Now for some English …

I hope you enjoyed a laugh or two. If you want to watch some more, there are plenty on Youtube.

In 2008 Lamborghini will offer a car called the Reventón to 20 people who can scrape together the million Euros to buy it.

The word reventón has various meanings for Spanish speakers, including party, explosion, burst, flat tire, and blowout. Lamborghini has also made cars called the Espada, Diablo, Murciélago, and Gallardo, but it’s not the only car manufacturer to use Spanish words to name cars.

Ford manufactured the Fiesta, Festiva, Pinto, Granada, Cortina, Sierra, and Bronco. Chevrolet sold the El Camino for a while. Dodge has the Durango, which is also the name of a Mexican state. Hyundai sells the Veracruz (another Mexican State), and the Santa Fe. In Toyota’s lineup are the Corona, Paseo, Premio, and Vista.

Do you know the meaning in Spanish of all the car models named above? Can you think of any more?

Picture credits: Tacoekkel and Zölle.

So here you go. Five* random things that you might not have known about Spanish or related to Spanish in some way.

*You might have noticed that I’m not to good at following directions, so I gave you five things instead of eight. Here’s the rules of the meme:

Share eight random facts about yourself, pick eight bloggers to keep the meme going, tell the eight bloggers that you tagged them, and of course include these rules in your post.

Since I broke the first rule, I’ll break the second and only tag 5 others. So… Osman, Zach, MissProfe, Aaron and Simon, you’re it.

Nor is the language learner like a brick wall.

Building a brick wall uses the same process as gaining language fluency and offers us a solid metaphor for language learning.

Building Blocks

As a bricklayer begins building a wall, he joins the bricks together with mortar, placing each brick carefully, and ensures that the wall rises vertically at 90 degrees.

Each Spanish word you learn is a brick. You begin placing them at the base of your language learning, joining them together with the grammar rules you are learning. You place one word upon another, just as with bricks. One of the first words you learned was libro, then when the word librería came up, you easily placed that brick upon the first one and your Spanish language structure became stronger. When you learned of libreta, librero, and libresco those bricks were easily secured to the structure based on the foundation of the previous words.

Every time you learn a new word, it becomes attached to the language structure you are forming, strengthening the structure. As the structure grows and becomes more solid, it becomes easier and easier to add new words.

A House of Cards

We are building a brick structure, firmly mortared in place, and not a house of cards. Be deliberate with every new word. Give yourself a reason to remember it. Relate it to previous words you already know and use, causing it to adhere firmly to your structure. If you let words in one ear and out the other, it’s like throwing a brick at your wall and wishing it would magically find it’s place and stick there, even becoming a foundation for other new words.

It won’t happen.

Randomly studying the language without taking the effort to consolidate what you’re learning into a strong and well-understood foundation is like building a house of cards. You can only build so long before it crashes.

Drive-Thru Language Learning

We’re spoiled with instant this and while-you-wait that. People want a fast-food language learning experience. Instead of investing the time to properly marinate the steaks, they want to pull up, order, and drive away with a steaming bag of McSpanish.

Language learning shouldn’t be rushed.

Take your time to carefully lay just a few bricks, and wait for the mortar to harden before adding more. Take a single paragraph of real, live Spanish from a newspaper and force yourself to learn every single word in it. Use each one of those words in a new sentence. Then review those words every day for two weeks. You’ll be laying good solid bricks that will allow your language learning structure to grow larger than, and last longer than the Coliseum.

Bricks and Mortar Together

You’ve probably seen ancient dry stone fences and walls. They can be strong and last a long time, but are usually made by interlocking the stones. You could build a dry brick wall with carefully laid bricks, but if you use mortar, it’ll be stronger.

As you continue to learn words and expand your vocabulary, you also need some grammar and some knowledge of how to put those words together and form sentences. Would you build a house using only bricks or using only mortar? What good it is to know grammar but not know any words so you can put it to use? And how can it help you to have a large vocabulary if the longest sentence you can muster consists of two words? Try to strike a balance so you can grow your language with the correct mixture of bricks and mortar.

Now go buy a periódico, pick a paragraph, and start laying those bricks.

I was talking with a Mexican man today and I heard him say the strangest thing.

Ya váyanse, yo se los pongo.

Now that in and of itself sounds perfectly grammatical, but here’s the context. Two of his friends were walking by and said they were in a big hurry becuase they had to go over to another building to change a lightbulb before leaving for an appointment that they were almost late for. To this, my friend responded “Ya váyanse, yo se los pongo”, telling them to go ahead and leave and he would take care of changing the lightbulb.

Let’s analyze this.

- Then I responded ¿Qué dijiste?
- Yo se los pongo.
- Me to a native speaker ¿Y no debiste haber dicho “yo se lo pongo”?
- Blank stare

So I ask for a couple of examples and write them on a paper towel.

Remember that in these examples, the person is always talking to two or more people, and the object/action they are talking about it singular.

• Un calentador está prendido, y ya deben apagarlo: Yo se los apago.
• Unos amigos quieren cocinar un pollo: Tráiganme el pollo y se los cocino.
• A varios niños: Si se mojan con el agua, se las voy a cerrar.
• Unas personas tienen que irse y cerrar su casa: Si tienen que irse, yo se las cierro.

He also mentioned, in answer to one of my queries, that as far as he knows, that’s standard usage in Spanish. That declaration, along with the elicited examples, came from a 30+ year old Mexican male, who is a native Spanish speaker.

