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Evolving from Spanglish to Spanish
Tagged: app, conversation, language, learn, spanglish, spanish, speak, vocabulary
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Evolving from Spanglish to Spanish
Posted by pauldavidmena on July 5, 2022 at 3:19 pm3 of my 4 grandparents were born in Puerto Rico and spoke primarily Spanish, subsequently it was my parents’ first language, with my mother remaining bilingual for her whole life. Unfortunately it ended there, as my parents never spoke Spanish in the home and I didn’t learn it in grade school. Now, at age 62, I’m trying to make up for lost time. I would consider myself somewhere between beginner and intermediate, combining Spanglish with pantomime whenever I visit Mexico. I subscribe to a number of YouTube channels with different approaches to learning Spanish, but was curious to know if anyone had any background with the “italki” (https://www.italki.com/) learning platform. It seems appealing in that it pairs learners with teachers for one-on-one classes, but I don’t know anyone who has actually used it. Short of relocating to Mexico and avoiding expat “bubbles” (¡Algún día, espero!), I’m looking for a way to up my game and become more confident with conversational Spanish.
bajatraveler replied 2 years, 1 month ago 20 Members · 59 Replies -
59 Replies
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That one is new to me. I have been using Duolingo and my Mexican friends tell me that I have made pretty good progress in the 5 or 6 months that I have been on the program. I started out with a vocabulary of less than 20 words.
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I taught myself Spanish over a half century ago and today consider myself extremely fluent. I figured out early on that the best and easiest way to be able to carry on a fluid conversation in Spanish had very little to do with understanding the Spanish rules of grammar or even proper pronunciation.
At least in my case, it was all about building a large and diverse vocabulary.
So back when I was first learning Spanish, I dedicated myself to learn at least 50 new words each and every day. My method back then was to simply grab a newspaper or magazine in Spanish and begin reading. Each time I came upon a new word I didn’t know, I would record it in my vocabulary notebook and then look it up in the dictionary, recording the English translation along with different/alternative meanings. I found that actually writing them down was a huge help as it helped me to better memorize the meaning as well as the proper spelling and accents.
I would then make an effort to carry on conversations in Spanish (very rudimentary at first), using the new words I had learned which helped to both reinforce the new words as well as learning to understand spoken Spanish.
Each day I would make it a point to review the new words as well as the prior words I was still struggling with and after just 10 days I had accumulated a vocabulary of 500 words. In 3 months my vocabulary was nearly 5,000 words!
We only speak Spanish at home and most of my friends here are locals so I rarely speak English anymore, with my online work here really my only connection to English anymore. If someone speaks to me in English anymore, my mind translates it to Spanish to think about what they say. When I am writing in English online I am usually translating from my thoughts in Spanish.
It’s a process and you can get there if you commit to it.
If you are not around someone who is a native Spanish speaker, there are many tutors who can help you via Zoom sessions. I know one, if you need a referral.
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Thanks for your quick reply! I know how busy you are, so I truly appreciate it.
I subscribe to a “Spanish Word a Day” type of mailing list from spanishdict.com and have been picking up vocabulary that way. It quizzes you on about 20 words each day. Other tools include wordreference.com, which I use a lot for ad hoc translation.
Beyond vocabulary, I lag behind on things like conjugating verbs in the various tenses. While I hate things like classroom drills, I can see where that might have benefited me.
Ultimately my Holy Grail is conversation. I was doing weekly Zoom classes with a Mexican man who produces a language and travel channel on YouTube. It’s got zero structure, which has some benefits (we could talk about anything), but I feel like I’ve plateaued. So the contact info with the instructor you know would be appreciated.
I am in the opposite situation from you in that I speak strictly English in my every day life. I have to make time to listen to and participate in Spanish conversation. On the other hand, the growing acceptance of remote working scenarios might provide the opportunity to spend more than a week at a time in Mexico in the near future.
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Short of living in a Spanish speaking environment, my suggestions would be to try turning on Spanish subtitles when watching movies and/or streaming TV series, focusing on reading the subtitles while listening to the English audio. It really will help you with both increasing your vocabulary as well as improving your rules of grammar and the key verb conjugations. I would also recommend you try to watch Spanish language television, using the same techniques in reverse.
