Latin Am vs. Castilian resources

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embici
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Re: Latin Am vs. Castilian resources

Postby embici » Wed Aug 05, 2015 10:42 pm

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Foreign Service Institute materials http://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/spanish-index.html They are mainly Latin American Spanish, are they not?
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Re: Latin Am vs. Castilian resources

Postby donJhon » Thu Aug 06, 2015 2:52 pm

As well as differences between Spain and Latin America (LA) there are also differences within LA from country to country and region to region. One of these is tuteo vs voseo. Vos is used in Central America (CA) where tu is used in most of Mexico. But there also some place that use both vos and tu.

An explanation of the Argentine variety can be found here: http://www.happyhourspanish.com/spanish-agentina-voseo/.
The CA version is slightly different. These are the present subjunctive and the negative imperative.

The Word Reference conjugator shows these difference and is in fact the only conjugator on the Web that I have found that shows Vos conjugations. See http://www.wordreference.com/conj/EsVerbs.aspx?v=ir.

I live in Costa Rica and I almost never hear vos much less tu being used in this area. But is commonly but not universally used in advertising. Specially the imperative like ¡Viví ...!.
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Re: Latin Am vs. Castilian resources

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed Aug 12, 2015 10:59 pm

Since my original response to this thread, I stumbled upon another source of Latin-American Spanish, which I describe in a new thread: Spanish Proficiency Exercises.
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Re: Latin Am vs. Castilian resources

Postby Polyclod » Wed Aug 12, 2015 11:29 pm

embici wrote:I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Foreign Service Institute materials http://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/spanish-index.html They are mainly Latin American Spanish, are they not?


Kind of, although they do go over Castilian pronunciation, the vosotros forms, and usually the dialogue will have footnotes if there's a discrepancy between European and Latin American usage. I think all but two of the speakers on the tapes are from Latin America as well. (One of the women pronounces her lls without *yeísmo*, which could also mean she's from South America, and the other Castilian speaker has a horrible, grating voice). Honestly though, I think the FSI course does a really good job of presenting a broad, "Standard" Spanish that could be used virtually anywhere. I mainly speak Castilian Spanish (thanks to my first two Spanish teachers in elementary school :roll: old habits die hard!), but I've had pretty much no trouble adapting the course to my needs.
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Re: Latin Am vs. Castilian resources

Postby Speakeasy » Thu Aug 13, 2015 1:48 am

sfuqua wrote:I know how you feel about live radio. If people are talking fast, I can perhaps understand every word, but never parse a sentence all the way. If only I could get everyone who speaks spanish to keep their speed down to 130 words a minute or less...

Anyone who has attended an auction knows that it requires a keen ear to keep up with the campy "bda-bda-bda SO-O-O-LD--FER bda-bda-bda 500 dollars" style of delivery. For your edification and amusement, I have appended the link to an Wikipedia article on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute

Many years ago, I attended a short training session for college-level debaters that was designed to help us, amongst other things, follow complicated arguments delivered at a speed of 350 words per minute or more. It's possible, but it requires immense concentration!
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