To me, the original utterance should have been Yo se lo pongo. The lo being singular, to represent a singular light bulb. But if this is how a large group of native speakers use the language ^{[confirmation needed]}, then who am I to get all prescriptivist and tell them it should be different?

I would love it if some native or non-native speakers could confirm the extent of this usage. If you’ve heard anything like this, where did you hear it, and who was speaking?

Sure, you can go out and buy a great printed dictionary, but let’s take a look at the best online monolingual Spanish dictionaries.

The RAE Building in Madrid, Spain.

1. The RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española.

The RAE publishes one of the most prestigious Spanish dictionaries in print, which is also available on their website. It’s all in Spanish, with Spanish definitions. One of the best free resources you can find online.

2. Diccionarios.com

I remember when this site was free. Now, if you want to do more than a couple of searches, you’re going to have to sign up and pay for the privilege. But it is probably worthwhile. This dictionary gives you a definition, audio pronunciation, synonyms and antonyms in Spanish, as well as having bilingual diccionarios in Spanish for: English, French, Catalan, German, Italian, and Portuguese. If you want your free trial to last a minute longer so you can really convince yourself to sign up, just clear the cookies in your browser.

3. Signum’s Spanish Thesaurus.

This is a decent dictionary if what you’re looking for is a synonym, antonym, part of speech, or inflection. The only thing missing are some definitions. But hey, it’s free and you can get an idea of what a word means by looking at its synonyms.

4. The Dictionary at ElMundo.es.

This site does not seem as “formal” as the other three– that’s the only way I can describe it– but it has a fairly exhaustive dictionary with definitions, as well as a thesaurus and several bilingual dictionaries. The good thing is it’s free.

Now you have no excuse not to use a monolingual “Spanish-Spanish” dictionary!

About Dr. Pimsleur

Paul Pimsleur was a French teacher, linguist and memory expert whose research focused on language acquisition and how children learn language without having formal knowledge of their language’s grammar and structure. His four basic tenets are: Anticipation, Graduated Interval Recall, Core Vocabulary, and Organic Learning. The result of this research was his language learning system that trains adults in a new language using an all-audio approach. Learners listen and speak along with a CD and learn their target language in a naturalistic fashion.

This is all good and well, but the typical Pimsleur course costs about $250. Is it worth it?

Free Spanish Lesson

See for yourself by taking the Spanish course for a test drive. Simon & Schuster, the publishers of Pimsleur’s works, offers the first 30-minute lesson of the Pimleur course for most languages. Download or listen to the mp3 of the first Spanish lesson, and see what you think.

Buy the Full Course

If you’re convinced, you can get it on amazon That’s the level one course, there are also level two and level three. Each one has thirty 30-minute lessons. If you don’t want to pop for one of these full-fledged courses, you can get just the first 8 lessons for about $20.

Here are links to these courses on Amazon, which is a lot cheaper than some other bookstores. Disclosure: If you use these links to buy a course, I will get a fee from Amazon for referring you to them.

• Spanish Quick & Simple (Lessons 1-8) about $15
• Spanish One (Lessons 1-30) about $220
• Spanish Two (Lessons 31-60) about $220
• Spanish Three (Lessons 61-90) about $220

You can find all kinds of things on the BBC website, and one of those that I ran across today is a Basic Spanish course. It’s designed for kids, but it looks useful to anyone who is beginning to learn Spanish. There’s lots of basic vocabulary and phrases with interactive characters that pronounce the words for you. After you’ve gone through the basics, browse the learn more section where there’s a handful of other units. It’s all fairly basic, but very well done, with visual and audio interaction, and the four cartoon characters that lead you around.

Marido. The word marido sounds a lot like ‘married’, but it really means ‘husband’. Esposo is another way to say husband. For wife, try esposa or mujer.

Chocar. This verb has nothing to do with choking, which would be estrangular, ahogar or sofocar. Chocar means to crash. It can also be used to express disgust or dislike. “Me choca esa canción” means “I’m sick of that song”.

Sensible does not mean sensible. Sensible in English is sensato, and sensible in Spanish is sensitive in English.

Vaso. This Spanish would means glass/cup when referring to a drinking vessel. Vaso is also used for vein. Vaso sanguíneo is blood vein. The English vase is a florero.

Pariente. This is does not mean parent, it means relative as in blood relations. Parents are padres.

Sano means healthy. To talk about being sane, look up the words juicio, cuerdo, cordura and sensato.

And that’s all I can think of for now. I’ll have to sit down and see if I can come up with some more to round out this series. It seems like it should have at least 5 parts.

¿Cómo se dice?
Mejoremos un poco

La comunicación oral es una herramienta que usamos la mayor parte del tiempo, nos ayuda a expresar sentimientos, deseos, necesidades, elogios, también nos sirve para causar algo negativo en otro, pero sin duda el hablar nos ayuda a quedar bien o mal frente a los demás. Aquí van algunas correcciones que te ayudarán a corregir lo que pronuncias mal.

Correcto — Incorrecto
dijiste — dijistes
viste — vistes
a veces — en veces
hoy — a hoy
nadie — nadien
sin embargo — pero sin embargo
cerca de — cercas de
debes ir, debes hacer — debes de ir, hacer
Ana e Iván — Ana y Iván
leones u osos de peluche — leones o osos de peluche
dar una disculpa — pedir una disculpa
haya dicho — haiga dicho
irresponsable — inrresponsable
espérame tantito — perame tantito
mira ven — ira ven
catsup — capsu
préstamelo — empréstamelo
diferencia — diferiencia

So if you want to sound like a native speaker, make some of these mistakes Actually only kids make these mistakes– por lo general adults don’t.