Spanish For Dummies^®

Spanish For Dummies^®

by Pedro Vázquez Bermejo and Susana Wald

Spanish For Dummies^®

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-470-68815-1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Authors

Pedro Vázquez Bermejo is a leading Spanish communicator, teacher, translator and interpreter living in London. He was born in the Spanish region of Extremadura (the land of the Conquistadores!) and grew up in Madrid, before settling down in London.

After studying sociology at Madrid’s University Complutense in the late 1980s, Pedro developed a real passion for modern languages. He now specialises in teaching Spanish to all ages and levels of ability, from young multilingual children to retired enthusiastic academics. He holds both one-to-one and group sessions, including his innovative, absorbing and entertaining Spanish classes at the BBC headquarters in London.

The varied work Pedro has undertaken includes acting as a corporate interpreter and as a Spanish voiceover coordinator on educational interactive videos and multilingual historical role games. He is also a multilingual corporate image producer, and his work in this area has included producing some award-winning international corporate DVDs.

Pedro also holds a High Certificate in Foreign Commerce from the Chamber of Commerce of Madrid, and a masters degree in marketing and business administration.

Pedro is very personable and his excellent communication skills are imbued with warmth, humour and patience. He speaks in a standard Castilian Spanish accent, with pleasing and crystal-clear pronunciation. He also has a personal repertoire of Spanglish jokes and sayings, and is capable of ‘talking the hind legs off a donkey’ – try translating that into Spanish! He is never short of ideas for keeping the language (lengua in Spanish) rolling!

Susana Wald is a writer and a simultaneous and literary translator in Spanish, English, French and Hungarian. As a publisher, she has been working with books and authors for many years. She has been a teacher in Chile and Canada and has known the joy of learning from her students and their untiring enthusiasm and tolerance. She is also an artist and has had her work shown in many countries in North, Central and South America, and in Europe.

Authors’ Acknowledgements

My thanks go to everyone who has helped to keep my blood pressure down throughout the time I’ve spent working on this book (excluding English tea and Spanish coffee)! I can now relax and acknowledge the following:

I thank my always-admired publishers, Wiley, and specifically my charming and professional commissioning editor, Wejdan Ismail, for finding and selecting me for the ‘Spanish job’ and for her great support; thanks also to my development editor, Steve Edwards, for always being so patient and encouraging.

Thanks, also, to all my pupils – especially the kids for their inspiration and laughter. Their passion for exploring language and communication makes all my efforts worthwhile!

I also thank my adorable Dee and my own family members – my dad Gregorio, mum Felisa, auntie Use and beloved super-sister Carlota. I acknowledge the support to the cerebral side of things provided by my bilingual friend, Fiona Campbell, and thank José Luís Ruíz-Calero García-Gil from Madrid for his enviable command of Spanish writing skills and for his friendship. Last but not least, thanks of course go to our favourite companions on our weekend walks in the forests of Kent – Chessie (a gorgeous border collie señorita) and Lily (the most enchanting miniature cocker spaniel niña), both of whom can now bark in a useful and fashionable Spanish!

Pedro Vázquez Bermejo

I would like to thank Wiley for the splendid idea of publishing these truly novel books. My thanks go as well to Jean Antonin Billard, greatest amongst the greatest translators. I must also mention that I owe Juergen Lorenz the structure of the text, as well as his friendly help with its first birthpangs.

And I thank from the heart the unflagging editorial help of Kathy Cox, at Wiley, who kept my spirit from sinking at all times, as well as Tammy Castleman, Patricia Pan, Billie Williams and Kathleen Dobie, who contributed their excellent copy editing skills. Thanks and excuses are also due to my lifetime partner, Ludwig Zeller, who for months saw mostly the back of my head while my face was glued to the monitor of my computer. May we all have a happy life.

Susana Wald

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our Dummies online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register/.

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Commissioning, Editorial, and Media Development

Development Editor: Steve Edwards

Content Editor: Jo Theedom

Commissioning Editor: Wejdan Ismail

Assistant Editor: Jennifer Prytherch

Proofreader: Andy Finch

Technical Editor: Maria Violeta Millins Alarcón

Production Manager: Daniel Mersey

Cover Photos: © Gavin Hellier/JAI/Corbis

Cartoons: Ed McLachlan

Composition Services

Project Coordinator: Lynsey Stanford

Layout and Graphics: Claudia Bell, Carl Byers, Christine Williams

Proofreaders: Melissa Cossell, John Greenough

Indexer: Valerie Haynes Perry

Introduction

As society becomes more international in nature, knowing how to say at least a few words in other languages becomes increasingly useful: low-cost airfares are making travel abroad a more realistic option, global business environments necessitate overseas travel or you just may have friends and neighbours who speak other languages.

