See, I hope I look cultured enough today, cause I got my SE Asia map in the BG even though I don't know anything about geography,
Seleccion Nacional t-shirt even though I don't watch soccer.
So this is my second time recording this video because the first time I recorded it I was totally chaotic,
and I think I was just a little bit too excited, but I am very excited. Do you know why?
it's because I'm back on YouTube, duh!
Hey guys, welcome back to my channel and thanks for being here. My name is Elysse DaVega,
I have felt the void in my chest for about a month now because I haven't even thought about posting, I had like
you know, life changes, I was going back to school, getting used to a new routine, semi-traumatic life events, but that's all on the side now.
Today I have a very exciting video for you because it's about something that I feel very deeply about.
It's something that I'm very passionate about, and that is *whispers* Mexican Spanish.
but here I am today to talk about why choosing a dialect for your language is very, very cool,
important, helps you a lot, all of those things. I have nothing bad to say about it.
But I don't wanna get ahead of myself, so I'm just going to say a little disclaimer up-front, this video is highly contextualized around Spanish
because it's like.. I guess the "case study" that I'm basing all of this knowledge and advice off of.
"Knowledge"... bold to assume that I know anything, I know. Umm hehe
So if you speak Spanish, if you want to learn Spanish, this is great for you but also there's gonna be a lot of stuff in here
that benefits you even if you're learning a different language,
or even if you don't care at all and you're just here to watch me and my pretty earrings.
I should plug in my laptop. Aaaa! So in this video I'm gonna talk about the context of my Spanish and
kind of like its whole life journey, talking about like three really strong benefits and of
course I'm gonna talk about how I actually did it. So like the steps that I took
to actually choose a spedific... 'spedific'.. SPECIFIC dialect
and incorporate it into my Spanish, which is already at a very mature level.
God, I hate that it looks like I have no hair. I swear! No, literally, since the last time I posted a video I
couldn't even put it in a ponytail. But now? Come on. I'm not even kidding wit yall.
Okay, so, let's talk about the context of my Spanish.
If you go to my first Painting with a Polyglot video that I made one year ago,
you'll see that my Spanish sounds very confusing. People left very kind comments saying
that "Your Spanish sounds so good", but I also got a lot of comments saying stuff about my accent, and people were very confused
about how I spoke. Or at least I think confused because everybody had something different to say.
So over the years, I've spoken Spanish for about 10 years more
or less but I only got serious about it in the last five, and over this time people have told me that I sound like a mix between a
Spanish and a Mexican person, they've told me I sound Argentinian, which... you're lying. You're lying!
people have told me I sound Caribbean or Venezuelan or something like that, and it's equally confusing for me.
You know? I just wanna fit into one little place so bad.
But yeah, I think just by default I always wanted to study European Spanish,
because it's just like the default I guess. When you learn French, most people wanna learn metropolitan French.
When you learn English, you pretty much either learn UK or American. Nobody's like
"I'm gonna learn Australian English!" But the problem is just that I was so far removed
of course geographically but also culturally. Like, I had no
ties to the culture or anything, whereas being Floridian, I live in Florida and I have for 10 years,
I'm constantly exposed to Latino Spanish, like different dialects like Venezuelan,
Puerto Rican Spanish, Dominican Spanish, Cuban Spanish, oh my god there's so many Cubans in Florida,
So I realized after a while, I was like "...I need to like, let European Spanish go.."
You know it's nothing against Spanish people, you guys have a very beautiful dialect and I've travelled to your country
more than I have any other Spanish-speaking country, but I just didn't really identify with
it anymore so I was like "Hmm. Okay, that's fine." Fast forward to last year
in May when I went to Mexico for the first time, and I was like "Oh my god."
You know I fell in love with everything, and when I was there I felt like myself. And that's
when it really just struck me like "I want to be me as much as I can in this language."
So it occurred to me-- it's not like I planned to dialectify my Spanish, it's
kind of just like I realized in the same moment that I wanted a specific dialect and that that dialect should be Mexican Spanish.
It was just very natural. It came to me very naturally and for that I'm grateful. It found me, baby! Okay.
But literally since then, since last May I've made it a constant point and a constant effort
to just put a little bit more on Mexican Spanish.
And there are some people who will say that it's really not good to center yourself on one dialect
because you need to be able to communicate with people of all different countries and you need to be versatile and with that, yes I do agree.
But I think that's more appropriate and suited for beginner and intermediate learners,
and my Spanish is very, very mature, not to flex, but for me I felt like a little bit of tunnel vision
was not going to hurt the fundamentals of my Spanish. To the contrary, I feel like it's given me so much more
confidence because it's given me so much more of an identity. Here's a recurring theme for you: identity.
So yeah, that's basically the context of my Spanish, and now it's time to talk about how I actually put that into practice.
Because it's easy to just sit up one day and be like "Ohp, I'm gonna learn Congolese French instead of
Metropolitan French", but how are you gonna actually put that into practice?
So luckily, Mexico is not a small country, you know, there's a lot of
people that wanna learn Mexican Spanish, so there's a lot of different ways to incorporate it. One of the biggest things that I can
say is social media. You know, not to be a headass millenial or something, but
there's just so many different ways like on Instagram I started to follow literal like
just Mexican Spanish accounts. Because there are people that are so proud of their dialect
and they want to teach people their dialect, like ProfMexicaine,
I really like that one because I like to overlay it with French,
Dosis de Espanol, Spanish lang lovers,
there are a lot of different accounts you can find that focus on just one dialect.
You just have to ask around and look for them. We've got Twitter,
Twitter is such-- it like, that's how I keep my Spanish Mexican but also young.
because you know I follow a lot of [Mexican] people who are the same age as me.
And it's just very beneficial to know how people actually talk in day-to-day.
