It has been a little while SINCE I’ve had time to work on this blog but, SINCE I have a few moments, I thought I’d write a quick article about how to say SINCE in Spanish. As you can tell from the first sentence, this little word has TWO meanings in English which are translated […]
Author: JT Spanish
¿Para o por?
¡Qué tiempos de locura! I’ve been largely away from this platform due to career changes and family health issues and, now, I return at a time when the whole world se está volviendo loco. The Spanish language, however, remains my passion and hobby and I figured, rather than simply watch telenovelas and skype with my […]
Los aprovechados
It’s something about the holidays and the influx of family, friends and frenemies which brings out the best and worst in all of us. Today I’m going to focus on the “worst” part and specifically the human propensity to take advantage of one another, something which occasionally happens within families. Whether it’s that relative who […]
How to describe crazy people in Spanish…
Crazy people are everywhere. At work. At school. At home. They, in fact, seem to make up the majority of the population and, most certainly, are the most common type of individual that you or I will meet on a daily basis. This is why most languages have at least a dozen expressions for the […]
“To Become” in Spanish
There are some verbs that don’t translate very neatly between English and Spanish. The verb “become” is one such example, as it has six equivalents in Spanish and they’re not all interchangeable. Before you become (no pun intended) panicked, there are fairly simple rules regarding the use of each of these translations and, with a […]
Alternativas para “coger”
¡Hola! If you’ve been learning Spanish for some time, you’ve probably discovered that the dictionary isn’t always reliable when it comes to translating what you want to say. For years, I used the word felpudo to describe a door mat, simply because it was the only translation my dictionary gave for the word. It wasn’t […]
Tocar
Today I thought it would be useful to explore the nuances of tocar, an extremely common verb which means much more than “to touch.” Although this is its literal meaning, in 23 instances of its use I documented while living in Mexico / Guatemala, only two were used in this way. One of these came from an argument between […]
El misterio tras el imperfecto vs el pretérito
¡Hola! I figured that since I’ve been so sporadic about posting lately (por mi trabajo), I’d offer something a bit more in-depth which I hope will dispel más dudas about this fun but crazy thing called Spanish grammar. Today I want to focus on the difference between the pretérito and the imperfecto, a tricky subject […]
Cinco sonidos que te harán sonar menos “gringo”
One of the greatest debates amongst linguists is whether a non-native speaker of a language can ever achieve a native-like pronunciation, or whether certain characteristics of one’s first language will always make an impression upon the second. Some argue that, after a certain age, the brain fossilizes in such a way that it does not […]
Fun with “falsos amigos”
After four posts on the subjective (and all the collateral cerebral damage caused by writing them), I thought I’d give us a break and focus on something a un poco más ligero. Not to neglect this all-important subject, but there are tons of other aspectos of the language worth talking about. I have in my […]