Whatever your reason for acquiring some Spanish, this book can help. Spanish For Dummies gives you the skills you need for basic communication in Spanish. We’re not promising fluency here, but if you want to greet someone, purchase a ticket or order off a menu in Spanish, you need look no further than Spanish For Dummies.

What’s Special about Spanish?

Spanish is one of the great European languages, rich in heritage from more than nine centuries of existence. This language comes from the central region of Spain called Castilla (kahs-tee-yah) (Castile) and is also the language of much great literature.

The first European novel – as a matter of fact, the first novel in the modern sense – was written in Spanish by Miguel de Cervantes. You’ve probably heard about Don Quixote, the ‘enthusiastic visionary’. His adventures have even become part of the English language: the word quixotic describes someone with an odd, eccentric or utterly-regardless-of-material-interests attitude.

Spanish is also the language of great poets. Many Nobel Prize winners in literature are Spanish-speaking, including the poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda.

When Cristobal Colón (Christopher Columbus) and other Spanish explorers came to the New World of the Americas, Spanish became the language of all the peoples from Florida to Tierra del Fuego at the extreme tip of South America (with the exception of Brazil, where Portuguese is spoken).

When you go to places such as Spain, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras or Nicaragua, you speak in or are spoken to in Spanish. If you visit cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, Seville, Santiago de Chile, Montevideo, Asuncion, Buenos Aires, Lima, Caracas, Bogota, Mexico City, Quito, San Juan and many, many others, all the people you find speak Spanish.

So you have several reasons to embrace this beautiful language. You may want to understand the culture and the people and you may also want some future new Spanish friends to understand you, in their own language.

About This Book

Although you may think that ‘Spanish is Spanish’, things aren’t quite that simple. The Spanish language carried to the New World by the Conquistadores (kohn-kees-tah-doh-rehs) (Spanish conquerors) developed over time in its own way, and at its own speed. Alternative words and conventions increased until the Spanish spoken in Latin American countries became, if not a different language, certainly one with a very different personality to the standard Spanish spoken in Spain.

This book concentrates on standard, contemporary Spanish – known as Castellano – meaning the Spanish spoken in Spain itself, even in regions such as the Basque Country or Cataluña where it may not be the language that people habitually use. By getting to grips with Castellano, you can be understood anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world, including Latin America.

This book isn’t a class that you have to drag yourself to twice a week for a specified period of time. You can use Spanish For Dummies however you want to, whether your goal is to know some words and phrases to help you get around when you visit the Canaries, Balearics or mainland Spain, or you simply want to be able to say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ to a Spanish-speaking friend. This book can help you reach moments of true understanding in a different language. Use the text as a language and cultural guide for those moments when you really need to know how and why things are done.

Go through this book at your own pace, reading as much or as little at a time as you like. Also, you don’t have to trudge through the chapters in order; just read the sections that interest you. The only way to know and love a language is to speak it. Throughout the book, we give you lots of words, phrases and dialogues, complete with pronunciations.

If you’ve never taken Spanish lessons before, you may want to read the chapters in Part I before tackling the later chapters. Part I gives you some of the basics that you need to know about the language, such as how to pronounce the various sounds.

Why We Wrote This Book

Language exposes you to every aspect of the human condition, allowing you to study the past, understand the present and ponder the future. Language sometimes changes the ways in which people express various emotions and conditions. People are connected through their ability to speak, but you can go one step further – to understanding – by being able to communicate in another language. Very few things are as exciting as that!

The best way to discover a new language is to immerse yourself in it. Listen to the way Spanish sounds, concentrate on the pronunciation and look at how it’s written. By listening and repeating, you enter a new world of ideas and peoples. Acquiring Spanish through immersion really does feel like a sort of magic.

Conventions Used in This Book

To make this book easy for you to navigate, we set up a few conventions:

Spanish terms are set in boldface to make them stand out.

Pronunciations, set in brackets in italics, follow the Spanish terms.

