Grammar talk makes me feel a little like this guy, but it can be helpful.

At some point while during my intensive study of Spanish, when I was taking 1-on-1 classes nearly every day, I hit a wall with a particular problem. The only way I could express it, with the limited knowledge of grammar terms I had at the time, was that I didn’t know who I should be conjugating the verb for.

Now it seems like a silly problem to me. So much so, that I’d almost forgotten about it. But I struggled with this for a while, and I imagine a lot of other Spanish students do as well. Here’s an example of the problem.

I’ll make it really simple. If I wanted to say, “She told me,” I would need a subject – ella (she) – a verb – decir (say/tell) – and an object – me. The verb needs to be in the past tense. Here’s where I was running into the problem. Do I say, “Ella me dije” or “Ella me dijo”?

“Dije” would be conjugated based on the object (me), “dijo” is for the subject (ella).

I was constantly getting this mixed up, and I couldn’t figure out what the pattern was, how to choose which person the verb got conjugated for. I was puzzling over this one day when my wife, who is not a Spanish teacher or a native speaker, just a student like me, said: “I think the verb always matches the person who is doing it.”

I looked through several books I had lying around, and confirmed that yes, it was the person performing the verb (the subject), who the verb was always conjugated for.

After that, it took classes with native Spanish speakers for me to internalize this rule. It represented a big leap in my understanding of Spanish though, and helped me understand the importance of grammar terms like subject and object.

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Anytime someone asks me what the most difficult thing is about learning Spanish, I’m answering before they finish the sentence. Spanish verb conjugation. There are other parts of Spanish that become harder as you go, like the subjunctive tense, but verb conjugation was, for me, the biggest single obstacle to learning Spanish.

Our well-worn Barron's 501 Spanish Verbs.

In English, regular verbs don’t change that much depending on the subject. For example:

To run (present tense)

I run

You run

She/He/It runs

We run

They run

So, in the present tense, the verb to run only changes one time, in the 3rd person singular. Here’s the same verb in Spanish:

Correr (present tense)

Corro

Corres

Corre

Corremos

Corren

Verbs in Spanish change for each subject. And again, in each tense. Remembering to do this while speaking at full speed in Spanish seems totally impossible at first. Myself, and many Spanish speakers I know, started by just saying the verbs, without conjugating them. Then you spend a long time conjugating them, but getting them wrong all the time. So, you intend to say, I ran yesterday, but you end up saying, You run yesterday.

In the end, there is no better way to get good at conjugating Spanish verbs than practicing with native Spanish speakers, which is why you should try our Spanish classes. But my wife and I did come up with a high-pressure way of pushing each other to learn our Spanish verb conjugations. We called it the pinching game.

We took turns with Barron’s tome, 501 Spanish Verbs. One of us held it and randomly picked a verb. The other had to conjugate it in all 14 tenses. Each time the person being quizzed made a mistake or  couldn’t remember a verb, the person holding the book got to give them a good pinch. The strength of the pinches inevitably escalated.

Really, it was quite funny. We never pinched that hard, obviously, but it was a good way to add some fun and pressure to the normally arduous task of memorizing the way Spanish verbs conjugate.

I hope this helps. Don’t pinch your partner too hard!

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The plan for me and my wife’s first ever trip out of the U.S. was really simple. We barely had one. We would land in Santiago, Chile, spend two weeks studying Spanish – I knew a little, my wife was starting at zero – and then start traveling south, into Chilean Patagonia.

Things started off a little crazy. On the plane ride down there, I had trouble getting to sleep. Then, at about 1 am I heard murmurs in Spanish. The only word I could make out was borracho – drunk – and then a flight attendant was yelling, “I need passenger assistance. There is a security threat on the plane, I need passenger assistance.”

(story continues below image)

Me in Santiago, Chile, shortly after our arrival in 2004.

I turned toward the back of the plane, where I could see the flight attendant standing in the aisle in front of the bathrooms, waving her arms in the air like she was trying to signal us from far away, as she continued shouting to try to wake us. A few men started to stand, but most of the passengers had been shocked out of deep sleep, and looked dazed. It was just a few years after 9/11, and I imagined the worst. I got up and ran to the flight attendant. Behind her, against a wall behind the bathrooms, in the flight attendant’s area, a man frantically glanced around like Hunter S. Thompson being attacked by bats.

Four men had come to the back of the plane, and then another showed up, in a bright turquoise shirt, pulled out a badge, and said he was an air marshall. He told us all to relax, and started trying to reason with the man who had caused the disturbance.

“Look, we’re on a plane here, you’re scaring people.”

Before the marshall could finish, the man started mocking him, twirling a finger in the air and saying, “Oooh we’re on a plane! We’re on a plane!”

I relaxed a little then. Whatever this guy was, he wasn’t a terrorist.

The air marshall brought us into a huddle and gave instructions. He was going to arrest the man, and we were each to grab a limb. I had the left leg.

“Let’s go,” he said. And the next thing I knew, I was holding on to this guy’s leg. He tensed, as if to fight us off, but there were five adrenaline pumped men pinning him to the wall, and suddenly he gave up. The air marshall zip-tied his hands behind his back, then told us we could return to our seats.

