When you start out in the language, you can barely hear the differences.
In fact, I would say most people can't hear the difference.
Hi there, steve Kaufmann here.
And, uh, today I want to talk about Spanish from Spain
versus Spanish from Mexico.
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So, first of all, I do have I getting addressed for my video.
I found a LingQ t-shirt, so I'm wearing my LingQ T-shirt.
It comes up all the time: should I learn the Spanish in
Spain or the Spanish in Mexico?
Or I would rather learn the Spanish in Mexico or the Spanish in Spain?
Or I don't want to use material from Spain because I wanna learn
Spanish, the Spanish from Mexico?
My take on this is as follows.
You can find all kinds of material by Googling, which will give you, you
know, a hundred differences between say, Mexican Spanish, and Spanish in
Spain, and you can get lists of these.
It's kind of useless, in my opinion.
The difference doesn't matter.
Okay.
It doesn't matter for a variety of reasons.
First of all, the Spanish world is not divided into Mexican
Spanish, and Spanish in Spain.
The largest Spanish speaking countries in the world are Mexico,
of course, number one, followed by Argentina and Columbia, I believe.
And even the United States is a larger Spanish speaking country than Spain.
But that's kind of meaningless because the Spanish speakers in the United States
have come from somewhere else, so they don't really represent a particular,
sort of, unified form of the language.
Second of all, Spanish, of the languages where you have, you know, different
regional accents, which includes obviously English, with Australian
English and New Zealand English and, and, uh, Singapore English and Scottish
English and, and, uh, you know, Liverpool English, and, uh, American, which
is again, not one American, but New York, Boston, Texas, uh, you name it.
So in all of these countries there are differences, but in the
Spanish, my experience is that the vowels don't change that much.
So there's not, it's not that difficult to understand the different variations.
The consonants do change in that some of the places they don't pronounce
the S for example, the Chileans.
So there are, there are differences.
But to me, and, and also I should say the, the differences in Spanish, just
as in English or other languages, it's not just a matter of Spain
versus Mexico, or even Spain versus Mexico versus Peru, versus Columbia,
versus Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua.
It's also within those countries, there are tremendous regional differences.
Uh, I hear this when I listen to a Columbia Columbian telenovela, differences
in pronunciation and certainly I had a discussion with a Columbian who taught
Spanish online, I can't remember her name, but she said the regions in Columbia
where this term is used, where, you know, getting into to the whole, uh,
usted and tu as a general rule in Mexico.
The formal, people tend to use usted more, which is actually third person, whereas
in Spain they go to tu more quickly.
But she was explaining to me that in Columbia there are parts of the country
where they use usted more parts of the country where they use tu more parts of
the country, where they invert and the more casual, informal form is you state.
So all of this stuff can vary within countries from country to country,
for Spanish and for other languages.
The point is, though, that you have to get used to it all.
If you're watching a movie in Spanish, it's very possible that there will be
actors there who are, are characters that are from Spain or from Mexico, or from
Columbia, or from Peru, from Argentina.
Uh, you can't control that.
You have to understand them all.
Uh, if you're reading a book, there could be characters there from
different Spanish speaking countries.
You need words.
Learning a language is primarily a matter of learning words.
You should learn these words from any source that you find interesting,
and if that happens to be Mexican or Spanish or Colombian or whatever,
you shouldn't say, exclude that.
I don't wanna listen to that because I wanna focus on whatever Mexican
Spanish, because I'm going to Mexico.
You need the words and the differences aren't that great.
And when you start out in the language, you can barely hear the differences.
In fact, I would say most people can't hear the difference.
So just treat it all as one language.
Read as much as you can.
Listen as much as you can.
Acquire the vocabulary.
And as you stumble across regional terms, you will learn, Oh yeah, this
is a term used in, uh, you know, Columbia to mean something or other,
it's a very much a regional term.
You'll gradually, as you get exposed to more and more of the sort
ofvernacular of a particular country, you'll get more and more used to it.
At some point, if you're gonna be living in or traveling in Mexico,
Spain, Columbia, wherever, you may wanna focus in on a particular sort of
form of pronunciation because you find that more attractive or more useful.