Verb conjugations (lists that show you the forms of a verb) are given in tables in this order: yo, the ‘I’ form; tú, the ‘you’ (singular) form, él, ella, usted, the ‘he/she/it’ form; nosotros, the ‘we’ form; vosotros, the ‘you’ (plural/formal) form; and ellos, ellas, the ‘they’ form. Pronunciations follow in the second column. Here’s an example (of the verb llevar, meaning to take or carry):

Studying a language is a peculiar beast, and so this book includes a few elements that other For Dummies books do not. Here are those new elements:

Talkin’ the Talk dialogues: The best way to improve with a language is to see and hear how it’s used in conversation, and so we include dialogues throughout the book. The dialogues come under the heading ‘Talkin’ the Talk’ and show you the Spanish words, the pronunciation and the English translation.

Words to Know blackboards: Memorising key words and phrases is also important in language, and so we collect the important words that appear in a chapter (or section within a chapter) and write them on a ‘blackboard’, under the heading ‘Words to Know’.

Fun & Games activities: If you don’t have Spanish speakers with whom to practise your new language skills, you can use the Fun & Games activities to reinforce what you’re discovering. These word games are fun ways to gauge your progress.

Also, because each language has its own ways of expressing ideas, the English translations that we provide for the Spanish terms may not be literal. We want you to know the gist of what’s being said, not just the words being said. For example, you can translate the Spanish phrase de nada (deh nah-dah) literally as ‘of nothing’, but the phrase really means ‘you’re welcome’. This book gives the ‘you’re welcome’ translation.

Foolish Assumptions

To write this book, we had to make some assumptions about you and what you want from a book called Spanish For Dummies:

You know no Spanish – or if you took Spanish in school, you don’t remember a word of it.

You’re not looking for a book to make you fluent in Spanish; you just want to know some words, phrases and sentence constructions so that you can communicate basic information in Spanish.

You don’t want to have to memorise long lists of vocabulary words or a bunch of boring grammar rules.

You want to have fun and discover a bit of Spanish at the same time.

If these statements apply to you, you’ve found the right book!

How This Book Is Organised

This book is divided by topic into parts, and then into chapters. The following sections tell you what types of information you can find in each part.

Part I: Getting Started

You get your feet wet in this part as we give you some Spanish basics: how to pronounce words, what the accents mean and so on. We even boost your confidence by reintroducing you to some Spanish words that you probably already know. In addition, we outline the basics of Spanish grammar that you may need to know when you work through more detailed chapters of the book.

Part II: Spanish in Action

In this part, you begin practising and using Spanish. Instead of focusing on grammar points, as many language textbooks do, this part focuses on everyday situations in which you may find yourself if you’re living in a Spanish-speaking country or dealing with your Spanish-speaking friends. This part hones your small-talk skills and takes you on shopping and dining excursions. At the end of this part, you should be able to do some basic navigation in the Spanish language.

Part III: Spanish on the Go

This part provides the tools you need to take your Spanish on the road, whether you’re going to a local Spanish restaurant or a museum in Madrid. These chapters help you to survive the Customs process, check into hotels and nab a cab, and have a great time doing it. Sprinkled throughout are cultural titbits that introduce you to people, places and things that are important in Spanish culture.

Part IV: The Part of Tens

If you’re looking for small, easily digestible pieces of information about Spanish, this part is for you. Here, you can find ways to speak Spanish quickly, useful Spanish expressions to know and celebrations worth joining.

Part V: Appendixes

This part of the book includes important information that you can use for reference. We include verb tables that show you how to conjugate a regular verb, and then how to conjugate those verbs that stubbornly refuse to fit the pattern. We give you a mini-dictionary in both Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish formats and provide some brief facts about the Spanish language in the modern world.

Icons Used in This Book

You may be looking for particular information while reading this book. To make certain types of information easier for you to find, we place the following icons in the left-hand margins throughout the book:

We use this icon to indicate crucial pieces of information that you need to bear in mind.

This icon highlights tips that can make Spanish easier for you.

Languages are full of quirks that may trip you up if you’re not prepared for them. This icon points to discussions of these weird grammatical rules.

If you’re looking for information and advice about culture and travel, look for this icon.

Where to Go from Here

Discovering a new language is all about jumping in and giving it a try (no matter how bad your pronunciation is at first). So make the leap! Start at the beginning, or pick a chapter that interests you. Above all, make sure that you have fun!

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Part I

Getting Started

In this part . . .

This part dips your feet gently into the water and gives you some Spanish basics: pronunciation, the meaning of accents and so on. We reintroduce you to some Spanish words that you probably already know and outline the basics of Spanish grammar.