4 Good and Bad things about the Spanish Language.

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Sure, I make my videos in english most of the time but that doesn't mean I've forgotten where I come from and that appart of english I have spoken spanish all my life, mostly because I live in a spanish speaking country.

Anyway, a lot of native english speakers find it difficult, and it makes sense, spanish can be a mess... but also can be easy. Today I'm re-writing the script I made for the video on youtube, so you can read it here on my blog and use it for research or entertainment or to make fun of me and my lame (but surprisingly going well) attempt to be a language nerd and amateur self taught linguist. Without further ado:

 

Good things

1: The letter egne (Ñ, ñ): it is written on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as ɲ (a voiced palatal nasal) has a unique sound in spanish, and even tho we use it as part of our everyday conversations it helps a lot when distinguishing words.

For example in Italian you have ano and anno, that would be anus and year, respectively. In Spanish you have Ano and Año. Easier. By the way most of the time we don't write it as you would find it in books or wikipedia. But instead a N with a Macron. (N̄, n̄). It is also the sound that appears in italian as gn (lasagna, lavagna [blackboard], etc)

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2. Exclamation and Question Marks: In english, for example, you have one Exclamation Mark ( ! ) and one Question Mark ( ? ), and there will be times in where you will have issues knowing where does a question start.

In spanish things are easier since we have opening and closing marks, so knowing where a question starts is way easier.

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3. Diacritics: Even though not all the words have written accents, some of them do and that simplifies when learning pronunciation. 

• Plástico - Plastic (Accent is on the A)
• Fonética - Phonetics (Accent is on the E)
• Sandía - Watermelon (Accent is on the I)
• León - Lion (Accent is on the O)
• Brújula - Compass (Accent is on the U)

All this plus the fact that we only have the Acute accent, that we call tilde or acento ( ´ ) for this cases, in counterpart to other languages that also use

Grave (  `  ), Circumflex ( ˆ ), caron or haček ( ˇ ), etc. Also, even tho the rules may seem kinda hard they are pretty much always followed, so if you learn them, you won’t fail using accents.

Other diacritic we use is known in Spanish as diéresis, on specific situations and only over the letter u. (Ü, ü) but tbh that one may be one of the bad things.

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4. Phonetic Consistence (on vowels) 

• A, a  is always   /a/    (as in "chapter")
• E, e, is always   /e/    (as in "bed")
• I, i, is always     /i/     (as in "beer")
• O, o, is always  /o/    (as in "cough")
• U, u, is always  /u/    (as in "poop")

there will be some exceptions depending on the word but you won't have different meanings by making a mistake and saying /y/ instead of /u/ (You'll sound weird but it wouldn't be the end of the world)

BAD THINGS:

1. Conjugations and Tenses: In english you have the words Have, Has, Had, Having and some other words that help them have a different meaning like would or could, but the main and those for.

In spanish you have Haber (the infinitive form) , and also:

he, has, ha, hemos, habéis, han, ha habido, había, habías, había, habíamos, habíais, habían, había habido, habías habido, había habido, habíamos habido, habíais habido, había habido, hube, hubiste, hubo, hubimos, hubisteis, hubieron, hube habido, hubiste habido, hubo habido, hubimos habido, hubisteis habido... And so with other verbs. Spanish has a looooot of conjugations.

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2. Word Strings: Even though you can speak really fast in English and some words will naturally stick together it happens just sometimes. In Spanish it happens ALL THE TIME and we can speak really fast and weird sometimes, add that to accents (people not pronouncing ‘s’, or mispronouncing ‘r’, or saying ‘b’ and ‘v’ the exact same way, or ‘s’, ‘c’ and ‘z’ the same way too). Spanish (mostly American Spanish) is a bloody mess. Listen to this: https://youtu.be/KttXceSvnQY?t=381

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3. False friends: Ugh! I hate fake people, always so nice with you and you turn around and they’ll be speaking just stupid sh!t (no)

Okay, lets be real. False friends are words or phrases that may sound similar to something you know in English. Simple examples are:

English – Spanish

• Rope (Cuerda) – Ropa (Clothing)
• Embarassing (vergonzoso or embarazoso) – Embarazada (Pregnant) 
• Envy (envidia) – Enviar (to send) 
• American (Estadounidense) – Americano (American but reffering to the whole continent of America)
• Carpet (Alfombra) – Carpeta (Folder)
• Grocery (like tienda de comestibles, grocery store) – Grosería (swear word)

and so on…

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4. Sounds: Usually we can mock English natives easily, bc most of them cannot pronounce rr, ll, ñ, etc… Just a matter of practice, to be honest. Also how you have to intonate when you speak, how you can ask a question the same way as a statement just by changing the intonation instead of the sentence structure, etc… In general sounds are tricky in Spanish because they tend to differ from English (and other languages of course)

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To conclude there are some things I wanna say. English and Spanish have different ancestors. Spanish's Latin and English's Anglo-Saxon so it makes sense they behave differently. Also some people critique english as it's really easy to learn and say that it's lazy, but we have to face something, it is really useful for work, study and entertainment. Spanish too but is difficult and has a lot of weird accents all over the world. Oh wait! That happens on every language!

Oh, here's the video:

 

By the way guys, thank you for reading. Have a nice night and Keep Dnzng!

-Blaxonk!