo que pude pensar de. El segundo enlace en la página habla de lo que significa ser un lenguaje romántico y que las lenguas se pueden clasificar como tal. La lectura de esta página web fue muy interesante para mí, porque siempre he tenido interés en saber qué idiomas están relacionados con el latín y en qué medida han evolucionado desde el latín. La siguiente página, que discute la historia de la lengua española, es similar al mapa en que se centra principalmente en la evolución y difusión del castellano, la base por la que comenzó el español como lengua. La página discute cómo, más allá de la península ibérica, los conquistadores desempeñaron un papel importante en la difusión del castellano, y como resultado, el idioma español moderno, hacia el nuevo mundo, por lo que es una lengua juggernaut en el mundo. El enlace final es muy divertido para leer, ya que discute la dificultad que viene con el aprendizaje de nuevos idiomas para los hablantes nativos de Inglés, y que los idiomas vienen más fácilmente a los hablantes nativos de Inglés. Entre los idiomas discutidos, el español está incluido y muchos de sus aspectos más fáciles y los aspectos más difíciles de dominar se discuten, y por qué caen en esas categorías. No es de extrañar que las lenguas romances son las lenguas más prolíficas en esta lista de idiomas fáciles de aprender para los hablantes de inglés.

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Language Evolution Map of the Iberian Peninsula

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Language Evolution Map of the Iberian Peninsula

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Romance languages facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Romance languages

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Get information, facts, and pictures about Romance languages at Encyclopedia.com. Make research projects and school reports about Romance languages easy with credible articles from our FREE, online encyclopedia and dictionary.

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Most of the Spanish spoken in South America actually comes from a language called Castellano, which originated in Castilla, Spain. Around the end of the fifteenth century, the monarchs of Castilla combined forces with the monarchs of Aragon, and proceeded to take control of a large part of the Iberian peninsula. Once in control, they imposed the language of Castilla (Castellano) over the citizenry.

In 1492, when the conquistadors and missionaries arrived in the Americas, they brought Castellano with them and imposed it, in turn, on the native populace. Castellano became the official imperial language of the New World.

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Most of the Spanish spoken in South America actually comes from a language called Castellano, which originated in Castilla, Spain. Around the end of the fifteenth century, the monarchs of Castilla combined forces with the monarchs of Aragon, and proceeded to take control of a large part of the Iberian peninsula.

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9 Easy Languages for English Speakers to Learn

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9 Easy Languages for English Speakers to Learn

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A SWEDISH FRIEND of mine speaks English and German with near-perfect fluency. "They're easy to learn," she insists with what I had believed to be sweet humility.

I'd always assumed the Swedes were just good at everything, hence their omnipresence on North American hockey teams. She firmly denied these superpowers. "English is a lot more like Swedish than you realize."

English is a part of the Germanic family and is linked to many European languages by descent or influence. It was also a big mooch in its formative years, with over 50% of its vocabulary stemming from Latin or French.

The result?

There are a lot of languages out there sharing common traits with English, which is great news when it comes to language study. When familiar structure or vocabulary is in place, the learning process becomes faster and easier. Hence my friend, the nonchalant polyglot.

Below are 9 of the easiest for English speakers to learn, as classed by the Foreign Service Institute.

1. Afrikaans

Afrikaans and English both derive from the West Germanic language family. Phonetics and pronunciation are comfortable for English speakers; the one wee hurdle is the Afrikaans "g", pronounced like the -ch in Bach.

Unlike English though, the Afrikaans language is not inflective. This means that with some memorized vocabulary, you can build sentences as you would a Lego tower, stacking words without worry of conjugation.

In Afrikaans, there is no conjugation of verbs (write, wrote, written), gender (think gato or gata in Spanish) or pronouns (my, mine; who, whose). In other words, you'll hardly be a grammar slave if you take up this logical language.

As with most Scandinavian languages, the biggest hurdle with studying Danish is in being able to practice. English is spoken widely and fluently across northern European countries.

Danish is said to be the hardest Scandinavian language to learn because of its speaking patterns. It is generally spoken more quickly and more softly than other Scandinavian languages. Danish is also flatter and more monotonous than English.

Grammatically, though, it's relatively easy. Danish has only nine verb forms, including the passive, which is peculiar to Scandinavian languages but familiar to English speakers. Danish has a lot of Germanic-based cognate vocabulary too: "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday", in Danish, are " Mandag, Tirsdag, Onsdag."

Like all romance languages, French has a few difficulties for prospective speakers. There are more verb forms (17, compared to the English 12) and gendered nouns ( le crayon, la table). Pronunciation is especially difficult in French, with vowel sounds and silent letters.

The bright side?

Like all Romance languages, French's Latin derivations make much of the vocabulary familiar to English speakers (edifice, royal, village). Linguists debate the concrete number, but it's said that French has influenced up to a third of English vocabulary, giving it more lexical common ground with English than any other romance language.

Another romance language, Italian has the great feature of readability. Italian is written as it is spelled. For learners, reading comes fluidly once a few new phonemes are learned (like -ghi- or -ci-).

Italian words tend to end in vowels, which makes for really fun, flowing speaking, as you might hear in Italians speaking English ("that's-a my-a house-a").

Grammatically, the language follows typical Romantic structure, with gendered nouns and similar word order. One perk: Italian has fewer verb forms than French or Spanish.
Italian is widely seen as the language of gastronomy. Many English speakers like to "study" by reading Italian restaurant menus and salivating.

The language is structurally similar to Danish, but with pronunciation more familiar to English speakers. Norwegian, like Swedish, uses a tonal "pitch accent" to distinguish homonyms, stressing either the first or second syllable of the word. It's an easy concept to grasp: think "decent" and "descent" in English.

Verb forms are a relative breeze in Norwegian, with no conjugation according to person or number. The past tense is formed with a simple -e suffix; the future is formed with the auxiliary vil; the conditional perfect with ville ha. The passive tense is formed by adding a simple -s. It's a walk in the park compared to English.

Grammatically, Portuguese is similar to other Romance languages. There are fewer prepositions in Portuguese than in English (easy to remember!) However, their uses don't always have direct parallels in English (easy to mix up).

One great element of the language is that interrogatives are beautifully easy, expressed by intonation alone ("You love me?") If you can say it in Portuguese, you can ask it. What's more, in Brazilian Portuguese, there's one catchall question tag form: não é.

Pronunciation is fairly comfortable for English speakers, though the more nasal vowel sounds take some practice

The geographic dark horse of the romance languages, Romanian is often assumed to be the most difficult of the bunch, with its Slavic influences. Not so fast.

They say that Romanian is the closest living language to Latin, and has preserved a lot of Latin's grammatical structure. Articles are a bit of a puzzle in Romanian, with definite articles attached as a suffix to the end of nouns ( frate/ fratele, brother/the brother), while indefinite articles appear before nouns ( copil/un copil, child/a child).

Though the language has taken Slavic influences in its vocabulary, the language is still about 80% Latin-based, and full of cognates like sub (under) or obiect (object).

Spanish pronunciation is fairly easy for English speakers, with only ten vowel/diphthong sounds (English has 20), and the easy-to-master letter ñ. Like Italian, the orthography is clear and simple; words are written as they're pronounced, which makes reading easier. Grammatically, Spanish has fewer irregularities than other romance languages too.

A slippery element of the language (and all the Romances) is in false cognates: word pairings that sound the same as an English word, but mean something different. Particular means "private" in Spanish, and eventual means possible. See how that could get confusing?

Still, there's no shortage of people in the world to help you fix these slip-ups. With 330 million native speakers, it's the most popular language on this list.

A fellow Germanic language, Swedish has some vocabulary common with English ( mus for "mouse", kung for "king"), and a similar syntax too.

Pronunciation may be a struggle at first, with nine vowels (like ö or å) and the sje- sound, which is unique to Swedish. Once you master it, though, the language is surprisingly melodic.

Students of the language gripe about the complicated grammar system, but the syntax shouldn't be unfamiliar to an English speaker. In Swedish, the Subject-Verb-Object pattern is standard word order.

Also, verb formation uses many of the same patterns as English. The future tense, for example, is described with komma att + infinitive (will), or ska + infinitive (going to). And verb forms are normally constant, even if the person changes. I am, you are, he/she is would be Jag är, du är, han/hon är.

Honorable Mention: Frisian

Never heard of it? It's spoken by less than half a million people in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands. It wasn't included on the list because Frisian is rarely studied as a second language, so finding a textbook or tutor outside the North Sea would be near impossible.

Linguistically it is the closest language to English, stemming from the same subfamily of West Germanic languages. Phonetically, the phrases are almost identical. Uncanny.

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A SWEDISH FRIEND of mine speaks English and German with near-perfect fluency. "They're easy to learn," she insists with what I had believed to be sweet humility. I'd always assumed the Swedes were just good at everything, hence their omnipresence on North American hockey teams. She firmly denied these superpowers.

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Spanish Spelling, Grammar, Syntax Checker

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Spanish Spelling, Grammar, Syntax Checker

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"SpanishChecker" Online Spelling and Grammar Checker for Spanish as a Second Language

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SpanishChecker is an editor that finds common spelling and grammar errors in Spanish. Simply type (or paste) your text into the window below and hit the

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Let us now move on to another major structural aspect of language, syntax. The word syntax derives from the Greek word syntaxis, which means arrangement. Morphology deals with word formation out of morphemes; syntax deals with phrase and sentence formation out of words.
What is a sentence?
Although everyone knows or thinks they know what a word is and what a sentence is, both terms defy exact definition. The sentence as a linguistic concept has been defined in over 200 different ways, none of them completely adequate. Here are the most important attempts at defining the sentence:

The traditional, or common sense definition states that a sentence is a group of words that expresses a thought . The problem comes in defining what a thought is. The phrase an egg expresses a thought but is it a sentence? A sentence like I closed the door because it was cold expresses two thoughts and yet it is one sentence.