I can assure you that life is slipping by much faster than you think and if you have the option of working remotely, I would suggest you strongly consider the option of moving to where you ultimately want to be sooner, rather than later.
I moved down here when I was in my 40’s and now regret that I didn’t do it sooner.
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We nearly bought a home in El Pescadero (not too far from Greg and Mayra Buser) in 2017 but weren’t able to secure a HELOC against our home, a necessary step since most of our money was tied up in it. As it turns out, we wouldn’t have been able to spend much time there and probably would have had to rent it out until we were able to move there ourselves. Now that I’m working remotely full-time (and my wife, who owns her own business, also works from home), it’s suddenly feasible to live and work from anywhere. At this point it’s a question of whether or not we missed our window of opportunity given the skyrocketing house prices in places like Todos Santos and El Pescadero, which continue to be our “happy place”.
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I would suggest that before you think about taking out an equity line, just rent a home for a year. That will give you a much better feel for whether or not TS is really a good long term fit for you as well as let the housing market callm down a bit – which it appears to be doing right now.
Also, living there you will have the time and opportunity to search out the market and find that special property that is not listed through a broker or online.
Just my dos centavos…
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Renting before buying is definitely a prudent approach. Even my realtor friend in Todos Santos did this before buying some 15 or 20 years ago, and he recommended the same to us. We’ve been visiting for the past 10 years but have seen different neighborhoods change over the years, providing many a cautionary tale.
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Exactly. But my ultimate advice to people who are thinking about this is to do it now before you get any older where the obstacles will seem to be even larger and the excuses “not to” sound more plausible. I have seen many folks talk about doing this for years until they reach the point they are no longer physically able to.
You’ll never have enough money in your retirement account, the housing market will likely be even more expensive five years from now and the idea of going through a major lifestyle change becomes harder to actually manage and deal with in each year that passes.
We only live once on this amazing planet, nobody (that I have seen so far) gets any “do-overs”…
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Perhaps coincidentally, BajaNomad featured this particular post the other day: http://forums.bajanomad.com/viewthread.php?tid=97661#pid1236996
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Ron wrote: If someone speaks to me in English anymore, my mind translates it to Spanish to think about what they say. When I am writing in English online I am usually translating from my thoughts in Spanish.
Fascinating! I’m pretty (coordinate) bilingual and have come to the conclusion that I don’t really think in either language; the thinking/reasoning process happens at some other (more symbolic?) level, and whatever comes out of my mouth or fingers is the result of translation from that symbolic language into the target language of whomever I may be addressing at the time.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by
Lencho. Reason: Trying to make quoting more obvious
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I was that way for a few decades when I was still working with U.S. based companies and speaking a moderate amount of English on most days. However since we moved down here outside of San Quintin, the only real English I get anymore is here on Facebook and that is only read/typed and not spoken. I probably have gone months at a time without actually speaking English these last 15 years and that has probably influenced why my brain made the transition to 24/7 Spanish.
What’s amazing about the brain is that I can listen to 2 side by side conversations, one in English and the other in Spanish, and simultaneously comprehend both conversations. That is something that I only really perfected in these last several years and I think it’s because my brain translates the English to Spanish, making it easier to comprehend the 2 conversations in the same language (in my head) in real time.
BTW, it’s great to have you onboard @Lencho
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WOW, that’s amazing. At what age did you first learn Spanish?
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Sixteen. Spent a year in Argentina as a foreign exchange student and where I first became enchanted with Latin America – a year that made me rethink everything about myself and my plans for the future and would set me on a different course that I have followed for nearly my entire lifetime.
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Makes me wish I’d paid more attention in Spanish class in High School.
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Ron writes: I think it’s because my brain translates the English to Spanish, making it easier to comprehend the 2 conversations in the same language (in my head) in real time.
So you’re pretty sure the English goes through an intermediate Spanish stage before it finally connects to meaning? If you’re paying attention, does “dog”, evoke the same exact meaning “block” as “perro”? For me, it doesn’t, and I don’t understand how they’re connected (as they obviously are, since I can translate between the two).
