Most Recommended Film For The Lovers Of Peninsular Spanish

It has always been stressed here that the process of acquiring Spanish must transcend textbooks and classrooms and must include more of immersive tools and methodologies such as films and telenovelas. Watching Spanish movies is not only a great way to improve your linguistic skills and discover interesting facets of the Hispanic culture, but is also way more fun than sweating over exercises, drills, and homework. You would be conditioning your mind and ears for the unique rhythm of spoken Spanish and it’s regional dialectical nuances that a book could never teach without even realizing how those 90-odd minutes passed by!

Pedro Almodóvar (L): The master craftsman of Hispanic cinema
Photo credit: Cynthia licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

A stellar and visual treat

Talking of films, if you are keen on acquiring the Spanish of the peninsula, you don’t want to miss Hable con Ella (Talk to Her) no matter what. The most celebrated filmmaker Spain has ever produced, Pedro Almodóvar, created this comedy-drama in 2002 and made the box offices jingle on both sides of the Atlantic. The film collected no less than 25 awards and 8 nominations which is no small feat. The wins include heavyweights like the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, and the Oscars.

Basically, this movie has every ingredient of being a star member of every Spanish enthusiast’s collection and the incredibly engaging direction and storyline are only an added bonus. Packed with some of the most famous names in the Spanish cinema, the star-cast is what strikes you first. Then you have the bullfighting, the dancing, and some of the most stunning locales in Spain, all teaming up together to present to you the culture of Spain like you never knew before.

A celebration of human emotions

The film is all about the communication gap between the sexes, the die-hard love, the melancholy, and the accompanying intimacy. Benigno is a private nurse to a beautiful and comatose ballet student, Alicia, at a private clinic while Marco is a travel writer whose girlfriend, a famous matador by the name, Lydia is also comatose in the same clinic. It is this clinic where, while attending to their respective ladies, the two men start developing a bond and recount their respective stories to each other.

The entire film tracks these stories in flashback and shows some incredibly intense and deep-rooted human emotions shared by the four characters in some of the most extreme circumstances faced by ordinary men and women. It is also revealed that Marco had actually fallen in love with the famous bullfighter during an official interview and later she had an accident where after being gored by a bull during an event, she went into a coma. Benigno, on the other hand, had actually fallen for Alicia, who had gone comatose after a car accident, while caring for her at the clinic. It is this one-sided love that the film attempts to track with all the usual bells and whistles of Spanish culture thrown in along the way.

As the story develops, Marco is shown to have left for Jordan where he is writing a travel guide and reads in a newspaper that his girlfriend has died while in coma. Meanwhile, Alicia gets pregnant and Benigno is charged with raping her and is sent to a jail in Segovia. Eventually, he is shown to have died after ingesting a lot of sleeping pills in a desperate attempt to escape his fate. The film moves through several emotional twists and turns and eventually ends with Marco and Alicia together, apparently a couple.

The compelling storyline will captivate you regardless of your level of Spanish and that is what makes it such an easy watch. You can watch this film over and over again, as many times as required without ever getting bored. This is the power of compelling storytelling that Almodóvar is so capable of. Of course, you stand to absorb best if using Spanish subtitles instead of English, if at all any.

Speaking of subtitles, Spanish is your best bet only because you must develop the knack to instantly recognize the language first-hand, both written and spoken. English subtitles would mean your mind will never learn to interpret Spanish without first translating in the background. If you wish to master the language, you must wean yourself away from English in every possible thing you do and subtitles are no exception. So, no English subtitles and absolutely no English dubbing. Treat everything English like the plague. Stay assured, this sacrifice will pay off.

Know Spain like never before

This film captures the essence of the Hispanic culture like few others have done in the past. From the icon of Spain’s machismo, bullfighting, to the legendary flamenco, every aspect of the Castilian lifestyle has been captured with incredible accuracy. The film’s realistic, authentic dialogs ensure that you enrich your Spanish bit by bit each time you watch it and the stunning cinematography ensures you feel compelled to watch it in endless loops.

Then there is the evocative music that celebrates love, obsession, and the effervescent Spanish charm with sophisticated flamenco guitars, violins, and vocal flourishes. This is one of the most awe-inspiring musical interludes in any film in recent memory, we must say. If you are looking for one single film to understand everything that defines Spain, this is definitely it.

