Learning the lingo

There was good news this week. On Monday, I completed my 20th hour of Spanish lessons at Woodward Chile and so it was time for an assessment to check on my progress. And the good news was that I passed and have now started Spanish level 2!

So far, learning Spanish has been a lot of fun but quite difficult. I arrived having studied Spanish at evening class for a year and was quite confident I could communicate on a basic level. How wrong I was. I had not been prepared for how different Spanish in Chile would sound. And even now, I almost always have no idea at all what people are saying to me.

Firstly, people in Chile seem to speak quite fast. Of course, native speakers always speak faster than learners. But the Chileans I've dealt with, by their own admission, talk quite rapidly.

They also seem to swallow their words. Again, probably quite a standard thing for native speakers - the final letters or syllables in words get lost or dropped and words run together.

Then there's the difference in pronunciation. The Spanish that I have been used to is spoken with a th sound for the letters z and c, whereas here, s, c and z are all pronounced with a s sound. Getting used to the pronunciation is easy but it makes spelling a bit tricky.

Add to this, changes in lexis. Lots of vocabulary is different from Spain. For example, the word for avocado (which Chileans eat a lot of) is palta, not aguacate. And don't even get me started on 'Chileanisms' - colloquial expressions and phrases which proliferate standard conversation.

So as you can see, getting to grips with the local lingo is a challenge. One that both amuses and frustrates me in equal measure!