Because social media is very much a casual, informal platform.
Or, I guess where people just feel very comfortable so they talk how they talk with their friends.
And of course talking about social media, I have such a big platform. I have thousands of people that see my stuff,
So when I show people what I'm doing, so like "Oh, I'm watching-- I'm listening to this Mexican song,"
or "I'm watching this Mexican movie," people are like "Oh, I love that, did you know about this one?" you know, it's..
It's cyclical, it's cyclical because when people see you learning their dialect,
they feel flattered! Like they want to help you and they want to give you recommendations, they wanna
video call with you, they just wanna egg you on. And that's super cool.
So definitely I would say get involved with social media, just start a little studygram, you don't even have to show your face if you don't want to.
I'm just saying because it has exponentially helped with putting a dialect into my Spanish.
And of course, also it's a given that I use italki, because on italki you can choose what country
your tutor is from. So in the past year I have only had Mexican tutors, and so that helps me to just constantly use
the stuff that I'm learning from social media, from music, from a lot of other sources,
and lastly for how I put it into practice was just cinema. I got so, like, entrenched,
and just like really interested in Mexican movies in the last year, I think I've seen more Mexican movies in the last year
than I have American movies, and that's saying something because I really like to watch movies.
There's just so much to discover, and I feel like because I love movies in general,
just doing that but in Mexican Spanish it's just like... it's enriching, it's very enriching.
And now it's time to convince you because I gotta give you some proof in the pudding, I gotta talk about it a little bit more.
So the first thing that everyone talks about when we talk about choosing a specific dialect is
slang and filler words, and how to use them in context, and of course that's really, really important.
So an example of something that I didn't used to say but now I say all the time is "Me hice bolas".
which literally means "I made myself balls", but in Mexican Spanish it means "I got confused".
So now instead of saying "Me confundi, me confundi" all the time, I say "Me hice bolas",
and it's just like a more informal, comfortable way to talk to younger people. I don't know if older people say that.
I don't know, but it just makes me feel a little bit more identified, I guess.
Slang is very cool. And when people hear you say slang they're also like "Ohh, this girl knows what she's talking about."
and then filler words. So filler words are not necessarily
dialectified, I don't know, I really don't have that much experience talking about filler words in different dialects, but I know
in every Spanish dialect you're going to hear things like "o sea", "pues", "este",
Just by constantly talking to Mexican people, it's been very contact heavy, so I've heard
a lot more filler words than I would have heard if I didn't put so much effort into learning a specific dialect.
Sorry-- you gotta stay with me here, I'm kinda like *wheewww* but I swear, we're on our way.
Am I making sense? So of course, slang, filler words, and how they're used in context, that's really
really important but we gotta go a lil bit deeper. Something that can be very beautiful and very important is the etymology
and history. So let's talk about history first. God,
this little piece of hair is gonna drive me insane. Let's take care of that, okay.
So way way back, in the land of New Spain in the 1500s, when the Spaniards came down to Mexico and ruined everything (just kidding)
There was a woman named Malinche, or Malintzin, honestly, there's some debate around her name, it's not very clear to me, it's been
a long time since I've read about it. She was an indigenous woman and she was sold by her mother
to the Spanish to be an interpreter because she spoke Maya.
Why is this important? Because of Malinchismo.
So malinchismo today is used to describe the tendency to prefer
foreign things instead of things from one's own country.
When you hear this term, you're like "What is that?", you get to learn a little more about the history. So
that's part of Mexico's history, but it also relates to, you know, social dynamics and social concepts today.
and of course it's not just specific to Mexico, malinchismo is kinda just like a Latin American concept that has spread to other places, so the
history is not just in the past. It's also interwoven and it's integral to the modern language and modern society as well.
And next, talking about etymology.
So something that I always kinda was familiar with but didn't really know about
until I really got into Mexican Spanish was how common it is for indigenous words to be in the language.
So Mexican Spanish has a lot of words that come from Nahuatl, it is the biggest indigenous language in Mexico if I'm not mistaken.
It's still spoken today, most widely spoken, and it's really interesting because now that I'm exposed
to it so much I actually have a drive to learn a little bit of Nahuatl. I wanna try it next year
and because I know Spanish there will be more resources available, I don't think there are as many resources in English.
So think about that. It's just really beautiful because when you are constantly using these words you start to grow attached to them,
and you want to learn more about it. So, that is what I plan to do next year.
And it's something that I didn't plan, you know? so dialectifying my Spanish really led me to other
linguistic endeavors that I'm really excited about. And the last thing I want to use to convince you is that it's really fulfilling.
It gives you a sense of community. So like I said, overall it's helped to give an identity to my Spanish.
So I feel much more like me when I'm speaking Spanish now. And on top of that, like I said with social media when people
see you learning their dialect, they wanna help you. So that's a really easy way to make friends,
or acquaintances, I've met so many different cool people on social media and in real life just because they know that I'm really into
Mexican Spanish. And it's not just native speakers, though, too, you know? Because there's other people focusing on a specific dialect as well
so you guys can mingle. Anyways, I'm getting to that point where I'm rambling, but.
I hope that I've given you enough reasons to consider it, it really.. I don't know, it's just something that I'm very grateful for.
It's a decision that I don't think anybody would regret, you know?
and you know, why learn the colonizer version of the language in the first place?
Like c'mon. I'm joking, but also [piercing silence]
I hope you consider it if you've been thinking about it at all, or even if you haven't thought about it, I hope
that I've planted the idea into your mind and it grows into a beautiful plant or something.
Anyways, hope that everyone has been doing well, I am very happy to be back on YouTube, thank you so much for
supporting me in my wavering times, and I'll see you guys very, very soon. Have a good one :)
[music - "Salute to Mexico"]