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Can Che Guevara Help You Learn Spanish?

When the 23-year old Ernesto Guevara decided to drop out of the university and make a cross-continent motorcycle trip along with his friend, Alberto Granado in 1952, little did he realize that his memoir of this trip would spawn a biopic decades later and would not only become an iconic classic but also the single most enriching window to the Argentinean culture and history available to a non-Hispanic. The powerful story of Diarios de Motocicleta makes for a perfect tool in every Spanish-learner’s arsenal who is interested in not just learning the language but also appreciate the immensely rich Latin-American culture.

No teacher better than a masterpiece

A road trip turned Che into the legendary revolutionary
Photo credit: Adam Jones licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

Anyone who acquired Spanish as a second (or third or fourth) language and got fluent in it would vouch for the incredible contribution of Spanish flicks and music to their learning. Unless you live in a Spanish-speaking community crawling with nothing but native Spanish-speakers, you have no better channel of authentic input in this language than original, undubbed Spanish movies.

While much have already been written here as well as elsewhere about how to choose from an otherwise mind-numbing ocean of titles from both sides of the Atlantic, today’s post will throw some light on what our Che left behind for us Spanish enthusiasts.

The film, directed by Walter Salles of Brazil, recounts Che’s expedition across the length and breadth of South America that seamlessly transformed Ernesto Guevara from the hedonistic youth into the most successful and feared revolutionary South America ever knew. The screenplay written by José Rivera of Puerto Rico draws from from the travelogs written by Che and his co-traveller, Alberto. Gael García Bernal who essays the role of Che himself is a real treat and if you liked him in Y Tu Mamá También, you will not be disappointed in this one at all.

The road-trip to Enlightenment

Ernesto “Fuser” Guevara (played by the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal) is a medical student about to start his last semester at the university and his older friend, Alberto Granado (played by the Argentinean actor Rodrigo de la Serna) is a biochemist when, in 1952, they both decide to leave everything behind and travel throughout South America on La Poderosa (The Mighty One), Ernesto’s dilapidated Norton 500 motorcycle. Initially the purpose of the trip, that was planned to last four and a half months clocking over 5,000 miles, was nothing more than satisfaction of their youthful sense of adventure and adrenaline rush.

During the course of this trip, the duo gain a deeper insight into the seriousness of life in the continent at large and thus start a journey of historic transformation that made this trip legendary. The scenes of economic disparity, poverty, and social inequality move Che who grows more and more radical, viewing armed rebellion as the only answer to all social problems throughout South America.

The turning point of the film comes when Guevara suddenly assumes a never-seen-before sobriety after a visit to Machu Picchu. At this stage and onwards, his musings center around how a civilization as constructive and rich as the Incas could be taken over completely by the modern urban decay of Lima. When a relatively tempered Granado proposes a peaceful revolution to transform all of South America, Che questions the viability of a “revolution without guns” giving first signs of his Communist ideals. It is this transformation that this film captures so accurately that it deserves to be in every single Spanish-enthusiast’s collection.

A rich source of Argentinean Spanish

The film beautifully tracks more than 9,000 miles of the trip presenting some of the most unforgettable and captivating images of the Latin American identity. From Argentina all the way thru Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, the locations include the Atacama desert, Miramar, Machu Picchu, The San Pablo Leper Colony, Patagonia, San Martín de los Andes, Nahuel Huapi Lake, and many more historically and culturally spectacular sites all over the continent. The breathtaking cinematography not only makes this movie a visual delight, but also presents a rare glimpse of the South American lifestyle never illustrated by any guidebook or travel video.

As a Spanish learner, your biggest advantage is that the very first time you watch the film these appealing visuals get etched in your memory forever and later act as handles or cues for those wonderful dialogs you hear in crisp, authentic, Argentinean Spanish. The number of dialogs you thus absorb and retain add a whole new dimension to your Spanish vocabulary and Spanish-speaking skills. They are even easier to recall and improvise upon, thanks to the stunning images and immersive storyline.

So, if the flavor of Spanish that you are rooting for is Argentinean, you will be doing yourself a huge favor by watching this film with Spanish subtitles (NOT English!) because the Spanish you hear in this film most closely follows what’s spoken by real people in real Argentina. Let Che teach you some authentic Spanish and give you some history lessons along the way!