Another definition is that a sentence is a group of words expressing a topic (old information) and somecomment (new information) about that topic: John left. (Notice how intonation--which is a part of phonology--interacts closely with syntax in delimiting topic from comment--another example of the grammatical interconnectedness of all the so called levels of language.) The problem with the topic-comment definition is that many sentences have no clear topic and comment structure: It's raining.

The grammatical definition of the sentence is the largest unit to which syntactic rules can apply. In terms of syntactic categories, most sentences--at least in English-- can be divided into a subject and a predicate. This applies to sentences with or without a clear topic/comment structure: John ---left. Many sentences have no clear topic and comment structure: It--is raining. (The word it here is the so-called dummy it used to fill the subject slot for impersonal verbs in English; cf. prshí, snezí.)

Another problem with grammatical, or syntactic, definitions of the sentence is that not all sentences--even in English--are divisible into subject and predicate. Some sentence types make no internal syntactic structure; there is no distinction between subject and predicate:

a) Emotive sentences such as Gee! Wow. Darn! Yes! No!

b) Imperatives: Go! Leave! Taxi! All aboard! Down with alcohol!

c) Elliptic sentences: Who took the car? John.

d) small talk phrases: Hello. Good-bye. Good morning.

In polysynthetic languages the single word serve as a complete sentence much more frequently. In such languages, morphology rather than syntax usually expresses the distinction between subject and predicate.
Types of sentences containing a subject and a predicate
Syntax usually examines sentences that have a clear inner division into subject and predicate. There are 3 types of subject/predicate structured sentences:

a) a simple sentence contains at least one subject and one predicate: John read Pushkin.

b) a compound sentence is two or more simple sentences joined into a single sentence: John read Pushkin and Mary read Updike. Each simple sentence maintains its own internal syntactic structure. They may be joined by a coordinating conjunction such as and or or, or asyndetically (without a conjunction).

c) a complex sentence is a sentence in which one of the syntactic roles is played by an embedded sentence: I made students read Chomsky. The simple sentence students read Chomsky plays the role of object of the verb made. Because the syntax of the two parts of a complex sentence is intertwined, it is often not possible to divide them into two free-standing simple sentences. * I made. Students read Chomsky. I saw Mary run.

Complex sentences, then, are said to consist of a main clause, with a subordinate clause imbedded into its structure (the subordinate clause is often referred to as an imbedded sentence). In phrase structure notation a subordinate clause, or imbedded sentence, is notated as S', pronounced s-bar.

The word that connects a subordinate clause to a main clause, such as the word that in the previous example, is known as a subordinate conjunction; in syntactic analysis a subordinate conjunction is known as a complementizer, and is notated as Comp. In some English complex sentences the complementizer is optional, in others obligatory: I know (that) you snore. vs. I hate when you snore (if the complementizer has a temporal meaning it can't be left out.)
Parts of speech
Words and phrases can be grouped according to their sentence building functions. Syntactic classes of words are traditionally called parts of speech. English has the following parts of speech: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, verbal particle (the off in turn off the light), article.

Note the following test to determine what is a preposition and what is a verbal particle in English:

a). The mouse ran up the clock--Up the clock he ran. (Prepositional phrases can be fronted).

b.) The man ran up a big bill.--*Up the big bill he ran. (Verbal particles cannot.) Also: The mouse ran up it (pronoun is object of the prep and can follow the preposition) but not * The mouse ran it up. But, The man ran it up (pronoun is object of the verb and follows the verb) not * The man ran up it.

Not all languages have the same parts of speech. Many languages have postpositions rather than prepositions, like Georgian skolashi, to school; skoladan, from school. Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and many other languages have clitics (clitics are affixes attached to phrases instead of single words). som knigu prijatel'ovi/ Knigu som dal prijatel'ovi/ Prijatel'ovi som dal knigu. I gave it to my friend. Spanish uses the object marking clitics le and lo after verbs: Dice mi lo.

A common assertion is that all languages have at least nouns and verbs. It is true that all languages have some means of conveying information as a concept or as an event, but what a noun or verb is differs from language to language. In the Salishan languages of the Puget Sound, a single word can be translated into English as village and a village exist or there is a village; in other words, morphemes denoting stationary concepts are often bound roots that require verbal affixes to stand as words. So parts of speech--even nouns and verbs-- turn out to be at best fuzzy categories across languages, not identical or even present in every language. Some people thing of parts of speech or grammatical categories as similar to protons, electrons and neutrons in how they contribute to the structure of languages, but such is not the case. The form/meaning connections differ from language to language. There are universal tendencies, but these do not seem to be absolute universal properties.

Parts of speech are based on syntactic function, not concrete, extra-linguistic meaning. Notice that words is different syntactic classes can have the same concrete meaning and differ only in their ability to combine with other words: The sky darkens, the darkening of the sky, a dark sky, the darkness of the sky.

Thus syntactic patterns as well as syntactic categories cannot be said to be limited to any concrete real-world meaning; they are linguistic structures relevant for expressing meaning and yet have no specific meaning of their own. Note Chomsky's famous semantically anomalous statement: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This sentence is utter nonsense but it is nonsense stated in English and conforms perfectly to a complex set rules of English syntax; thus one is tempted to devise a surrealist interpretation of it. The utterance * green sleep colorless furiously ideas is not a sentence of English at all and even the most imaginative person could not devise a meaning for it.
Syntactic atoms
The basic unit of syntax is not the word, but the syntactic atom, defined as a structure that fulfills a basic syntactic function. Syntactic atoms may be either a single word or a phrase that fulfills a single syntactic function.

Elements with syntactic equivalence all belong to the same type of syntactic atom (NP, VP)

A language also contains specific rules for properly connecting syntactic atoms to form sentences--these are called phrase structure rules ( look at problem 5 on page 116). The sentence: The big yellow dog ate the bone. is well formed because it uses the parts of speech in a way that conforms to the rules of English syntax. The string of words: big the ate bone dog yellow the, is not a sentence because it violates syntactic rules. It is often not even possible to assign any meaning to a syntactically ill-formed utterance.

This is why the syntactic rules of a language can be followed perfectly to produce illogical or semantically highly improbable sentences: The bone ate the big yellow dog. Since a new context could be imagined to render such a statement at least fictionally logical, it is fortunate that our language has a ready made means of expressing it. The fact that syntactic structures are not restricted in the meanings they may express is one reason why we can so easily produce novel sentences never before heard. The semantic independence of the phrase structure rules is one of the main factors that provides for the infinite creativity of human language. Animal systems don't have any structural units that are meaningful yet totally independent of meaning.
Syntactic Relations and phrase structure rules
Let's examine syntactic relations within English sentences. One approach is to divide the words of a sentence into phrases (defined as words closely associated with one another syntactically). This technique is know as parsing. The most fundamental division is between subject and predicate. (of course, this is because we are cheating and ignoring sentence types that lack this division). Phrases containing different parts of speech can serve one and the same function.

Each of these sentences consists of a subject and a predicate. But in each sentence different syntactic types of words or combinations of words constitute subject and predicate. Different combinations of parts of speech fulfilling the same syntactic function are said to be syntactically equivalent. It is possible to write rules describing syntactic equivalence. These rules are called phrase structure rules. These rules use special symbols designed exclusively for syntactic descriptions. Grammatical terms or graphic notation devices devised to describe language structure are examples of meta-language, defined roughly as language about language. The syntactic metalanguage used in writing phrase structure rules involves mainly abbreviations from English words for parts of speech.

S--> NP VP A sentence consists of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. (These correspond to subject and predicate.)

NP--> (art) (adj) N or NP --> pronoun
(Go over exercise 5 on page116 in the textbook.)
Phrase structure rules are said to be recursive. That is, identical elements in the structure of a phrase can repeat. These repeating elements are sometimes known as parallel items in a series:

Parallel subjects: the sentence John came--John, Bill, and Mary came. is a simple sentence with a recursive subject. (Compare John came and Bill came which is a compound sentence each part of which has a simple subject.)

Parallel verbs: Caesar came, saw, and conquered.

Parallel modifiers:

adverbs: a very good book-- a very, very good book; or

adjectives: a green and red and pink and blue book.

Parallel compound sentences: I came and Bill came and Mary came and...

Multiple subordinate clauses in a complex sentence: I know an old lady who swallowed a fly which was chased by her cat who had been bored because there was nothing to do in the house that Jack built when he. . .

Remember the ability of syntactic elements to occur in multiples is known as recursion.

It is possible to write an entire book consisting of just one single recursive complex sentence. The property of recursion means that it is impossible to propose limits on the length of sentences. No one will ever be able to state with certainty what the longest possible sentence can be. There are a limited number of words in each language, but a potentially infinite number of sentences. This realization prompted 19th century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt to say: " Language makes infinite use of finite means." Such a statement could not be made about animal systems of communication, in which the number of messages is strictly limited.
The syntax/morphology interface/ Day two
1) The syntactic atom is the basic unit of syntax; syntactic structures are made up of other syntactic structures; although syntax is separate from meaning (we can have syntactically correct sentences which are utterly anomalous semantically, it is not possible to separate syntax from morphology compeletely: there are some instances where specific phrase structure rules are constrained semantically, for instance in VP = V + NP (Subcategorization rules for verbal complements).

Let's take a closer look at verb phrases, which are more complex than noun phrases. First of all, VP can = a single verb (V) He ate; or the verb may have an auxillary (aux): He was eating, He has eaten; or the verb clause might contain verb + dependent words. There are several types of verb-dependent words, known collectively as verbal complements: He ate yesterday (Adv); He ate meat (NP); He ate in the cafe. (PP) Object noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and adverbs all fulfill the same syntactic function--the verb complement. (Yesterday we noted that in language typology the complement is notated as O.

The noun phrase complements of action verbs are called direct objects: He kicked the ball. Verbs that can take a direct object are called transitive verbs. Some transitive verbs are obligatorily transitive: that is, they cannot be used without a complement: * He made. Other transitive verbs may omit the object: I write vs. I write a letter.