Anyway, interesting stuff! It would be fun to chat in person; I’ve spent a lot of thought and observation on my own and others’ language acquisition, and suspect that a lot of the instructors in formal language classes, really don’t understand the process very well. Talking with people like you who have reached a high level of proficiency in a second language (few Gringos do), always provides delightful surprises and insight.
Thanks. I really like the civil environment here, please, keep that up!!!!
Still fighting a bit with the user interface (lack of granular quoting for replies, for example, grumble), but there’s easy workarounds so it’s not a big deal.
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I do believe so, as in my mind I find myself evaluating and tracking the 2, side by side conversations in Spanish.
As far as civility, it’s a prerequisite here and the very few here who repeatedly tried to push the limits were 86’d – I have little patience for trolls and/or adults who behave like they are still in junior high. It may limit our growth somewhat but as far as the forum here goes, I am much more interested in quality vs quantity and I do believe that you will find that here in the discussions.
About the quoted reply function, the people who built the base of this platform believed that providing the comment reply structure like on Facebook would make it clear who/what a member was responding to.
Having said that, there is a quote function available on the post menu bar that you can access by clicking on the quotes icon on the menu bar that starts with the Aa icon at the bottom left of the post box – you just have to manually type in the quote.
Anyway, interesting stuff! It would be fun to chat in person; I’ve spent a lot of thought and observation on my own and others’ language acquisition, and suspect that a lot of the instructors in formal language classes, really don’t understand the process very well. Talking with people like you who have reached a high level of proficiency in a second language (few Gringos do), always provides delightful surprises and insight.
This is how the quote function displays.
It would be fun to meet and talk face to face and I would look forward to that amigo, just give me a bit of advance notice if you ever have plans to be in the SQ area…
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This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by
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I’ve read good things about Duolingo, particularly when it comes to learning the rules of a language. I’ve been working with a tutor one-on-one for over a year now, and while I’m getting more confident with my conversation skills, I realize that I lack experience and training conjugating verbs, various tenses, etc. It seems like it would be a good supplement for my lack of formal language education.
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I think that Duolingo is probably one of the best and easiest apps to use.
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I’ll add my vote too for Duolingo. It’s the only app I have been able to stick with and I found that with just 15 minutes of my time each day, my Spanish has improved enough to the point that I feel at ease when in Mexico and ordering from a menu at a restaurant or asking questions of a store clerk. Those situations used to terrify me.
Still have a long road ahead to become fluent but my trips south of the border are so much more fun now. In fact I value my time in Mexico as that is where I really improve my conversational skills.
The important thing is to find a routine / schedule that fits in your lifestyle and then stick with it.
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I was messaging with an old neighbor of mine last night who lives in Puerto Vallarta and he expressed some of the same difficulties with Spanish as you have encountered. In spite of living in Mexico for over 5 years, he felt that his Spanish learning had plateaued. He had tried different apps and it wasn’t until he started using one called “Speechling” that he noticed that he was making a lot of improvement again.
Personally, I don’t think it’s a case of one app having a magic bullet but probably has more to do with you finding the app whose structure feels like a comfortable fit with you, your learning abilities, goals and lifestyle.
My suggestion is to keep trying different apps until you come across one that best works for you, inspiring you to want to keep improving.
Here is the link to Speechling.
Let us know what you find out…
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I am now using Rosetta Stone. Duolingo was OK for me but my conversational proficiency has really improved since I switched over about four months ago. I am now able to watch TV in Spanish and can get a lot more of what they are saying now – or at least the gist of the conversation. Two years ago I couldn’t put a single sentence together.
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I tried Rosetta Stone but for whatever reason, it felt tedious.
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I just watch TV shows in Spanish with English subtitles. I did take 2 years of Spanish in high school but have learned a lot more this way than anything I picked up in the classroom. As we stream everything on our TV, I can just stop the show, backup and replay any parts of the show’s audio I want to hear again. It must be working as I have noticed my ability to carry on a conversation while in Mexico has really improved from before when I could only use a combination of a few words in Spanish that I remembered with some English and a lot of hand gestures. Just find the shows you like to watch and are familiar with in Spanish. It really works.
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I found “The Taco Chronicles” on Netflix to be an excellent resource. I would play it in Spanish with Spanish subtitles so that I could recognize what I was hearing. It had the side effect of making me very hungry!