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Angry Mom Teaches Spanish

Here comes yet another deconstruction session where we dive right into the belly of the beast in an attempt to understand how the Spanish language really functions. Since, cramming up rules of the Spanish grammar and meanings of Spanish words off a dictionary are passé, we are doing in these sessions what we all did to get fluent and confident with our mother tongues even before we hit our first grade schools. Today’s sentence is an angry reprimand which should make it fun to dissect. Almost often a typical Mexican mother would be heard yelling out this kind of line at her bratty kids when they are being pests at bath-time.

¡Vete a bañar, cabrón!
Photo credit: Eric Lewis licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

¡Vete a bañar, cabrón! Te apestan las bisagras (Go take a shower, asshole! Your armpits stink).

Sounds familiar? Countless moms have been found yelling out either this line or a variant on top of their voice at their little ones throughout history regardless of what language they speak. Let’s see why these sentences appear the way they do and learn some Spanish.

The nuts and bolts

Vete – Remember the Spanish for “to go”? Yes, ir. Ve is ir conjugated in the familiar imperative form. But what is this te doing there hanging on to ve? Well, Spanish grammar calls this a case of reflexive usage. While most of us know that te is “yourself” in Spanish, attaching it to any verb gives that verb an inherent object, “yourself”. So, while bañar simply means “to bathe”, bañarse means “to bathe oneself” or “to take bath”. The se gives that reflexive tone to the otherwise intransitive verb and it could be replaced by any reflexive suffix such as, me (myself), nos (ourselves), or te (yourself). So, while ir means “to go”, adding a se to it gives it the sense of leaving or, “to take oneself away”. Coming back to vete, it just means, by extension, “take yourself away” or just “leave”.

a bañar – Talk of the devil! wasn’t this word just mentioned in an example above? Well, that wasn’t intentional but it has indeed saved us some explaining here now that you already know what this word means! What about the a then? Loosely, it translates into “to” in English but, just loosely. Like you have already been warned before, never ever try to cram or even translate word-to-word because no such direct association exists between any two languages of the world, let alone Spanish and English. So, for a better relationship with your Spanish, respect a and take it for what is does to your sentence and what sense it gives rather than what English word it translates into. So the same question again: What is a doing here? Nothing actually. Same way as “to” does nothing in “I want to eat”. All it does is sit between vete and bañar and link the two.

You must use a whenever you use two words of action (in other words, verbs) in this sense, as in, voy a comer (I am going to eat). To make your life miserable, exceptions do exist but it can only get as bad as you allow it to. Don’t bother with exceptions at this stage. Don’t bother with any grammar. Just understand that you have to use a whenever another verb follows ir in any form. Learn this sentence well so that any absence of a between ir and any other verb automatically sounds unheard of, unnatural, and simply incorrect to you without you even knowing why! That would be awesome, wouldn’t it? By the way, some time back we posted an entire article dedicated to this word, Taking A Bath Or Taking A Shower.

cabrón – This one is an international favorite and will soon become yours too. If you are in Mexico, you hear this word more often than pauses in one’s breath. Why? Because it means “asshole”, that’s why. Told you, it would soon become your favorite too! And if swearing in Spanish motivates you, learn some of the choicest insults at Swearing In Spanish Like The Natives.

Now, before we move on, let’s string these pieces together and see how they work. Don’t bother much about the strange-looking upside-down bang. In Spanish, any sentence that closes with a bang (!), must also start with an upside-down bang (¡). That’s all there is to this alien punctuation mark. So, vete a bañar means, “go take a shower” and we all know what cabrón means. “Go take a shower, asshole!” Why? We will soon get to know the reason behind this anger in the next sentence.