Verbs that cannot take a direct object at all are called intransitive. For instance, the verb sleep cannot take a direct object complement: He slept (yesterday, at home), but not * He slept a fish.

The complements of linking verbs are called predicate nominals, which may be either nouns or adjectives: John arrived healthy. We became ill.

Sometimes the same verb can have two different meanings, one requiring a direct object, the other a predicate nominal: We smelled the roses. The chef made (created) a good salad. vs. The roses smelled good. He made (became) a good chef.

The study of what grammatical form may or may not be used after a verb is called verb government. It is also known as lexical subcategorization, the point being that it is not enough to know the meaning of a word and what part of speech the word belongs to. One must also know additional requirements about how the word may or must combine with other words in a phrase.

Mention that in polysynthetic languages this is part of morphology. (There is no clear division between morphology and syntax that can be drawn across all languages.) The division between syntax and morphology varies across languages.
Phrases and heads
Since they cannot be defined as having specific meanings, syntactic atoms (single words or whole phrases) are defined by how they interact with syntactic rules.

1) They do not allow reordering of their constituents, It's the bone the dog ate. The bone, he ate it. ( cleft sentences and sentences with left dislocation). You can't front only part of a syntactic atom any more than you can change the order of morphemes in a word rewrite but not *write-re: * The big, he ate the bone. (NOTE: When used as examples, grammatically ill formed sentences and words are traditionally marked by an asterisk *. This also applies to morphologically ill formed words: * ingrun, *runre.)

2) One may not anaphorize, or substitute for, only a part of a morphologically complex syntactic atom ( I like the tea's flavor. I like its flavor. Here is coffee and here is a coffeepot I like its pot.)

3) Also, if a morphologically complex syntactic atom takes inflectional endings, then only the head can be so modified, not any of the subordinate constituents. ( Workaholic--workaholiclike, *workedaholic, *workingaholic.)

The head of a syntactic atom can sometimes be a zero morpheme: withstand, grandstand, leaf--> maple leaf Toronto Maple Leafs, fly--> fly out (a window), a fly ball--to fly out (in baseball) He flied out.

Notice that noun phrases often have internal rules. English noun phrases observe a strict word order: article, adverb, adjective, noun. Noun phrase structure rules differ from language to language: In French, Hawaiian, and many other language the adjectives come after the noun. In many languages the form of articles or adjectives changes to reflect the gender of the noun. When words in a phrase change grammatically to accommodate one another the process is called concord or agreement. French is a good example: le petit garcon vs. la petite fille; German: das Haus; der Apfel; die Blume. In such cases we say that the noun is the head of the phrase, since it causes other words to change and yet remains unaffected by whatever adjective or article is added to it. In English, the head of the syntactic unit called the sentence is the subject NP, since the verb agrees with it and not the other way around. Each syntactic atom has its head.
Diagramming sentences, how to deal with ambiguity
Let's now turn to instances of ambiguity in syntax. Sometimes a sentence or phrase allows for two different syntactic interpretations.

Parsing using parentheses to show syntactic relations can disambiguate such a phrase as: old men and women

Other sentences do not lend themselves to such a linear approach. Sometimes the words that belong to the same syntactic unit are separated by other words: The book that was lying under all the other books is the most interesting. Tree diagrams can be used to show such "long distance" grammatical relations.

Consider also the sentence The fish is too old to eat. Here, parsing and even tree diagramming cannot separate out the two potential meanings. In such cases of semantic ambiguity, paraphrases can be used to express two meanings hidden in a single linear form:
The fish is too old for the fish to eat. The fish is too old to be eaten.
Noam Chomsky, a linguist at MIT, became interested in the phenomenon of syntactic ambiguity. He noticed that languages contain systematic ways of paraphrasing sentences:

a.) Active sentences can regularly be turned into passives: The boy kicked the ball.--> the ball was kicked by the boy. (passive transformation)

b.) Statements can be regularly turned into questions: He is there? Is he there? (interrogative transformation)

He came to believe that such parallel syntactic means of expressing the same meaning were simply surface manifestations of deeper structural units of language. To study and describe such deep structures, he devised the theory of transformational grammar. The three main tenets of this theory are:

1) The surface forms of a language are reducible to a limited number of deep structures. The same deep structure is manifested in several different ways in actual sentences. This is similar to the use of the principle of allomorphs to describe morpheme variants.

2) These deep structures are universal--in other words, the same for all languages of the world; only the rules for deriving the surface forms from the deep structures differ from language to language.

3) The reason these deep structures are universal is that they are inborn, part of the human genetic code; being inborn they help children discover the surface forms of language so quickly.

Transformational grammar has maintained its popularity since 1957 when Noam Chomsky published his first book, Syntactic Structures. But major problems continue to dog the theory. The main problems are:

Transformational rules only work for sentences composed of separate noun and verb phrases. We have seen that not all sentences are of this type.

Mainly English data was used to find these supposedly universal deep structures. Usually one of the paraphrases is taken as the basic one and the other derived from it: cf. active and passive. But active is not more basic in all languages; Japanese uses the passive as its more basic form.

No deep structures have been described that would apply across all languages. Structural universals tend to be proposed, then disgarded as data from new languages disprove them. There seem to be universal tendencies in syntax, but no universal has yet been proven to exist that would be more specific than the general creativity in humans.

Thus, no real progress has been made in writing a universal grammar that would be applicable to all human languages, a sort of In chemistry we have the Periodic table of Elements--all substances on earth can be seen as compounds of a finite set of elements. Human language doesn't seem to work this way, and no such table of universal grammar elements has been found.
Definitions of Grammar
Since sentence formation is the most obvious and frequent manifestation of creativity in any language, the syntactic rules of a language are often referred to as the grammar of the language. But morphology and phonology are also part of the grammar in that they, too, are creative tools.

Here it might be pertinent to mention a few other definitions of the term grammar that are widely used.

a) A descriptive grammar is a description of the structure of a language in all its aspects--morphology, syntax, phonology--which attempts do portray the language as accurately as possible in terms of how it is naturally used by speakers.

b) A prescriptive grammar is a description of a language which assigns value judgments to competing ways native speakers use in forming words or sentences. Prescriptive grammars do not attempt to describe the language as it is naturally spoken, but rather to tell the speakers how they best should speak it.

c) A third type, grammars of foreign languages written for second language learners fall in between the other two types. They represent attempts to describe a language as it is spoken by natives in order to tell non-natives how to speak it.

When thinking of grammar in the general, descriptive sense, remember that there is no absolute division between syntax, morphology, and phonology. Even in the same language these so called levels of language are not completely separate.

It is not always possible to separate phonology from syntax. For instance, certain phonological rules depend on syntax. Look at these examples from fast speech: What are you doing? where are = an auxiliary verb, becomes Whacha doin? But What are you? where are = the main verb of the predicate, can't be run together as * Whacha? Similarly, I'm going to work now. (in the sense of I am planning to work now)--> I'm gonna work now. But I'm going to work now in the sense of setting out for work, can't be contracted. The phonetic environment is the same; but syntactic class the words belong to affect which of them can and cannot be contracted.

Morphology and syntax also interact, as we have seen. Compound words are part of morphology, yet they are dependent on syntactic parameters, as well. Compound words or adj/noun combinations that act as single words can express different syntactic functions. One must understand these underlying syntactic functions to understand the meaning of the words: magnifying glass, falling star vs. looking glass, laughing gas.

The difficulty of completely separating morphology, syntax, and phonology is especially evident when comparing different languages. What in one language is a part of syntax in another language will be a part of morphology, a fact particularly evident when comparing analytic languages like Chinese to polysynthetic languages like Eskimo.

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Let us now move on to another major structural aspect of language, syntax. The word syntax derives from the Greek word syntaxis, which means arrangement. Morphology deals with word formation out of morphemes; syntax deals with phrase and sentence formation out of words. What is a sentence?

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Brown's Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development

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Brown's Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development

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Brown's Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development

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Brown's Stages - Sentence Types, Structural Analysis

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One aspect of syntax is the order in which words appear in a sentence. Spanish word order is fairly flexible; however, it is best to use the more common patterns of putting words together to form sentences, as given below. These patterns, for the most part, are simply illustrations of a few generalizations:

Normal word order in a Spanish declarative sentence: [declarative- referring to a statement, as opposed to a question]

SUBJECT ("doer") + PREDICATE ("action") + OBJECT ("recipient")

The subject comes first, if expressed; often it is incorporated into or at least suggested by the verb ending.

The predicate is the next primary element. This is composed of at least one verb, often accompanied by object pronouns and by a negative or other adverbial expressions.

Complements follow the verb; these include predicate nouns (after ser ), or direct and indirect object nouns or noun phrases.

subject   neg.    verb       direct object
Juan      nunca   levanta    la mano.

As regards direct and indirect object pronouns: They are normally attached to the end of:
1) affirmative commands:

2) infinitives:

después de bañarme... - after taking a bath...

3) gerunds ( -ndo forms):

levantándose... - getting up...

They normally precede conjugated verb forms. If the verb is a combination of a conjugated form and an infinitive or gerund, the object pronouns may be placed in either the pre- or post-position.

¡No me lo des! [negative command]

Lo hacemos a menudo. [conjugated verb]

Estoy diciéndotelo. OR [conjugated verb plus an -ndo form]

Te lo estoy diciendo.

Voy a hablarles. OR [conjugated verb plus an infinitive]

Les voy a hablar.

Indirect object pronouns precede direct object pronouns.

Normally in a Spanish interrogative sentence the order of the subject and verb is reversed: [interrogative- referring to a question, as opposed to a statement]

Usted habla italiano.
You speak Italian. [declarative]

¿Habla usted italiano?
Do you speak Italian? [interrogative]

When an interrogative word or expression (e.g., cómo, cuándo, dónde, adónde, por qué, quién, cuál, cuánto) appears in a question it normally occurs at the beginning:

¿Por qué hablan los colombianos tan rápido?
Why do Colombians speak so rapidly?

¿Cuándo viene Margarita a verme?
When is Margarita coming to see me?