A few minutes later, the marshall and a male attendant brought the man to the seating area, and as they tried to put him in a seat, he head butted a flight attendant on the nose. It started spurting blood right away. Another flight attendant, with the help of the marshal, shoved the man into a seat, where they subdued him.

When we landed in Buenos Aires, a layover for us on the way to Santiago, a half dozen police men marched onto the plane and dragged the guy off. One police officer stayed aboard and spoke to a woman with a small child. Apparently the man’s wife and son. Through tears, said he had forgotten his medication, drank a beer, and then lost it. I never found out what happened to the guy.

We took a much more calm flight to Santiago. I got a short nap, but was still frazzled when we arrived in Santiago and stepped into the heat of summer, surrounded by Spanish speakers. Luckily we had asked our hostel to call a cab for us, and we found the driver waiting.

During the ride I fumbled around in Spanish, chatting with the taxi driver and watching the city. From what I’ve seen of South American cities, they tend to have a lot more graffiti than those in North America. To my inexperienced eyes, the copious graffiti, including a poorly scrawled “50 Cent” on the side of the bridge that led to the neighborhood where we were staying, meant danger.

As we got closer to the hostel, the driver warned that I should take off my sunglasses, and that my wife should take off her earrings. With hand gestures he explained that people would run by and snatch them off our heads. Then he stopped in front of the hostel and asked us for 18,000 pesos.

Now, I knew that the exchange rate was quite different, but 18,000 of anything seemed like a lot of money to me, and the guide books had warned me about crooked taxi drivers. So after a hushed conversation with my wife, I asked the driver to come into the hostel so that I could make change. He politely agreed, and inside the clerk settled it all for us (the cabbie turned out to be honest).

A few minutes later, my wife and I were in our rundown but brightly painted room, laying on the bed and staring at the ceiling. We’d only been in South America a few hours, and had three more months before our return flights. What in the hell were we doing here?

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Telemundo has made an interesting choice to start a new television series, Mia Mundo, that will apparently be in both Spanish and English, or “Spanglish” with actors from Spanish language Telanovelas and English reality shows. It will also, according to an article in the New York Times, feature a “heavy dose of marketing,” as it is sponsored by Chevy and Verizon Wireless.

Heavy Dose of Marketing + Telenovela + Reality TV may sound like a recipe for crap. And Telemundo’s on press release on the show makes it sound like an effort by the marketing department:

“Mia Mundo” grew out of the Beyond Demographics™Latino Identity study conducted by Telemundo Media in partnership with Starcom Mediavest Group, a groundbreaking approach to understanding the various psychographic segments of U.S. Hispanics in America today. To better understand the market, the study looked at 12 unique segments, each with their own attitudes and psychographics that define and drive consumer behavior, including the Modern Independent Achiever (MIA). The study’s results illuminated the expected, as well as the unexpected archetypes that exist in the Hispanic market today. The character of Mia Ramirez was developed based on insights derived from the study that pertain to the Modern Independent Achiever. Working closely with Telemundo’s research department, Mia’s lifestyle and tastes mirror those of this important segment.

Still, I can’t say I wasn’t fascinated by the videos on the Mia Mundo Youtube channel, featuring monologues by the characters in which they effortlessly switch between English in Spanish in a way that makes me really jealous.

Watch the video below of the show’s main character, Mia Ramirez, and see if you can catch what she’s saying. Her Spanish is fast, but the little bits in English should help you out.

The show starts on May 3rd. You can watch it here. Also, check out the other videos of the characters on Mia Mundo’s Youtube channel here.

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After getting our butts kicked trying to cross over the high desert of the northern Argentine Andes, (read part 1 here) we started hiking back down to to the town of Uquía. I was woozy from the altitude sickness, and the wind was whipping, but at least this time we knew how to get back.

Calilegua National Park in Northern Argentina.

Somewhere along the way, we decided we were still committed to seeing the rain forest on the other side of the mountains. It’s hard to remember why it seemed so important now, but I think we were mostly intrigued by the idea that a landscape could change from a high and dry desert to a lush rain forest, just by crossing a ridge line.

That day we took a bus over to Humahuaca, which was a beautiful little town. The next day we got on another bus, and took a journey of several hours around the south end of the mountain chain that held the desert and the rain forest, and around to San Martin, the nearest bus stop before entering Calilegua National Park. I can’t say I remember at what point during the bus ride the landscape changed, but by the time we got to San Martin, we were surrounded by fields of sugar cane, and the once blazing sun was hidden behind thick clouds.

After a quick meeting with the tourism office in the bus station, my wife and I decided that we needed to go to the national park, camp that night, and then spend the next few days hiking up further into the forest, with the goal of reaching the desert from the other side. We got a cab that took us and our backpacks a few miles out of town, down a dirt road for a few more miles, and to a campground.

As we set up camp, it started to rain.

The next morning it was still raining. We went and spoke to the park ranger, and understood that there was no trail that would go quite as far into the park as we wanted, and that we would have to just walk along the road. She also let us know that the rainy weather was pretty much what you could expect every day this time of year. We were light on rain gear, as our original intent had been hiking in the desert, but we decided to hang out in the park for another day, hike some of the shorter trails, and hope for better weather the next day.