Te apestan – Apestar is the Spanish for “to stink”. Here, we use apestar in its third-person present-tense plural form where the -r or any -ar verb is knocked off and replaced by -n (thus, cantar becomes cantan and trabajar becomes trabajan). Forget about the reflexive te (which is, in fact, an object pronoun and not a reflexive in this case) for a while. Remember Spanish often omits the subject if implied? So who or what is stinking here? Surely, it’s something plural, going by the conjugation of apestar. Let’s find out.

las bisagras – This is what we love about the Mexicans. To most who speak Spanish, a bisagra is a “hinge”. But in Mexico, it becomes a slang for “armpit”. Aren’t slangs wonderful? They are forbidden by the politically-correct teachers, books, and our elders but then how will Spanish taste so delicious if you take away all the spices? The a-ending must have told you that bisagra is feminine and should, thus, take la and not el. And since there’s more than one bisagra in question here, the la becomes las. So, this is the mystery subject.

What was stinking? Your armpits, of course! Well, but where does this sentence say it’s “your” armpits and not “mine”? Now, we will bring in the very first word of this sentence, the te. The object word, te (or me, or nos) must be used before the verb to indicate whose body-part we are talking about whenever the subject is a body-part. Also, in such cases, the subject often comes “after” the verb. Essentially, if we were to literally translate this sentence into English, it would turn out something like this: “The armpits stink to you.” Agreed this sounds illogical but who cares? Just learn the sentence without bothering about grammatical sense and soon you’ll know why they say, “me duele la cabeza,” when one has a headache.

Hope this line is going to be a part of your flashcard deck now so that you can soon start making many, many more sentences with a similar context and get fluent without learning grammar!

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Reps Are For Biceps, Not For Brains

Remember those days in school when you were made to repeat lists of words along with their meanings, a hundred times each, at gunpoint in an attempt to stretch our English vocabulary? Most of us do. And, not too surprisingly, the experience was frustrating at best. It’s still a mystery how this extremely dead-beat and downright inefficient learning method caught on as the winning classic that it is today in almost every school around the world! Is there a more effective alternative? Turns out there is. And it is not only more effective but also comes with zero calories! Easy Spanish must also have an easy absorption method.

No, we are not going to discuss some wonder drug or some obscure black-hat trick that inexplicably enhances your memory without any effort. What we will be discussing here is a rather insignificant-sounding practice in common use by men and women learning Spanish throughout the world for centuries. We neither invented, nor discovered it. Nor is this the first time we will be discussing it. Quite a few articles have been done on visualization earlier as well and this is just a reaffirmation of the same concept as discussed before. Why? Because this technique is just too powerful to be taken lightly. We, for one, could never harp on it enough!

What’s wrong with the reps?

Rote learning was never motivating enough
Photo credit: Julien Harneis licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

So what’s wrong with the classical way of cramming using reps anyways? Unless we understand and appreciate the chinks in this armor, we would not be able to appreciate the tremendous benefits of visualization.

Let’s see how the process works. Say, as a part of your Spanish assignment, you have to memorize a list of the names of animals in Spanish and one of them is burro (donkey). How would you go about it? You would go, “Burro, donkey. Burro, donkey. Burro, donkey...,” maybe a few hundred times. Perhaps you would repeat the exercise the next day and going a step further to reinforce your memory, write it down a few dozen times. Done? Do you remember it now? Of course you do; you have worked your ass off at it after all! So what’s wrong with this method?

First off, a typical language would have an inventory of at least a couple of thousand words that you must know in order to be able to have anything more than a survival conversation in that language. With the amount of torture you went through doing all those reps for just one word, can you calculate what you are expected to put in to be able to even start conversing in Spanish? Is it practically possible? One does not and cannot really know for sure. We do know, however, that an overwhelming majority of Spanish learners end up quitting half way through and an overwhelming majority of those quitters quit due to monotony and boredom. Also, words you memorized using such insane number of dull reps are programmed to fall off your active memory the moment you need to recall them the most. Ever experienced that it’s-there-but-not-coming syndrome? Need this be clarified any further?

So how does visualization help?

The biggest flaw in the classical method is that despite your million-and-a-half reps, you are making no connection between burro and “donkey”. Your brain is getting no reason to associate the Spanish word with its English counterpart other than the fact that you have repeated them in combination so many times. So, the only handle or cue your brain has is the memory of you yelling out the two words in quick succession over and over again. Not the best thing to depend on, sound. Human mind retains pictures and moving images better and for longer than plain sounds. That’s an established fact of life so no debating this point.