But the likelihood is that even if you think you are immitating that, you
know, Mexican Spanish to the local, you still sound like a foreigner,
so it won't make much difference.
The main thing is, can you put words together?
Do you understand what people are saying?
Are you able to express yourself with words, even with mistakes, even
with some pronunciation, fuzziness?
That's the main thing.
So that this distinction, you know, do I, I wanna make sure I'm
learning, you know, uh, whatever.
To me is, it's not that meaningful.
If anything in Portuguese, the difference is greater between, say, the Portuguese
in Portugal and the Portuguese in Brazil.
But even within Brazil and within Portugal, you have regional differences.
But as a general rule, if you sort of take Portuguese accents from Portugal,
Brazilian as Brazilian accents from Brazil, those are more different.
And the Portuguese spoken in Portugal is often held to be more difficult
to understand for a learner than the Portuguese spoken in Brazil because
the Portuguese have a tendency to chew their, uh, syllables a little bit.
But even there, when I was learning Portuguese, I wanted to listen to both.
I want to be able to understand both.
If I find something interesting that's in Portuguese podcast from
Portugal, or a podcast from Brazil, I want to be able to understand it.
I want to be able to use it for my language learning.
If you are learning English, and you have a person speaking to you who's very
interesting and you like his or her voice, and he or she is Scottish or from Texas
or Georgia or uh, Liverpool or Australia, you still wanna access that material.
So I just think there's far too much emphasis, similarly with
French, between the French spoken in Montreal or in Paris or in Marseille.
To me, these are not, or Haiti, for that matter, where the language is a little bit
different, these are not important issues.
Get the words in you.
Get the brain used to the language.
Speak when you have an opportunity.
Don't worry about how you sound.
Go for it and take in the whole language.
So that's my take on Mexican Spanish versus Spanish, uh, in Spain.
It doesn't matter.
It actually is a false statement of the problem.
Spain, Spanish, you know, is widespread around the world,
as are many other languages.
Enjoy them all, all variations of the language.
And, and on a final note, these regional differences in different
forms of Spanish, it, it's still one language, so it's not like Spanish and
Portuguese, which are different languages, although very, very similar with a high
degree of, uh, mutual intelligence.
Vocabulary is very, very similar.
A similar case would be say the Scandinavian languages, where
there's a greater difference in vocabulary and syntax, but still,
they kind of more or less understand each other a lot of the time.
But they're, all of these are considered languages, partly because they're separate
countries and partly because uh, you know, there's a sufficient difference.
Um, you know, uh, Schweizerdeutsch in Switzerland is considered to be a separate
language, but it's a, it's a form, it's in effect a dialect of German, but Austrian
is not considered a separate language.
Bavarian is not considered a separate language today, the language that's spoken
in Bavaria or Austria is still German.
If we get to say Ukrainian and, and, and Russian or the Slavic languages,
they are again, very similar, similar grammar, a lot of common vocabulary.
But there again, you know, some lang, some of the Slavic languages are
closer to each other than than others.
So Russian tends to be an outlier from a vocabulary point of view, whereas
Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak, et cetera, Czecg even are closer together.
But there are separate languages from a political point of view and
from a, you know, the extent to which they are mutually intelligible.
Uh, so that's a very different situation from, and, and even with
Chinese, I mean, you've got say, Mandarin as spoken in Taiwan versus,
uh, different areas of the mainland.
It's still the same language, it's still Mandarin.
That's not the same as what is sometimes called, what are sometimes called regional
dialects, like Cantonese or Shanghainese, but which to me are different languages.
Uh, with essentially overwhelmingly the same vocabulary.
But again, once you get into casual conversation, the vocabulary is different
and the pronunciation is so different that they're mutually unintelligible.
Anyway, a bit of a rant here on this whole subject of, of, you know, a
different variance of the language.
And again, it's not like Arabic where the language is in fact
are almost different languages.
It's...
the Spanish thing is they're very, very similar and it doesn't matter which one
you listen to and which one you use to improve your Spanish, in my opinion.
Thanks for listening.
Bye for now.