Specific patterns of word order

Linking verb (e.g., ser & estar ):

Declarative sentences:

subject      (neg.)     linking verb   predicate noun/predicate adj.


(Nosotros)   (no)       somos          estudiantes de español.
(Ella)       (no)       está           cansada.

Interrogative sentences:

(neg.)     verb     subject     predicate noun or adjective

¿(No)      es       usted       el señor Montalbán?
¿(No)      estás    (tú)        lista?

Intransitive verb (no direct object):
Declarative sentences:

subject     (neg.)     intransitive verb     (adverb)

(Yo)        (no)       hablo                 (bien).

Interrogative sentences:

(neg.)     intransitive verb      subject      (adverb)

¿(No)      leen                   (ustedes)    (rápidamente)?

Transitive verb, no object pronouns:
Declarative sentences:

subject      (neg.)      transitive verb     direct object   (adverb)


(Yo)         (no)        hablo               español         (bien).

Interrogative sentences (transitive verb, no object pronouns):

(neg.)   transitive verb   subject   direct object

¿(No)    traen            (ustedes)  la cerveza?

Transitive verb, with object pronouns:

Declarative sentences:

subject (neg.) (IO pronoun) (DO pronoun) verb (DO phrase) (IO phrase)

(Usted) (nunca)  le           da un     regalo      (a Juan).
(Usted) se       lo           da                    (a él).

Interrogative sentences:

(neg.) IO pronoun DO pronoun  verb  subject (DO phrase) (IO phrase)

¿(Nunca)             le        da    (usted)  un regalo  (a Juan)?
¿Se                  lo        dan   (ustedes)           (a él)?

Interrogative sentences:

In general, in interrogative sentences -questions- the order of subject and verb reversed (compared to their order in a declarative sentence).
Yes/no questions (that is, questions which expect the reply "yes"or "no") have already been given in the previous sections.

linking verb subject predicate noun or adjective

¿Es               usted       protestante?
¿Estamos         (nosotros)   listos?

Information questions expect some information to be given in the answer, not a simple "yes" or "no". Ordinarily these sentences begin with an interrogative expression such as cómo (how), cuándo (when), dónde, (where) adónde (where to), por qué (why), quién (who), cuál (which), or cuánto (how much, how many).

¿Por qué hablan los colombianos tan rápido?
Why do Colombians speak so rapidly?

¿Cuándo viene Margarita a verme?
When is Margarita coming to see me?

interrogative     (neg)     verb     subject     object

¿Quién            (nunca)   trae                 la cerveza?
¿Qué                        quiere   ella?
¿Por qué                    dicen    ellos        eso?

Commands:

In commands the verb usually comes first, followed by the subject (if expressed). If the subject is tú or vosotros, it is included only for contrast or emphasis. Usted and ustedes are frequently included for reasons of courtesy and clarity.

Yo me siento aquí. Siéntate tú allí. [contrast]

Venga usted mañana a las siete.

Object pronouns are attached to the end of affirmative commands, and precede the verb in negative ones.

Special case #1: Verbs like gustar.

In standard declarative word order, subjects come before the verb and indirect object phrases are placed after it. The order of these two elements is normally switched with the verb gustar (to please, used -with subject and indirect object switched- in the sense of "to like"). Similar verbs include:

importar      - to matter, be important
parecer       - to seem, appear
encantar      - to enchant, delight, to like very much
interesar     - to interest, to be interested
resultar      - to result, turn out
faltar        - to be lacking, to lack
hacer falta   - to be necessary, to need
molestar      - to bother, irritate, to be irritated
(des) agradar - to please/displease,to like/not like
doler         - to hurt, ache
quedar        - to remain, to have left

ind. object phrase

ind. object  pronoun  verb     subject

A mí         me       gustan   las manzanas.
  =  I like apples.
A ellas      les      encanta  el regalo.
  =  They love the gift.
Nos                   falta    la paciencia.
  =  We lack (the) patience.

Special case #2: Direct object preceding the verb

Sometimes for emphasis or special effect the direct object noun or noun phrase is given before the governing verb. When this happens, a direct object pronoun is used with the verb, and the subject, if expressed, is often placed after the verb. In other words, the order of the subject and direct object is switched, and a direct object pronoun is added, one which agrees in gender and number with the direct object.

Carlos compró mis libros. [normal word order]

Mis libros los compró Carlos. [preceding direct object]

(Both sentences mean: Carlos bought my books.)

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One aspect of syntax is the order in which words appear in a sentence. Spanish word order is fairly flexible; however, it is best to use the more common patterns of putting words together to form sentences, as given below.

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Yes, no es un mito (it's not a myth)!

Spanish is one of the most popular languages spoken today, but its grammar has stopped too many learners in their tracks.

Just looking at the 15 tenses and moods alone is usually enough to give any Spanish student un dolor de cabeza (a headache).

But here's the thing: Verbs are like the spinal cord of any sentence in Spanish. There are many different types of verbs in Spanish, ranging from simple verbs with regular conjugations to intricate stem-changes. Sounds fun, right?

Well, this is exactly why this article was written. We are going to look into 33 difficult Spanish verbs which will help you sound a lot more like proficient Spanish speaker and writer.

But first let's give you a couple of great resources to improve your Spanish grammar knowledge base

This "Practice Makes Perfect" edition is ideally suited for beginner to intermediate level students and will help you finally understand how and when use the appropriate tense and mood through everyday examples covering a wide variety of topics and about 250 engaging exercises.

The principal behind this book is simple: Giving you an in-depth analysis of the 501 most common ly used verbs in Spanish and how to use them all in the 15 tenses and moods.

The new seventh edition includes brand new content covering passive and active voice formation, an additional list of 2200 regular verbs to improve your learning, sentences demonstrating Spanish verb usage in all tenses, a CD-ROM which includes language learning aids and an audio CD that reviews the formation and usage of Spanish verb forms.

This extremely complete and up-to-date Spanish frequency dictionary provides you with a list of the 5,000 most commonly used words in the language.

There's a special section which provides a comprehensive list of the most used verbs (which is quite different from the list of the preceding book) along with their English equivalents and sample sentences.

Lastly, this Spanish workbook will have you actually put into practice everything you'll come to learn about la gramática española (Spanish grammar). Each chapter will present you with exercises covering fundamental conjugation information and illustrative dialogues for you to master every tense and mood over a period of time.

After this brief intro, let's get right to the meat of this article!

1. Caber (to fit)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.

The stem changes to u in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
Present tense: quepo, cabes, cabe, cabemos, cabéis, caben

Preterit tense:

2. Caer (to fall)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.

The stem changes to i in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
Present tense: caigo, caes, cae, caemos, caéis, caen

3. Dar (to give)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.

The stem changes to i in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
Present tense: doy, das, da, damos, dais, dan

Preterit tense:

4. Estar (to be)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.

The stem changes to uv in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.
Irregular conjugation
6. Valer (to be worth)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.
Irregular conjugation
7. Traer (to bring)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.

The stem changes to j in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
8. Salir (to leave)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.
Irregular conjugation
9. Poner (to put)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.

The stem changes to u in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
10. Componer (to compose)
Difficulty
This verb is a compound form of poner. It follows the same pattern.

Note that the compound forms of these verbs are also irregular in the yo form. Compound forms are pretty easy to spot because they show a prefix ( des-, dis-, com-, con-, etc.) preceding the radical.
Irregular conjugations
11. Disponer (to arrange)
Difficulty
This verb is a compound form of poner. It follows the same pattern.
Irregular conjugations
12. Proponer (to propose)
Difficulty
This verb is a compound form of poner. It follows the same pattern.
Irregular conjugations
13. Reponer (to replace)
Difficulty
This verb is a compound form of poner. It follows the same pattern.
Irregular conjugation
14. Hacer (to do)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.

The stem changes to i in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
15. Deshacer (to undo)
Difficulty
This verb is a compound form of hacer. It follows the same pattern.
Irregular conjugations
16. Rehacer (to remake)
Difficulty
This verb is a compound form of hacer. It follows the same pattern.
Irregular conjugations
17. Saber (to know)
Difficulty

The first-person singular (the yo form) is irregular in the present tense.

The stem changes to u in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
18. Conocer (to know)
Difficulty Irregular conjugation
19. Agradecer (to thank, to be grateful)
Difficulty Irregular conjugation
20. Aparecer (to appear)
Difficulty Irregular conjugation
21. Ofrecer (to offer)
Difficulty Irregular conjugation
22. Permanecer (to remain)
Difficulty Irregular conjugation
23. Pertenecer (to belong to)
Difficulty Irregular conjugation
24. Traducir (to translate)
Difficulty

This verb changes from c to zcin the first-person singular only in the present tense.

The stem changes to j in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
25. Conducir (to drive)
Difficulty

This verb changes from c to zcin the first-person singular only in the present tense.

The stem changes to j in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
26. Producir (to produce)
Difficulty

This verb changes from c to zcin the first-person singular only in the present tense.

The stem changes to j in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
27. Tener (to have)
Difficulty

Irregular form in the present tense.

The stem changes to uv in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
Present tense: tengo, tienes, tiene, tenemos, tenéis, tienen

28. Andar (to walk)
Difficulty

The stem changes to uv in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
29. Poder (to be able to)
Difficulty

The stem changes to ue in the present tense.

The stem changes to u in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
30. Venir (to come)
Difficulty

Irregular first-person singular form (the yo form) in the present tense, and stem change in other present tense forms.

The stem changes to i in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
31. Querer (to want)
Difficulty

Irregular form with stem change in the present tense.

The stem changes to i in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
32. Traducir (to translate)
Difficulty

This verb changes from c to zcin the first-person singular only in the present tense.

The stem changes to j in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
33. Producir (to produce)
Difficulty

This verb changes from c to zcin the first-person singular only in the present tense.

The stem changes to j in the preterit tense.
Irregular conjugations
So, there you have it! There was muchísima (a lot of) information in this post and you might want to bookmark this page so you can come back to it often and refresh your mind when you need to.