Flatulent with all those beans in his burritos
Photo credit: Adam Rosenberg license CC BY-SA 2.0

So how does visualization help? Well, the simple rule of this technique is to feed your brain with what it most desperately needs to aid memory. How? By creating a mental picture. A funny, outrageous, stirring, emotion-inspiring, unforgettable picture in your mind that links the two words together conveniently. This image acts as the visual cue your mind always needed in order to not only retain the word forever but also recall it whenever needed. This is visualization. Imagine. Visualize. The more sensational your image, the easier for you to retain and recall. What is extremely important is that the image must serve as a link between the two words otherwise it won’t serve its purpose.

Coming back to our burro, one could imagine an obese, flatulent donkey eating a huge bean burrito. This image quite efficiently links the animal with its name in Spanish via the already-known word, burrito. Believe me, the image doesn’t have to make sense at all. In fact, try to make it stand out even more by adding some outrageous elements to it. For example, the donkey could be farting while biting into the burrito because of all the beans he’s been eating lately. This would give your picture a fun element that is so easy to recall. Make it bigger, more vivid, more colorful, and more outlandish and you will never again forget a word of Spanish, we bet!

By the way, it took me some five minutes to come up with this image while learning the word, burro, and some 10-15 seconds to imagine it with closed eyes for the first time. That was during the first few days of my Spanish-learning program and more than 10 years down the line today, I still don’t need to make an effort to recall the word.

Want to see more of visualization at work? This website had featured an article helping you to quickly assimilate the names of your body-parts in Spanish. Life is easier than you think!

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3 Meanings Of Acelerado

Just like in English, words in Spanish can, and often do, take a figurative meaning that is entirely different from what it literally means depending on the context. This is the point today’s very simple yet grammatically rich Spanish-language sentence is going to illustrate. What we are going to dissect today is a construct commonplace in real conversations in Mexican households yet not endorsed by mainstream grammar books. This is exactly what this site aims at anyways – Helping you speak Spanish as spoken by real Latinos and not necessarily as always prescribed by grammar books and constructed by literary characters.

So, here’s the Spanish sentence whose anatomy this post revolves around:

Mija Eldorita es de naturaleza acelerada y en el trabajo esta semana está acelerada con varios proyectos (My daughter, Eldorita, is by nature hyper and this week at work, she is swamped with various projects).

The nuts and bolts

Is your child acelerado too?
Photo credit: anarchivist licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

Let’s break this long sentence down to chewable morsels and discover how effortlessly Spanish just flows in! As always, we will do this word by word, phrase by phrase, assimilating new vocabulary as well as relevant grammar on the fly.

Mija – This one’s a bit interesting. You won’t find this word in any official dictionary and yet hear it everywhere you go. It means “my daughter” in English. Now, if you are familiar with the actual Spanish for “daughter” (hija), you would have probably guessed by now that mija is simply a colloquial contraction of mi (my) hija (daughter). No points for guessing that mijo, in a similar fashion, stands for mi hijo, or “my son”.

Eldorita – Just another female Hispanic name, in this case, the name of the daughter in question.

es – This is the third person singular present tense form for the verb, ser, which means “to be” in English. The English verb, “to be” has actually two translations in Spanish and ser is one of them. The other one is estar. Confused about which one to use when? Well, that’s an entirely different topic of discussion that calls for a post of its own. For now, as a rule of thumb, just remember that ser is used when we are talking about one’s character, traits, or anything that’s more or less permanent in nature while estar, on the other hand, fills in whenever something temporary is being discussed (such as, location, temporary physical condition, temporary emotional state, etc.). Of course, this statement is overly simplistic and there do exist quite a few if’s and but’s to this rule. Hence, you’d be better off just remembering the context set by example sentences such as this one and forget about the grammatical modalities. Just go with the flow and eventually your ears will evolve to be able to tell which one of the two sounds correct in any given context. Let this evolution be organic and don’t force-feed your brain by memorizing the rules right now.

de naturaleza – No questions asked, this phrase simply means, “by nature”. If you have been learning vocabulary as taught in schools, i.e., memorizing lists of words with their English meanings devoid of any context, you would probably be scratching your head right now over whether this should mean “of nature” instead because you learned that de means “of”. That’s the disaster you invite if you ever try cramming up word-lists. So, take this as an illustration of how important context is when you are learning Spanish, or any language for that matter. Here, de naturaleza is just a phrase and not requiring any further autopsy, just means “by nature”.

