(05-20-2024, 06:05 PM)The Real Marty Wrote: I'm trying to learn some Spanish, but I think I probably lack the discipline to get fluent.  I'm watching youtube videos and learning the basic words and sentences.

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(05-17-2024, 07:28 PM)mikesez Wrote: I was the star student in my all gringo high school Spanish class.  My Spanish is on the level of, say, Rick Scott or Bush 43.  My vocab isn't great, but I know one word for pretty much everything you'd want to talk about and I know all the tenses and moods.  I probably sound like a fifth grader. I understand most of what's on the radio or TV, but I can't really follow slang conversations between natives from the same country.  My wife's grandmother had a middle school level education from Cuba and we couldn't understand each other.  But I have no problem with her younger relatives.  They pick up on my gringo accented slang-free Spanish quickly and return the favor.

Isn't Cuban Spanish different from Castillian Spanish?  Back when I was in business, we were trying to make our database auto-translate itself by writing our own Spanish translation program.  We had some native Spanish speakers working for us and they told us there are many different types of Spanish.

Yes.  What they taught us in school was "Latin American Spanish" which is the same thing you'll hear on the Spanish radio stations or on Univision.  It's very middle of the road with few slang words.  In school, the double L sound was just English Y.  But if you try that in the real world you'll hear that double L is more like the the J in "judge" in Cuba and Puerto Rico and like the S in "vision" in Argentina and Uruguay. I only know this from movies and meeting people in the US.

And then there are the conjugation differences around the word "you".  Computers have a hard time getting "you" into Spanish because there are at least three different words that "you" could be.  Generic Latin American Spanish goes "Tu/Usted/Ustedes".  But Costa Rica and Argentina add "vos" and Spain has "vosotros". 

But what your database dudes were up against was probably local vocabulary for mundane things that you'd really have to travel and study to become aware of.  I used to know a Spanish professor who worked at a state college.  He told me each country has its own word for see-saw, and he had done a paper documenting them all.

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