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That’s funny! Bet you also learned how to order tacos. 😄😄😄
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Would really love to become fluent in Spanish but think that’s impossible without living there full time so I keep rumbling on and jump from app to app make the best of it. One of the things I love about Mexicans is that most of them actually try to help you, unlike so many up here who turn their noses at Latinos they come across struggling with English.
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Conversational groups are more effective than just one on one IMHO.
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You can always hire Sofia Vergara to help you!
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I think it just gets harder as we get older. I was able to learn basic english as a young boy, working at my families restaurant in Tijuana after school time and helping my aunt sell at the mercado artesanias on the weekend. Our kids learned spanish at home when they were very young but when we moved across the border to San Diego they lost much of their fluency. Now they want to learn it again and its not so easy.
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Four of my granddaughters live in Kenya and have become fluent in Swahili, but to your point, if any of them moves back to the U.S. they’re likely to lose that fluency. I never learned Spanish in school so I recognize that my age (62) is an obstacle, but I do feel as if I’m making some progress.
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But the flip side is that several studies have shown that making the effort and overcoming that mental block to learn a new language when you’re older can help reduce your chances of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
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My mother died of Alzheimer’s after suffering dementia for over a decade, so I definitely want to forestall that by keeping my brain as active as possible for as long as possible. I initially mentioned the italki app because it allows learners to pair up with teachers online, and I know how stimulating that can be (and how mentally exhausted I am after a class).
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I hear you Paul but I do agree with another comment from this thread that group conversations can be more effective than just one on one. I don’t have any scientific evidence to support that, just a general sense inside my head that our brains are more stimulated (and open to learn) in group conversation environments instead of just one on one conversations. I think some times other factors come into play that our brains focus on when we are the center of attention, all of the time in a conversation.
YMMV
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I’ve been to Spanish conversation groups in the Boston area, but my shyness (which is multi-lingual, by the way) tends to make me shut down and I have a hard time participating. I also have tinnitus, which makes it difficult to hear a conversation in a group setting.
All that said, there is an online conversation group I thinking of joining run by the married couple who run the “Spanish and Go” YouTube channel. The couple is a gringo man and a Mexican woman. Imagine that? 🙂
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That sounds interesting. Is your wife going to join you in the online conversation?
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I’m not sure at this point. Personally I wish she was more interested in Spanish, although she does know an impressive number of food words. 🙂
I’ll let you know what I find out about the Spanish conversation group. So far the “Spanish and Go” team has been slow to respond to my inquiries.
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Shyness in speaking a foreign language is something many of us have to deal with. But I keep trying in spite of my internal fears of sounding stupid.
Nice topic BTW, it’s something all of us who visit Baja regularly should be working on.
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I’m introverted by nature, but I’ve had to overcome that (in some degree) in order to be successful in my career in IT. I see my quest to become fluent in Spanish as similar; and stepping out of my comfort zone in order to communicate with locals in their own language is a sign of respect to my hosts. I’m determined to keep at it, and I’m encouraged to hear that I’m not alone.
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Spending time in Mexico, while exhilarating, can take a lot of us outside of our “comfort zone” for several reasons; exposure to a different culture, lifestyle, crime, poverty and other aspects of life in Mexico but it’s a package deal. Like you, we are trying to improve our Spanish and at this age, learning something new is much harder than it was 40 years ago. I look at it this way, I am going to force myself to endure the uncomfortable and even difficult moments to learn Spanish, knowing that I have a much bigger “payoff” coming when I can have a fluid conversation with anyone I meet in Mexico. That is worth more than whatever it costs me.
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I am the same as you but reverse. I can write and read english very fine but speaking is more difficult to me.
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I struggled too for long time while learning to be more comfortable in conversational english until my husband canceled our spanish language cable. It made me invest my time and myself more into the culture of the english language and television is a big part of that. I suggest you try to only watch spanish language tv for a few months. Is that possible for you @pauldavidmena ?
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I have access to Spanish TV programming, but I can’t watch Spanish exclusively because my wife only speaks English. We did watch “Taco Chronicles” on Netflix with English subtitles, and I like watching Spanish and Mexican soccer.