acelerada – Something funny is happening here. Literally, acelerada or acelerado (if used for males) means “accelerated” or “speeded up” in English. However, colloquial Spanish has a way of altering the meanings of recognized words beyond recognition. In this context, acelerada means “hyper” or “hyperactive”. Luckily to aid your memory, this contextual meaning does hold a semblance to the literal meaning because usually, if you are hyper you would tend to do things quickly or faster. Why? Because you are hyper and impatient! Since we are talking about my daughter, we are using the feminine form, acelerada and not the masuline form, acelerado.

y – this one is perhaps the easiest. Y stands for “and”; nothing more, nothing less. However, just in case you are feeling a tad adventurous, here’s a fun fact: The Spanish for “and” becomes e if the following word starts with an /i/ sound as in e higiene (and hygiene).

en – Spanish for “in” or “at” when the sense being implied is that of something happening or being situated in a location.

el trabajo – This one means “work” and, to be more precise in this context, “the workplace”. Needless to say, it draws from the Spanish verb, trabajar (to work). El is the Spanish “the” when followed by a masculine noun (if feminine, the el becomes la).

esta – This means “this” in Spanish, only when the following noun is feminine, otherwise the word is este.

semana – The Spanish for “week”. Don’t miss out the feminine -a ending; most Spanish nouns ending with “a” are feminine and most ending with “o” are masculine. This is precisely why semana takes esta and not este.

está – This is the third person singular present tense form of estar, the verb that, along with es, translates into “to be”. As discussed above, estar is used only when talking about temporary conditions or locations. Why estar in this context? we will soon see. Also note the complete absence of the subject here. In Spanish it is perfectly fine, rather appropriate, to omit the subject unless there’s any ambiguity. Here, since the context indicates that we are talking about my daughter, está comes to mean not just “is” but “she is”.

acelerada – In this context acelerada takes on yet another meaning which though similar in origin, has a slightly different ring to it. This time, it means “to be swamped” or “to be flodded”. Again, were we talking about a guy instead of my daughter, the word would have been acelerado.

con – This means “with” in all contexts; usage examples include con gusto (with pleasure), con carne (with meat), etc.

varios proyectos – Perhaps the easiest bit for an English-speaker, this phrase means “various projects” where varios means “various” and proyectos means “projects”.

The two ways to be

Finally we come to an end of this interesting autopsy! We are sure this simple sentence has loaded you with enough grammar and vocabulary to make you feel one step closer to being Spanish-enabled! Did you notice how we used ser (the form, es) when talking about my daughter’s hyperactive nature and estar (the form, está) when talking about she being swamped with a lot of work during this particular week? Since her hyperactive nature is a permanent attribute, her trait, we used ser which is used while talking about all things permanent. However, when we talked about her hectic week, we know that it was temporary, only for one week. That’s why the temporary verb, estar, had to step in.

Once again, please refrain from cramming up these rules and just learn the sentence, the context. If you learn a single sentence and just “understand” the grammar it uses, you will be comfortable making hundreds of sentences more within a similar context without memorizing any grammar. Our two cents, just add these sentences to your flashcard deck.

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Love, Sex, And Lots Of Spanish!

If you have a weakness for everything Mexican, including Mexican Spanish, few films will teach, exhilarate, and inspire you more than this one. We dig road-trip flicks which is why Diarios de Motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries) is amongst our top recommendations to anyone learning Mexican Spanish or researching the Latin American culture. This is also partially why Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) gets an article of its own here. Most importantly, the movie is a rich source of the local slang lingo and colloquialisms of Spanish as spoken in the country that has more Spanish speakers than any other in the world.

Gael García Bernal: One of the finest stars of Mexican cinema
Photo credit: Yann Caradec licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

The movie that made Gael

Well, to be very honest, though the movie released way back in 2001, it wasn’t until 2009 that I finally watched it for myself. All those years, however, I did know this movie in bits and pieces from an assortment of sources; for example, I knew that it was about a trio on a crazy road-trip across Mexico, that it was critically acclaimed all over America, that it had a generous dose of sexual content, and that it literally launched Gael García Bernal on the Mexican movie scene. What I failed to recognize back then was how this movie could prove incredibly indispensible to anyone learning Spanish, particularly the Mexican flavor!