The more you use these difficult Spanish verbs, the easier it will become for you to use and understand them when spoken out loud or in your reading materials.

If you want to expand on this particular subject, feel free to refer to the recommended list of books included in the first section of this article. It'll go a long way.

And One More Thing...

If you like learning practical, memorable Spanish lessons like these, then you'll love FluentU.

FluentU takes real-world videos like music videos, commercials, news, and inspiring talks and turns them into Spanish learning experiences.

Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the Spanish language and culture over time. You'll learn Spanish as it's actually spoken by real people.

FluentU has a wide variety of videos-topics like soccer, TV shows, business, movies and even magical realism, as you can see here:

FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive transcripts. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don't know, you can add it to a vocab list.

Learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU's Learn Mode. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you're on.

The best part is that FluentU keeps track of the vocabulary that you're learning, and it recommends you examples and videos based on the words you've already learned. Every learner has a truly personalized experience, even if they're learning the same video.

Start using FluentU on the website with your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU App from the iTunes store. The Android app is coming soon!

If you liked this post, something tells me that you'll love FluentU, the best way to learn Spanish with real-world videos.
Experience Spanish immersion online!

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33 Difficult Yet Super Useful Spanish Verbs and How to Use Them

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Yes, no es un mito (it's not a myth)! Spanish is one of the most popular languages spoken today, but its grammar has stopped too many learners in their tracks. Just looking at the 15 tenses and moods alone is usually enough to give any Spanish student un dolor de cabeza (a headache).

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spanish verb conjugation conjugations machine infinitive present past indicative imperfect gerund

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Spanish Verb Conjugation Machine automatically conjugates spanish verb infinitives

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LDLD: Spanish. Spoken Languag. Morphology.

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The differences in grammatical features between English and Spanish can influence the bilingual Spanish child's use of morphology and syntax in spoken and written English. Please refer to the table below for a listing of constructions that may be observed in the language of a child who is learning both languages.

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What's the most flattering question a non-native Spanish speaker can receive? "¿De dónde eres? ¿Argentina?"
Wow. That's just the ultimate compliment.

Seriously, it doesn't get better than that.

When people think you're from a Spanish-speaking country, you'll know your Spanish has finally reached a new level of excellence.

But you can't get there without perfect pronunciation, no matter how fluently you can string together Spanish sentences.

If you've interacted with native speakers and you haven't fooled one yet, then you've got some work to do!

Even if you think you're pronouncing Spanish words perfectly, you probably aren't. Unfortunately, we hear our own voices far differently than others hear them. We have vibrating jawbones, muffling muscles and all kinds of other things getting in the way.

Quick experiment: Record yourself speaking Spanish for 1 minute. Play it back. If you've never done this before, you might be surprised by what you hear.

Yeah, sure, your voice sounds higher-pitched and that sucks too-but the big takeaway should be that some of your Spanish words, no matter how fluent you may be, still sound a little off, or perhaps way off.

If you still think you sound perfect, play a recording of a native Spanish speaker and then play your voice back again. Even the most near-native speakers of Spanish as a second language have trouble perfecting the sounds. Some sounds just come out sounding a wee bit different when you speak.

That's totally normal. Luckily, it's not a hopeless situation.

We've targeted all the major problem sounds here, and we know exactly how you can adjust your pronunciation until you sound like a native Spanish speaker.

The Long and Short of Spanish Pronunciation

Anyone will tell you that Spanish isn't a complicated language. They'll tell you that the accent is so straightforward. You've probably heard someone tell you that "all the vowels always sound the same, like, the letter a always makes the same sound in every word, so it's much easier to pronounce Spanish than English!"

Okay, sure.

First, let's start by addressing with some curveballs that Spanish has been throwing you. There's an enormous diversity of accent, dialects, colloquial language and slang out there. While moving from town to town within the same darn country, you'll find that language usage, pacing, rhythm and accent all change significantly thanks to a few meters of regional separation.

In Andean regions of Latin America, you'll find sing-songy Spanish with beautiful lilts and a slower cadence. In coastal regions, you get mile-a-minute speakers who drop the last syllable in most longer words and don't pronounce a handful of consonants. In more indigenous communities, Spanish is fused with the local native language's words and accents, making things all the more challenging. Don't even get me started on Caribbean regions-forget everything you know about Spanish pronunciation, because they arguably speak their own languages entirely.

While living in Ecuador, I often got smacked with choque cultural(culture shock) simply by traveling between the Amazon, the Andes and the coast. After living in rural, slow-paced jungle communities, a weekend jaunt to the coast resulted in me not understanding any fast-talkin' costeños (coastal people) clearly for the first day and a half. When I traveled from Ecuador to the Dominican Republic, and on another occasion to Argentina, I definitely floundered for a bit before regaining my Spanish footing.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the "Qué difícil es hablar el español" guys could not be more on the money. That video's an internet sensation for a reason.

Nailing the Basics of Spanish Pronunciation

These are things you'll learn on the fly while traveling and interacting with native Spanish speakers. However, the internet has ways to explore the diversity of Spanish accents out there. Check out this impressively thorough, interactive guide created by Ohio State University. This gives you a chance to hear all the different takes on Spanish pronunciation you'll encounter in the Spanish-speaking world.

Now, to get a good grounding in straightforward, formal Spanish pronunciation-you know, what textbooks claim that native speakers sound like-you can explore some other educational resources. Try this awesome tool from the University of Iowa. It gives you a creepily thorough look at how to produce different Spanish sounds. Watch that nasal cavity go to work!

So, in this post, we're going to introduce you to typical Spanish pronunciation. Our main focus is to help you start getting all the most problematic Spanish sounds pronounced correctly. Beyond that, we're also going to help you sound far more casually cool -like a true blue native Spanish speaker-than your textbooks will.

It's kind of like learning the "General American Accent," which is characterized as a flat, generally unaccented English from the Midwestern or Northeastern United States. If you nailed this as an ESL student, you'd speak pretty great English.

Sure, you'll be able to understand most American English speakers, but will you be prepared to understand some neighborhood guys from Queens? Salty old New England farmers? Rural Southern folks? Australians? The answer is "yes," you'll be able to understand and communicate by and large, but you'll also need to adapt quickly as you move through different regions.

Learn Perfect Spanish Pronunciation: 11 Problem Sounds That Make You Sound Like a Gringo

1. General Consonant Issues

All Spanish consonants follow strict rules for the sounds they make, and there are few exceptions. The sound a consonant makes only changes when it's combined with certain consonants and vowels-and even this is fairly straightforward. There aren't nearly as many combinations and irregularities as there are with English sounds.

While many consonants are pronounced the same in Spanish as they are in English, one common mistake made by non-native speakers is over-enunciating the consonants in Spanish words. Consonants in Spanish are pronounced more softly, by and large, and we'll take a look at many specifics throughout the rest of this list.

2. General Vowel Issues

Spanish vowels are pronounced the same every time. Every. Single. Time. Learn ah, eh, ee, oh, oo, and you're golden. Watch this handy video, listen to it several times and practice those vowel sounds until you get them down pat. Like the lady says, "cinco vocales, cinco sonidos" (five vowels, five sounds).

But when you practice, be sure to pay attention to the length of the vowel sound. Spanish vowels are pronounced shorter, more abruptly. In English, we tend to let vowels drag on.

For example, many English speakers pronounce hola, which has two short and sweet vowels, as ooouulaaah. They let the and a drag on for far too long. Instead, try giving each vowel in hola a half-second of sound. Short and sweet.

And just because the vowels are short doesn't mean they're not strongly pronounced. Oh, no. Open your mouth wide when you pronounce these vowels. To say the letter a you should have your jaw dropped, and i requires you to stretch your mouth wide and be almost grinning. For o and u your mouth should be open wide with rounded lips. Keeping your mouth open wide for pronouncing vowels is key to sounding natural.

Keep practicing this with every Spanish word you encounter.

3. Accent Marks

Accent marks are extremely helpful. Misplacing or forgetting an accent can make a big difference in the meaning of your Spanish sentences. For example, , and each have different meanings, and you'll need to stress the right syllable when speaking.

If there's a long word that you're not sure about, check for an accent place on the word. Forvo is a great internet tool for checking Spanish pronunciation, because they'll often give you different regional pronunciations. Also, Google Translate is pretty great for this purpose-but it occasionally doesn't get the sounds quite right.

4. B/V

The difference between "b"and "v"in English is obvious. In spoken Spanish, and v are indistinguishable, and they both sound exactly like the English letter "b"in most situations.

In fact, many native Spanish speakers confuse them, particularly speakers who haven't received extensive education regarding reading and writing.

When the b or v comes at the beginning of a word, or when it follows the letter m or n, pronounce it like the letter "b" in the English word "ball." This is a deep, rounded b sound. In any other word, you'll step into the waters of truly foreign pronunciation-the letters b and v do something strange. Try to pronounce "b" as in "ball" without letting your lips come together. That's your sound.

For example, try pronouncing the word escoba (broom) without letting your lips touch. Your Spanish b here should not sound like the "b"in "ball." If you can master that, you've eliminated one distinctly problem sound.

5. Cl

makes us English speakers sound totally graceless. We spent far too much time attempting to enunciate both the c and the l. In Spanish, cl has a very graceful, elegant sound. That's because it's rather softly and swiftly pronounced.

To illustrate, try saying the English word "clomp." You likely made a very hard "c" sound and lingered on the "l." The tongue sticks to the roof of the mouth, hangs out there and produces a strong, muddy-sounding "l." This is typical of English, but not of Spanish.

Now let's swap "clomp" for (to clarify) or (clear). Try pronouncing these words by reducing the entire cl sound to a half a second. Just half a second. Your tongue should only gently tap the roof of your mouth, and then you quick and gracefully lilt on to the following .

Got that one down? You're one step closer to speaking with a clean, crisp Spanish accent.

6. C/S

The letter c will be pronounced like the Spanish letter s when followed by the vowels e and i. When followed by the vowels or a consonant, you'll use a hard c.