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Did you ask her @pauldavidmena ? Maybe turn on the english subtitles so she can begin learning too? I don’t like it when my husband just does something without asking me like changing the channel but if he asks my opinion, then maybe I change my mind afterall. Ask her while you hand her a margarita maybe? ☺☺☺
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Another good resource I’ve found for learning written Spanish is Spanish-language newspapers, such as https://www.bcsnoticias.mx/ or https://www.bcsnoticias.mx/. I can usually infer the context by the photos or by picking out familiar words in the headline. Sometimes I combine it with http://lingro.com/, a site that reads a URL and creates a page with links from each word to its translation, so you only need click on the words you don’t know.
I never did hear back from the “Spanish and Go” folks about their weekly Group Conversations. It’s a bit of bummer, since I thought that could be a good boost.
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Both my parents are from Chihuahua and when I was little, we were living with my moms sister here in California and they only spoke spanish in their house. My mom told me that one day when I was about 3 my dad came home and said I needed to learn english and we were moving. He had rented a house in a mostly white neighborhood and it made my mom mad as he made her move away from her family. My dad would only let me watch TV in english and I only played with the white kids on our street. My mom was mad that I wasn’t allowed to go over to my aunts house because my cousins didn’t speak much english and he was determined that his kid was going to speak english. I guess it must have worked. By the time I started kindergarden I was speaking english pretty good. I don’t remember having trouble understanding the teacher or the other kids. My dad was learning english too to get a better job but my mom never wanted to learn and only watched her telenovelas on the spanish channel. So at home I remember mostly talking in english with my dad and spanish with my mom. That made her mad too (see a pattern?) So my memories of learning english was my mom always mad and my mom and dad fighting. I think that probably messed me up somehow and why I avoided making contact with the Latino community for a long time. Although I can understand and speak spanish still, it’s difficult to read or write for me. And ever since I discovered Baja a few years ago, I want to go back and improve my spanish. Not sure where to start?
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The combination of a Spanish-language online newspaper or magazine and lingro.com can help with reading comprehension, but for writing it might mean joining an online language exchange forum. The beauty of these forums is that you can take all the time you need to compose your questions and answers.
Parents mean well when they enforce language restrictions, but I felt completely cut off from my roots. I didn’t know that I was Puerto Rican until I was a teenager. I grew up in a white middle-class neighborhood on Long Island and blended in with everyone else. I never did question the fact that my mother only spoke to her mother in Spanish. 🤔
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Yeah, I know my dad meant well but he probably went too extreme. When he came from Mexico he saw a bunch of other family members who didn’t speak much english and they were all stuck working min wage jobs, and he didn’t want that for himself or for his son. My mom never forgave him and held a grudge against him until he was diagnosed with cancer. Kind of sad that the only times I remember them getting a long was the last year before he died and mostly on chemo. After he died my mom admitted that he was right about learning english and I helped her enroll in a ESL program. Her english is a lot better now and she is watching a lot of TV in english these days.
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That’s quite sad, I am sorry your parents couldn’t work better together. I am sure that your father’s intentions were good and I bet if your mom had supported him more with learning English early on, he wouldn’t have been so strict about keeping you isolated from your culture and family. Marriage, like children should both come with how-to guides.
It’s never to late to reconnect with your roots. Did you keep in contact with your extended family?
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Yes, my cousins and I reconnected somewhat when I was in high school but it wasn’t the same. I feel bad for them in a way as the language barrier was the main reason they struggled in school and both dropped out of high school although today they both have decent jobs in construction.
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I was also a daughter of immigrants and we were raised in a home speaking mostly English although my dad would curse in Spanish when he was really mad.😆
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Yeah, cursing definitely has more teeth to it in spanish. Not that I would know of course. 😇
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You are definitely spot on with that, cursing in English seems so bland in comparison…
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My Spanish has really improved since I started using Rosetta Stone last year. I took the advice of @BajaGringo and am watching movies in English with Spanish subtitles. Then I will switch them around and re-watch it in Spanish voice instead with English subtitles. I have picked up a lot of the small nuances of Spanish that way and I strongly recommend you try it. My trips down south of the border today feel like an entirely different experience – I missed out on so much before.
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