I admit I just loved Gael García’s acting skills in this film but I was already a fan way before I watched it. More than half a dozen awards for his work in this film meant he would become the instant hot-property in Mexico everybody was after. Starting here, Gael went on to play his signature roles as Che in not one but two epic masterpieces including Diarios de Motocicleta! It only helps to note that he comes from Guadalajara which is widely accepted as the epicenter of Mexican culture and that he started acting before he started going to school.

The essence

Though, like I said, the film doles out generous helpings of skin and erotica, it is not sex that stands out in the story; what stands out is the artistic presentation of all this sleaze. And, yes, there’s more than a hint of homophobia with Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna sharing quite a chemistry. Nevertheless, the story is more about the teenagers’ coming of age, their friendship, and the changing chemistry between them during a summer road-trip they made with an older chick escaping from her marriage.

The trip in itself, a remote hint of Diarios de Motocicleta, is all about flamboyance, youthful hedonism, adventure, and a sense of liberation. The icing on the cake is their diverse social backgrounds which helps paint one of the most authentic pictures of modern Mexico’s class differences. Julio, played by Gael, from a middle-class family subscribing to leftist ideologies while his friend, Tenoch, played by Diego Luna, comes from a high-profile political family. It should only be a given that, if you are keen on knowing the Mexican culture and lifestyle while learning Spanish, this movie is probably the second best means of the closest possible encounter, the best being living in the country for a first-hand experience.

A goldmine of Mexican colloquialism

One reason why this movie deserves a spot in every Spanish learner’s collection is its heavy reliance on dialogs. Dialogs are key to understanding this story as what matters most here is what the characters say rather than what they do.

Also, since you are learning Spanish, especially the one spoken in Mexico, you don’t want to miss out on the goldmine of local colloquialism and slang jargon that these dialogs offer! For this reason, it is infinitely important that you watch this movie only with subtitles – Spanish, of course. As far as the visuals go you are in for a treat, for the camera rolls past some of the most breathtakingly original images as the protagonists drive past the poor Mexican countryside.

Were this movie produced by a glamorous Hollywood house, it would have been your typical raunchy road-trip skin-flick with little more than cheesy lines and naked people all over each other like a bunch of hampsters. But we are talking about Y Tu Mamá También here, which is as deep as it gets with its layered characterization, refreshing visuals, engaging dialogs, and a rare, raw storyline.

Our strong recommendation: Whatever you do, just do not skip this masterpiece no matter what if you are truly crazy about learning Spanish. Just don’t forget to hook it up with original Spanish subtitles and you are done. And don’t let yourself be put off by the sex and homophobia because even if the message of this film is out-of-sync with your philosophy, remember that your goal is learning Spanish and this movie fits the bill in every way imaginable.

Don’t forget to watch it over and over again in infinite loops until you are capable of recalling the lines ahead of the characters and can understand every single word without the subtitles. That will certainly take time but, as they always say, the juice is by all means worth the squeeze!

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Stay Silent And Get Fluent...Quickly!

Immersion seems so natural and yet there hardly seems to be any Spanish-learning methodology more controversial than this! Why exactly? Well, apparently there doesn’t exist a definitive answer yet but it can be vehemently affirmed that there exist more plausible evidences proving its benefits than the contrary. Actually, even the academic purists vouch for total immersion. Where, then, do we disagree? That bone of contention is called “grammar”. While academics consider it the be-all of any Spanish language acquisition program, successful polyglots unanimously counter it with what they call “silent, no-frills input”.

Ever since we started learning a language that was not our own (English for most of us), we have been wired with the idea that grammar is the start and end of learning a language. Let us shock you now with an assertion: This is precisely the opposite of what really is. Yes, it is possible to get fluent in any human language, let alone Spanish, while never turning a single page of that grammar book! To shock you even further, learning a language without touching grammar is a more efficient and quicker way and the only natural way of doing it. And we are not even the first ones laying this claim. This assertion is backed by rock-solid linguistic research and results experienced by established polyglots all over the world learning all kinds of language.