The trick is to get the hard c correct. We English speakers take our hard "c" very seriously. It's a strong sound, and is accompanied by breath rushing out of your mouth. Pronounce the English word "accommodate" strongly. Did you feel the air leaving your mouth when you hit the hard "c" sound? If not, try again-it's happening.

The different with the Spanish hard c is that no air should leave your mouth due to its pronunciation. Test this out with the Spanish acomodar (to accomodate). This should be crisply pronounced, and no time should be spent lingering on the hard c.

Got it? Good. On to the next one!

7. D

Oh, the letter d. This is a huge sticking point for any would-be Spanish speaker who's a native English speaker. I'd say that this English letter is partially responsible for Americans having a crap-tastic accent in any language. Our strongly and deeply pronounced English "d"-which sounds just like Homer Simpson's "D'oh!"-sounds so darn inelegant.

When we say a word like "donut," we open our mouths wide and our tongues loll about. Try saying that word. Pay attention to your tongue. In Spanish, we always want to strive to pronounce the Spanish letter d just like the "d" in "didn't." Thanks to the letter "i," perhaps, this letter "d" tends to stick to the tips of our tongues. Try saying this word compared to "donut" and feel the difference in your tongue's positioning and movement. "Didn't" hardly requires your tongue to move at all.

Try using this softer, lighter pronunciation of "d" for the Spanish word donar (to donate).Don't let that tongue move around! Keep it towards your front teeth.

Another trick with the Spanish d is when it comes at the end of a word in the form of -ado or -ada. For example, pescado (fish)or enamorada (in love).In Carribbean and coastal regions (among a few others), you'll likely never hear the -ado or -ada fully pronounced. sounds like pescao.

That's the most extreme version, but anywhere you go in the Spanish-speaking world you'll find that this final syllable is always pronounced softly-it's virtally nonexistant, to the point where your tongue shouldn't move at all or touch anything in your mouth to make this sound. The d should be very hard to hear. If you're pronouncing the do in pescado like the"do" in "donut," you've got yourself a problem.

8. G/J/Gua

Ah, a timeless office lunch room debate-do you pronounce the g in guacamole? Well, do you?

When the Spanish letter precedes or a consonant, it's a bit like the hard English "g" found in "grape" or "gorilla." The only difference from this English letter "g" sound is, as with any Spanish consonants, the Spanish g is pronounced a bit softer.

Before moving on with the letter g and its pronunciations, let's take a look at the Spanish letter j.The letter j has a breathy "h" sound, like the "h" in "house." You may already know this thanks to Spanish loan words in English-for example, how do you pronounce jalapeño? Exactly: ha-la-payn-yoh.

Okay, let's get back to that tricky letter g.

Now, does that mean we pronounce the sound in ? Nope. It turns out that the pair gu comes with its own set of rules. When gu is followed by an or o, as in (penguin), (war) and (old), respectively, the is hard. Formal Spanish rules might dictate that follow suit, but the spoken pronunciation is typically whua.

That means aguacate (avocado), and (Ecuadorian city) are all pronounced with a whua sound.

9. H

So, I'm willing to bet that you already know about this letter being silent. It's pretty basic stuff. However, this is commonly forgotten by learners when speaking Spanish. You hit certain words like almohada (pillow)or (now) and it just doesn't make sense not to pronounce it. But you still don't pronounce it.

When you see h in a word, pretend it doesn't exist unless it's in a ch combo. Oh, or unless it's in a funny loanword like hámster.

10. R/RR

You know what I'm about to tell you, because rolling your rr's can be tricky business. You might even want to blame your genetics, since some people have tongues with more limited mobility. But if the majority of Spanish speakers out there can do it, so can you.

A single r should almost sound like the Spanish or like the English "d" sound in "udder."

It's on the tip of your tongue, not in the back of your throat like the English letter "r." Let's demonstrate this by saying the English word "urn." Hold the r sound for 5 seconds. Where does that come from? You'll probably notice that this is a rumbling sound that echos from deep within your mouth and throat. I don't ever want to hear you use that in Spanish.

Now, once you finally master the rr tongue roll, don't get overenthusiastic and use it where you shouldn't. For example pero (but) and perro (dog) are distinguished by their very different r sounds.

I once had a friend who used rr everywhere, and went so far as to ask a restaurant server "¿Tiene morro?" (Do you have sass?) instead of "¿Tiene moro?" (Do you have the delicious rice-and-beans dish moro?). Oops!

11. L/LL

Welcome to the first-and only-Spanish consonant that I'll tell you to pronounce more strongly. We have a dainty "l"sound in English that doesn't exist in Spanish. This is the delicate "l" you see in "delicate" and "listen." Feel where your tongue goes when you pronounce these two words out loud-it shouldn't go far. This sound is made with the tippy-top of the tongue lightly pressed against your front teeth.

Instead, the Spanish l is lovingly pronounced and often lingered on. To start with, it's always pronounced like the sticky English "l" seen in the words "English," "glob" and "love." Your tongue should be pressing against the roof of your mouth to make these sounds, created a rich, hollow tone.

While you still want to keep your vowels short, you can pause and linger on the letter l in words like hola and loco. Or even, "¡hola, loco!"

That wacky ll letter is a whole different ball game. It's also notorious for changing drastically across regions. Generally, it's pronounced like the English letter "y" in "yell." So, the Spanish word (chicken) sounds like poy-yoh.

In areas with large indigenous populations and other particular regions, this may sound more like the "li" in "reptilian." That makes pollo sound like poll-yo instead of the usual poy-yo. In much of Argentina and some other regions, ll sounds like a cross between ja and sh or ch-or like the "zsa" in Zsa Zsa Gabor. This is really just fun trivia unless you're traveling to these regions-you should always stick with pronouncing ll as "y" unless the locals are peer pressuring you to change it up.

So, you've made it to the very end! If you can master all the above points, your Spanish will start to sound incredibly natural.

It won't be long before someone asks you, "Eh, ¿De qué parte de España eres?" (What part of Spain are you from?).

And One More Thing...

If you like learning practical, authentic Spanish lessons like these, then you'll love FluentU.

FluentU takes real-world videos like music videos, commercials, news, and inspiring talks and turns them into Spanish learning experiences.

Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the Spanish language and culture over time. You'll learn Spanish as it's actually spoken by real people.

FluentU has a wide variety of videos-topics like soccer, TV shows, business, movies and even magical realism, as you can see here:

FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive transcripts. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don't know, you can add it to a vocab list.

Learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU's Learn Mode. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you're on.

The best part is that FluentU keeps track of the vocabulary that you're learning, and it recommends you examples and videos based on the words you've already learned. Every learner has a truly personalized experience, even if they're learning the same video.

Start using FluentU on the website with your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU App from the iTunes store. The Android app is coming soon!

If you liked this post, something tells me that you'll love FluentU, the best way to learn Spanish with real-world videos.
Experience Spanish immersion online!

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Learn Perfect Spanish Pronunciation: 11 Problem Sounds That Make You Sound Like a Gringo

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What's the most flattering question a non-native Spanish speaker can receive? "¿De dónde eres? ¿Argentina?" Wow. That's just the ultimate compliment. Seriously, it doesn't get better than that. When people think you're from a Spanish-speaking country, you'll know your Spanish has finally reached a new level of excellence.

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Capitulo 2 TRADUCCION DE TRANSCRIPCION PHONETIC ESPAÑOLA

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Capitulo 2 TRADUCCION DE TRANSCRIPCION PHONETIC ESPAÑOLA

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Phonetic Transcription of Spanish Words. IPA Translator.

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The best tool to convert Spanish text to phonetic transcription using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. High-frequency words are highlighted.

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Spanish phonemes and phonemic transcription

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A phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes words. For example: /u/ and /e/ are phonemes because when you change /u/ in "tú" (you) for /e/ you have another word with a different meaning: "té" (tea). Phonological/phonemic descriptions will go between bars //.

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1) When I started this lesson I intended for it to be just an intro to the topic. But once I got into it, I ended up covering the topic very thoroughly. So at the beginning I say something like, "This is not an attempt to cover the topic thoroughly."

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El artículo que habla sobre el problema suena en la pronunciación que diferencian entre un hablante nativo de español y un hablante nativo de inglés va a algunas de las cosas que se habló en clase que diferencian a los dos. En este artículo, se habla de los muchos matices en la fonética que puede elevar a una persona que aprende español como segundo idioma al siguiente nivel en la pronunciación.

"Fonemas espanoles" ofrece una excelente práctica en fonética, a la vez que proporciona un montón de ejemplos que permiten una comprensión más profunda de la correcta utilización de muchos fonemas comunes.

El video de Youtube, Vogales, profundiza en algunas de las diferencias de pronunciación entre inglés y español, y donde se puede encontrar la separación de las sílabas como resultado de las diferencias de vocales entre los dos idiomas.

El convertidor fonético de la transcripción es una herramienta fantástica para romper el texto español en su contraparte fonética. La herramienta además incluye una opción para diferenciar entre español de España y México, pero lamentablemente no incluye una opción para los muchos otros países de habla hispana del mundo y sus dialectos.

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Q: In the battle of lay vs. lie, when do you use each and can you provide examples? -Annemarie V.
Don't forget about "lain," my friend! All these verbs have two things in common: They begin with the letter "L" and confuse the bejeezus out of many people. But here's a simple breakdown that will hopefully help you decipher when to use each one and when to use their past-tense equivalents (I've also included a handy chart at the end to help, but we'll get to that later).

The difference between Lay vs. Lie vs. Laid (Plus a handy chart). [ Click here to Tweet and share this grammar tip with others!]

Lay
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Lay and lie are both present-tense verbs, but they don't mean quite the same thing. Lay means to put or set something down, so if the subject is acting on an object, it's "lay." For example, I lay down the book. You, the subject, set down the book, the object.