An example from my life

So, back to learning Spanish. Where do we start if not with grammar? The most efficient idea, which we will be harping on shamelessly throughout our conversation, is to doggedly focus on absorbing the language to the point of saturation to begin with. Note that this article prefer using the word, “absorbing” instead of “learning” when it comes to Spanish, or any language for that matter. There’s a massive difference.

Learning is what I did with Sanskrit when I was in high school. Did I like Sanskrit? Hell, no! But I had to learn out of compulsion. And I did! Crammed up every single word in the ugly little textbook and all the complex case-tables mandated by the Sanskrit grammar and actually scored good grades on my tests. In fact, when it came to tests, I fared better in Sanskrit than in English or even my mother tongue, Hindi! But, was it any useful? No. I was never able to have a 30-second elevator chat with someone in Sanskrit while I could rattle off in English or Hindi for hours at a stretch.

The silent-period is a wonder-drug for fluent Spanish!
Photo credit: Knight Foundation licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

So where does this leave us? What I did with Sanskrit here is called learning, while I had simply absorbed English and Hindi. What I am trying to establish here is that learning a language is reading and memorizing words and grammar rules for a purpose. A short-term goal, e.g., a test. This can get you good grades on a test but will never make you practical in that tongue. If you wish to get fluent in any language and be able to converse with native speakers with ease, what you need is absorption. Soak up the language. Listen to it and let it roil inside you. Saturate yourself with the input to a point of absolute comfort. That’s when you should consider practicing the language and referring to its grammar.

Silent-period

We all know and have been told countless times that absorption is how we acquired our mother tongue and hence it is the most natural methodology. Putting it in practice for a second language like Spanish, however, gets more radical. The idea is to not attempt to speak a word of Spanish nor read any grammar for a pretty long time. Some call this the “silent period”. During this silent period, all efforts must be invested in listening. Listen to Spanish. Authentic Spanish. As much as possible. Watch telenovelas, listen to podcasts, listen to Spanish music, watch Spanish movies...just listen incessantly. Only when the time is right, should you consider producing some Spanish.

Break your silence when the time is right

The obvious next question would be, when? Well, when the time is right, you just know it. Think of it as an extremely annoying and ubiquitous TV commercial. Your guts hate that commercial and the moment it comes on TV, you curse under your breath. But just because it’s being shown over and over again, day in and day out, did you notice something? It started growing on you! Ever found yourself subconsciously humming the jingle in your shower or while you are cooking? That’s the power of your subconscious. You absorbed that commercial. The words, the sentence structures, the patterns, the intonation, everything. And, only when you are saturated, does it become your second nature to reproduce the sounds you absorbed and you start humming them unknowingly.

It’s the same with Spanish. When you are too loaded, you will start producing automatically. Not only will you start speaking spontaneously, but you’ll also start developing an ear for what word combination or pattern sounds right and what just doesn’t. All this when you haven’t started studying the rules governing the sentence structures in Spanish! In other words, you will recognize the very signature of Spanish and this is all it takes for you to be eventually fluent like the natives. Call it overkill if you will, but if it worked for me, I am sure it will for you too.

And when is that?

So again, when is the right time? Some say it’s 10,000 hours while some say it’s 800. The numbers would largely depend on your individual knack and environment and our advice would be to steer clear of any number written-in-stone. There’s no magic count at which you’ll suddenly start rattling in Spanish like a native speaker. This is, instead, a very personal and subjective concept. As a thumb-rule, we would still recommend no less than 500 hours of silent period before you even think of taking the plunge.

Again, what is immensely important is that these 500 hours must be evenly spaced out and must be consistent over a period of time. What is meant is that if you spend 8 hours watching telenovelas on the first day and then only 30 minutes the next day and skip it completely on the third day, don’t expect any miracles. It’s better, instead, to spend an equal amount of time, even it it’s as little as only 2 hours, every day without any compromise whatsoever until you hit the 500-hour mark (or 800 or 1,000).

Oh, and before we forget grammar, do use it. But only as a reference to understand anything that confuses you, not as a homework. Our suggestion, start using grammar only after you are comfortable conversant in Spanish, only in order to polish and buff-up your language skills. Isn’t this what you did to your native lingo anyways? You were already fluent in your mother tongue way before you were taught the first grammar rule for that language. Remember the same for Spanish and you should be able to fool the natives with your accent in no time.

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