Lie

Lie, on the other hand, is defined as, "to be, to stay or to assume rest in a horizontal position," so the subject is the one doing the lying- I lie down to sleep or When I pick up a copy of my favorite magazine, Writer's Digest, I lie down to take in all its great information-and not acting on an object. In both these cases, you, the subject, are setting yourself down. Are you with me so far?

FREE DOWNLOAD:
Debunking 10 Grammar (and Novel Writing) Myths

I Lie Down vs. Now I Lay Me Down (to Sleep)

To clarify things further, I'll answer this question that you're probably wondering: How can you be lying down in your examples while the classic nighttime prayer for kids clearly begins "Now I lay me down to sleep"? You must be out of your mind! It's true, I'm totally out of my mind, but both the examples I used and the kids' prayer are correct-and here's why.
[How Long Should Novel Chapters Be? Click here to find out.]
In I lie down to sleep, there is no object to the sentence, just subject (I). In Now I lay me down to sleep, there is a subject (I) and an object (me). Even though the subject and object are one and the same, the object is still present in the sentence, so you must use lay.

Laid vs. Lay vs. Lain

In the past tense, "lay" becomes "laid" (Last week I laid down the law and told her it was inappropriate for her to pick her nose) and "lie" becomes "lay" (Yesterday she lay down for a nap that afternoon and picked her nose anyway). Yes, "lay" is also the past tense of "lie." And the confusion doesn't end there.

To throw you for another loop, "laid" is also the past participle form of "lay." So, when helping verbs are involved, "lay" becomes "laid" and "lie" becomes "lain." Grandma had laid the chicken in the oven earlier this morning. The chicken had lain there all day until it was cooked all the way through and ready for us to eat.

Remember: Lay and laid both mean to set something down, while lie, lay and lain all mean the subject is setting itself down.

And now, I lay this question to rest. (Enjoy this totally awesome chart below to help you keep track of when to use lay, lie, laid, lain and more.)

Lay vs. Lie Chart

Infinitive Definition Present Past Past Participle Present Participle

to lay to put or place lay(s) laid laid laying
something down

to lie to rest or recline lie(s) lay lain lying
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you: Thanks for visiting The Writer's Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.
Want other Grammar Rules? Check out:
Sneaked vs. Snuck
Who vs. Whom
Which vs. That
Since vs. Because
Ensure vs. Insure
Home in vs. Hone in
Leaped vs. Leapt

Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer's Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You're Having a Girl: A Dad's Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.

Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
Sign up for Brian's free Writer's Digest eNewsletter: WD Newsletter

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Q: In the battle of lay vs. lie, when do you use each and can you provide examples? -Annemarie V. Don't forget about "lain," my friend! All these verbs have two things in common: They begin with the letter "L" and confuse the bejeezus out of many people.

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Este trastorno es terrible. La manera en que el paciente habla, es claro que él tiene una comprensión completa de cada pregunta que se le está pidiendo, pero no puede articular lo que está pensando. Cuando era joven, mi vecino se ocupaba de la afesia de Broca, y siempre era difícil verla buscar las palabras para sus pensamientos. Tuvo que reaprender la capacidad de hablar su mente, y ella tuvo que volver a aprender algunas partes de inglés, así
Ella fue capaz de volver a aprender las partes de inglés que ella había olvidado con bastante facilidad, sin embargo, porque ella ya tenía una comprensión de la forma en que el lenguaje funcionaba como un todo. Puedo ver muchas de las cosas que ella luchó con ocurren en este hombre también.

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La piedra de Rosetta, el programa infame que pretende enseñarle a aprender un nuevo idioma de la misma manera que un niño aprendería uno, es defectuoso en esa lógica. Como se discutió en clase, los bebés y los niños aprenden el lenguaje debido a lo impresionables que son a su edad. Como adultos, sabemos más de 50.000 palabras, y la mayoría de esas palabras son aprendidas como niños, mientras luchamos por la capacidad de comunicarnos. El problema con Rosetta Stone es que descuida el hecho de que los adultos son propensos a utilizar la lógica en su aprendizaje, a diferencia de los niños que utilizan el contexto y el entorno. Es difícil para los adultos separarse de su lengua materna ya conocida y aprender algo nuevo con una pizarra limpia de la manera que un niño lo hace, y es por esta razón que Rosetta Stone ha sido tan infructuosa con el seguimiento a través de su reclamación de enseñar todo lo que tome un nuevo lenguaje.

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Summary of This Review:

Rosetta Stone rarely works. I can say this with confidence because for years I've traveled the world, gotten a lot of stamps in my passport, and talked with thousands of language learners.

Every time I met someone who had learned a new language, I asked them how they learned it. When I asked people who were trying to learn Spanish, French, German, or some other language with Rosetta Stone, they never could say more than a few words. They couldn't even ask a useful phrase like "What's your name?" in their new language.

So if you're asking yourself, "Does Rosetta Stone work?" my answer is, "For everyone I've met (and I've met hundreds, perhaps thousands of language learners), Rosetta Stone does not work."

Summary of this Rosetta Stone review: "Rosetta Stone doesn't work for most people."

I wish I didn't have to say that, because the people who work at Rosetta Stone are a great, talented bunch of people. Hopefully they will eventually develop language-learning programs that really work.

What Works Better Than Rosetta Stone?

Three companies offer programs that work much better than Rosetta Stone. For beginners we recommend that you try a free and practical lesson right now, by clicking on the language you want to learn below.

Then-on the next page not here-click the big red "Try It" button.

We recommend Pimsleur for beginners if we don't have your language.

We recommend Yabla for intermediate to advanced learners.

If you are learning Japanese, you will want to read our Rosetta Stone Japanese review.

That's the end of the summary of this review. The detailed review starts below.

Rosetta Stone used to claim that you, an adult, can learn a foreign language the same way a child would, if you just bought their program. Then the company got a huge amount of well-deserved criticism. So they changed their ads-just a little.

They now say that if you use their program, you will be "learning a new language the way you learned your first."

It's the same bold claim, and it's still wrong.

Your Brain Is Different Than a Baby's Brain

To understand why Rosetta Stone's claim is not simply an advertising exaggeration but 100 percent wrong, you have to discover a little bit about the difference between the brain of an adult and the brain of a newborn baby.

From the age of one month to three months, a baby will respond to all the phonemes (language sounds) that he or she hears. Any child can learn any language that he or she hears.

But by age 1, the baby's brain has already built special neural processing circuits, and the baby will no longer perceive phonemes that are not in his or her native language.

Guess what? As an adult language learner of Spanish, for example, you will not even hear phonemes that are not in a language you already know well.

I am paraphrasing a lecture from Stanford biology professor Robert Sapolsky. Watch at least five minutes of this lecture to see what I am talking about.
The Biology of Language Learning by Robert Sapolsky.
You cannot learn a new language as an adult the way you learned your first language as a child, because your adult brain is different than a child's brain!

You Shouldn't Have to Guess

Have you ever seen a toddler point at a dog and say, "Look, Mommy, a cat!" Children do a lot of guessing when they learn a new language. It also takes children several years to learn their first language. They waste a lot of time, even though they usually have two full-time, live-in language tutors called parents.

You've already learned English, so you shouldn't have to start learning your next language by guessing and making all of your childhood mistakes over again. If you copy the learning methods of small children (as Rosetta Stone suggests you do), you will waste a lot of time.

Adults and children who are old enough to read a newspaper don't need to guess what foreign words and phrases mean. They can use translations to understand the meaning the first time, without guessing.
Why Rosetta Stone Doesn't Work Well for Children
You might reasonably ask, "Does Rosetta Stone work for children?" Sadly, the answer is also no, but for a different reason. Rosetta Stone's format of using pictures and having you match them to foreign words makes it very easy for children (and, in fact, for anyone) to remember the picture and get the answer right but without really knowing the foreign word or phrase.

If you have ever remembered a man's face but couldn't remember his name, you know what I'm talking about.

Rosetta Stone's program design accidentally makes it easy to "cheat" and get the right answer without really knowing it. Children are especially prone to doing this. The pretty pictures actually slow down a child's learning.
Rosetta Stone Pretends to Be What It's Not

Q: If you call a sheep's tail a leg, how many legs does a sheep have?

A: Four, of course. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

You see, it doesn't matter what you call something, because things are what they are, not what you call them.

Rosetta Stone markets its program as "Interactive Language Immersion," but unfortunately that's just a slogan. You can't sell language immersion in a yellow box.

What Is Real Language Immersion?

Real language immersion is full time and hardcore. You can't create language immersion by

using a computer program for an hour a day.

You can get it by going to a place like Middlebury College, where you will sign this pledge:

"In signing this Language Pledge, I agree to use ______________ as my only language of communication while attending the Middlebury Language Schools. I understand that failure to comply with this Pledge may result in my expulsion from the School without credit or refund."

You can also create a language immersion program by living or working in a foreign country. Anything short of that is not immersion. Sorry, Rosetta Stone.
Starting With Useless Words and Phrases
The Rosetta Stone Spanish program starts with a list of words like man, woman,and so on. It also uses short phrases like "The man eats" or "The man drinks."

These are things that you will eventually need to learn, but you should start with useful phrases like "What's your name?" and "What is this called?"

Next in Rosetta Stone, you will go on to phrases that are also not especially useful. For example, in the Rosetta Stone Russian program, there is a picture of a boy lying face down in a park with a soccer ball balancing on his back.

The sentence you are supposed to learn is: "The boy is under the ball." How many times in your life will you need to say that? How about this phrase from the Korean program: "The people have a pen."

Rosetta Stone does offer some practical phrases like "What's your name?" The problem is that they aren't anywhere near the beginning of the program.

Sadly, many people will quit before they ever reach the practical phrases they should have learned on their very first day.

If you do try to learn with Rosetta Stone, don't give up because of the boring list of vocabulary words you will have to start with.

Is It Possible to Be Worse Than Useless?

Actually, it is possible to be "worse than useless."

A "worse than useless" program not only fails to teach you anything useful, it also convinces you that you have no talent for language learning.

Progress: An Online School

Rosetta Stone has added an online school to their offerings. So while the software itself has arguably gotten worse over the years (you now have only two images to choose from instead of four), signing up for their online school might help you, especially if you like the teacher and find the human interaction to be motivating.

High Prices and a Never-Ending Sale

A lot of people criticize Rosetta Stone for being expensive. This criticism is 100 percent unjustified. These critics are usually people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Learning a language well (or even badly) really improves your life. Try the Rosetta Stone free demo, and if you can remember what you learned the next day or the next week, then Rosetta Stone works for you and it's a great deal.

In fact it would still be a great deal even if Rosetta Stone charged ten times as much as they do.

Unfortunately, for most people, Rosetta Stone really doesn't work.

The critics who whine about the high price of Rosetta Stone also are ignoring the fact that it's on sale at very big discounts most of the time.

So if you want to get that pretty yellow box on your desktop at a lower price, just go to the bottom right of their home page and sign up for their email newsletter. Soon you will be offered a much lower price.

I Don't Like Writing This

I don't like writing about Rosetta Stone's lack of progress. I would have much preferred to write, "The software is getting better." But sadly, it doesn't look like it is.

The people who work there are decent human beings. I'm sure they would throw me a life preserver if I were drowning or buy me lunch if I were hungry.

The company's marketing people are both decent human beings and geniuses. It's time for Rosetta Stone to hire some educational software geniuses to work with the marketing geniuses in developing new products.

If that happens, it will be a winning combination.

Who Should Use Rosetta Stone?

It might be OK to try Rosetta Stone if:

You can keep your enthusiasm for foreign language learning and then go on to another program if Rosetta Stone doesn't work for you.

Your only other language-study tools are books. For example, if you are learning Spanish, we still think that Rosetta Stone Spanish is slightly better than trying to learn Spanish with only a textbook.

You don't mind if your study program only teaches practical phrases near the end of the course instead of at the beginning.

What's a Better Way to Learn Your Next Language?

Language101.com is quite a bit more effective than Rosetta Stone. But please don't believe us just because we say so. Try our free lesson by clicking on the link below.

Please also try the Rosetta Stone free lesson.

Then buy the program-do it today-from which you can remember more after 30 minutes.

Our customers tell us that they can remember much more several days after they studied when they study with our program compared to Rosetta Stone.
What if I Want to Learn a Language You Don't Offer?
We have written a lot of articles on how to learn any language. These articles

will help you learn your new language faster, no matter which program you buy.

We also strongly recommend Pimsleur if we don't offer your language.

No, it's not an affiliate link and, no, we don't get any money from them for saying it. But we like Pimsleur, and you may too. It does work, especially for going from knowing nothing to being minimally conversant.

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Rosetta Stone-It won't help you learn Spanish https://language101.com/rsr/ please r/t
This critique is based on using Rosetta Stone Spanish 1, 2, and 3 in 2016. Sadly, not much has changed since we first tried it in in 2006.

Rosetta Stone uses the same program for all languages, so this is also a review of Rosetta Stone French, German, Russian, Italian, and Japanese. If you are interested in learning Japanese, you will probably enjoy our
Rosetta Stone Japanese Review
We know your time is valuable. Thank you for reading our Rosetta Stone reviews.

Try a Free and Practical Lesson Right Now

Click on the language you want to learn below then - on the next page not here - click on the big red "Try It" button

Why I Wrote This Review . . .

by Brent Van Arsdell

I really do like the people who work at Rosetta Stone. They are a smart and talented bunch.

I wrote this review in part to inspire Rosetta Stone to the greatness that the company is capable of. Someday they may develop software that really works.

Fortunately, in response to this review and others, they no longer advertise that adults can learn like a child with their software. I commend them for that. But they haven't significantly changed the software. It still doesn't work for most people.

Of course, I also wrote this review for the thousands of people who have tried to learn a language with Rosetta Stone and failed. If you are one of those people, I want you to know that your failure is not your fault.

The methods you were told to use just don't work. In fact, you might even be a language-learning genius and not know it yet, who knows?
My short bio
Last Updated: December 12, 2016

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Rosetta Stone Reviews - Why It Doesn't Work.

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Rosetta Stone rarely works. I can say this with confidence because for years I've traveled the world, gotten a lot of stamps in my passport, and talked with thousands of language learners. Every time I met someone who had learned a new language, I asked them how they learned it.

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Mirando a través de esta lista de palabras supuestamente oscuras, es interesante tratar de descifrar los significados de cada palabra antes de mirar la definición basada únicamente en la composición de la palabra. Muchas veces, las palabras se construyen de tal manera que su significado puede ser resuelto simplemente usando su conocimiento de otras palabras o incluso de otros idiomas. Muchas veces en idiomas extranjeros, te darás cuenta de que a pesar de ser diferentes idiomas, muchas palabras comparten estructuras similares. Esto por lo general se remonta a los idiomas que han evolucionado a partir de un lenguaje raíz, como el latín, y cómo varios lenguajes diferentes vienen de uno. Teniendo en cuenta las pistas del contexto y el conocimiento previo de otras palabras e idiomas, a menudo es fácil de entender el significado de una palabra oscura.

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What is this section all about?

This section, as the name suggests, is about words that are no longer in use. They say English is a funny language but it is pretty cruel one too; it periodically kills words and then goes on adds new words to its database. In this section, we explore words that have been 'killed' and are no more. Don't be surprised by some of these words and take them as they are.

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This section, as the name suggests, is about words that are no longer in use. They say English is a funny language but it is pretty cruel one too; it periodically kills words and then goes on adds new words to its database. In this section, we explore words that have been 'killed' and are no more.

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En este video, nos enteramos de un pueblo de África que vive en Colombia que ha descendido de esclavos, pero todavía ha logrado preservar su lenguaje de Palenquero. Sin lugar a dudas, preservar ese lenguaje ha tenido un precio. El lenguaje de Palenquero ha sufrido cambios a lo largo de los siglos a partir de su forma original, como suele ser el aislamiento del lugar de origen de una lengua, pero en su fondo sigue siendo el idioma palenquero. Como hablamos en clase, no hay una forma correcta de un lenguaje, ya que diferentes partes del mundo habrán desarrollado su propia versión de un lenguaje, lo que significa que el Palenquero preservado por el pueblo de Colombia sigue siendo tan grande como siempre ha sido.

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Un tesoro que descendientes de esclavos buscan preservar. En un pueblo en el norte de Colombia, descendientes de esclavos cimarrones intentan conservar el palenquero, una lengua creada allí a principios del siglo XVII por esclavos fugados de Cartagena. Sería la única lengua criolla de base castellana que sobrevive en América.

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El primer enlace en mi página, el de los verbos irregulares difíciles en español, está entre mis favoritos en mi página de padlets. La morfología irregular de estos verbos siempre me ha dado problemas, ver como cada uno parece seguir sus propias reglas ligeramente matizadas para la conjugación. La página ofrece consejos sobre cómo recordar estos verbos y por qué son importantes. El segundo enlace en la página, el de "Lie, Lay, Laid, Lain" en Inglés es el favorito de mi padre. La página expresa la dificultad que a veces puede llegar con la sencillez de la lengua inglesa, y permite al lector apreciar cómo la morfología de la conjugación de verbos españoles a veces puede hacer las cosas más claras. El conjugador de palabras español es una herramienta útil para aquellos que aprenden español para ver todas las diversas formas en que un verbo puede ser conjugado. Esto es especialmente útil, porque ver todas las conjugaciones de un verbo (especialmente un verbo irregular) en un lugar puede dar a una persona una mejor idea de las diferencias entre cada conjugación. El enlace final, Morfología en Ingles y Español, da una comparación lado a lado de la morfología presente tanto en inglés como en español. Esta página es interesante, porque ver las morfologías de ambos lenguajes lado a lado permite al espectador ver fácilmente las similitudes y diferencias en la forma en que cada idioma ha evolucionado.

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El primer enlace en mi pagina de padlet, "1, 2, 3, Teach Me Spanish Syntax" ha sido una herramienta muy importante para mí para entender la sintaxis española. La forma en que la página está configurada tiene la intención de enseñar al espectador cómo y por qué las palabras españolas están organizadas de la manera que son. Ha sido una herramienta muy útil para mí para entender los árboles de sintaxis que discutimos en clase el lunes. A pesar de que no tiene ningún árbol de sintaxis en la página, la forma en que explica la sintaxis española tiene muchos métodos similares. "What is Syntax, Really?" Es en realidad sólo una hoja de revisión para una prueba publicada en línea, pero hace un buen trabajo de asignar un significado real a lo que es exactamente la sintaxis, y cómo interactúa con la morfología de la palabra para crear oraciones y gramática adecuadas. Leer esta página me ha dado más confianza en entender qué es exactamente la sintaxis y cómo se aplica en la vida cotidiana. "Brown's Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development" explica el viaje de desarrollo que todos los niños pasan por naturalmente recogiendo las aplicaciones diarias de la sintaxis y la morfología. A pesar de ser adultos, muchos de los métodos que se discuten en cuanto a cómo los niños captar estos dos conceptos se puede aplicar a la forma en que los adultos que tratan de aprender un segundo idioma recoger los matices de la sintaxis refinada y la morfología. Creo que estas etapas ayudan a explicar, a su manera, por qué las personas que aprenden el lenguaje formalmente pueden tener más dificultad para comprender ciertas reglas gramaticales que aquellas que aprenden en casa por medio de la exposición-es cuestión de sentir lo que está bien o mal. El enlace final en mi pared conduce a un inspector español-una herramienta útil que verificación ortográfica, verificación gramatical y chequeo sintáctico. Con esta herramienta, una persona puede verificarse a sí mismos en la estructura de la oración si la estructura simplemente no se siente muy bien o si no fluye de la manera que creen que debería. Aquellos que se enseñan formalmente a menudo no tienen un sentido para recoger cuando una frase es sólo un poco mal, y por lo que esta herramienta proporcionará a los que tienen la capacidad de doble control.