I’m glad we did. Despite the weather, we enjoyed a pretty amazing hike, with great views of the Calilegua river, and the surrounding forest.

The protest in San Martin. It stretched for a few miles.

The weather didn’t get better, so we decided to try to hitchhike back to San Martin, and started walking the road. We walked for a few hours – there was almost no traffic on the road – with rain forest on one side and cane fields on the other. Eventually we caught a ride in the back of an old pickup truck that took us to the main road, where we stopped. There was a line of cars stopped as well. Most of the people were out of their cars, chatting with a police officer, and on the main road about a mile away, we could see a long, thick line of protesters with banners and signs marching down the street.

We asked the police officer how long he thought the road could be blocked for. “No se… puede ser horas.” - I don’t know, it could be hours. We asked if the protesters were dangerous, and he said no, so we decided to walk out to the road and join them on our way to the bus station. The whole thing was pretty surreal. I honestly don’t remember what they were protesting, but there were a lot of people.

Eventually we made our way back to the bus station and rode all the way back around to the desert, where we relaxed in the sun for a few more days before getting on the bus back to Buenos Aires, and checked out the Cerro de Siete Colores in Pumamarca.

I’d highly recommend the trip to anyone visiting Argentina. My wife and I have sworn that some day we’ll make the trek all the way across the mountains, from the desert to the rain forest.

El Cerro de los Siete Colores - The seven-colored hill.

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One of the most surprising things I realized after getting to Buenos Aires was that it isn’t very easy to make local friends, or even immerse yourself in Spanish, even though you’re in the middle of a huge Spanish-speaking city, teeming with people.

At the same time, it was very easy to get caught-up with the huge group of partying, English-speaking expats who have flooded the city.

Por suerte, my wife and I managed to get in with some locals, get a strong taste of the culture and immerse ourselves in Spanish during our 2 years in Buenos Aires. We made a couple key choices at the beginning that really helped.

1. Stay with locals

When we first arrived, we found getting an apartment complicated. So we started searching Craigslist and found a local family to stay with. Right away, this immersed us in a Spanish-speaking household, and gave us a quick doorway into the culture.

2. Stay away from the expats… I repeat. Stay away from the expats.

I know, it’s tempting. There’s a bunch of other people in Buenos Aires (and I’m sure this is true of most big cities) that speak your language, and are looking to make friends and have their own version of A Moveable Feast. Resist the temptation, it’s a trap! From what I saw in Buenos Aires the people that got in with the expat crowd ended up staying there for years and barely meeting any locals or learning to speak Spanish. Find ways to meet people.

You'll find Parque Centenario off the beaten path in Caballito, Buenos Aires.

3. Go to Spanglish events.

This was one of the best choices my wife and I made. We went to Spanglish, where local Spanish speakers and English-speaking travelers get together in bars for a sort of language speed-dating, where you talk for 5 minutes in Spanish, 5 in English, then move to a new table. This is how we met two of our best friends in Buenos Aires, who ultimately introduced us to a lot of other friends. I started playing guitar in their band, and it brought about some of the best times I had in Buenos Aires.

4. Study Spanish 1-on-1 with a local teacher.

Yep, we promote Spanish classes via Skype, and we’re still recommending that you study with a Spanish teacher based in Buenos Aires. My experience taking face to face classes with a local teacher was great. I learned not just the language, but the culture, and I made a good friend. If you’re there, in the country, you should really set aside the money to take classes with a local teacher. Here’s the one we studied with.

5. Choose your neighborhood wisely.

We got lucky. Most expats gravitate toward Palermo, Recoleta and San Telmo when they live in Buenos Aires. But the family we stayed with lived in Caballito, a neighborhood where you’ll have a hard time finding anyone who speaks English. After that, we purposely stayed in neighborhoods that aren’t known to expats. I would recommend Almagro, Caballito, Villa Crespo and Boedo.

6. Prepare your Spanish!

Take a Spanish class via Skype before you go! If you’ve got some Spanish before you arrive, your chances of being able to communicate and make connections are much better.

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Even though our Spanish wasn’t that good, and no one at La Posada spoke much English, the message was clear. We shouldn’t hike from the high-altitude desert of Argentina’s northern Jujuy provence, over the ridge line and down into the rain forest on the other side of the enormous 12,000 ft peaks.

But we couldn’t help ourselves. My wife and I were confident: we were experienced hikers and backpackers, had most recently lived in northern Montana’s Rockies and spent a lot of time backpacking Glacier National Park. And we were curious. Not only did this trip somehow take you from desert to jungle just by crossing a ridge line, it also went through an old ghost town, and small inhabited town that was only accessible by foot or horseback.

The owner of La Posada urged us to hire a guide, explaining “no hay sendero,” there is no path, and the weather is unpredictable. We were camping in La Posada’s yard at night, and knew that it got cold. Despite 70 degree days, our water bottles had an ice film over the top in the morning.

La Posada hostel in Tilcara, Argentina.

My wife and I had decent sleeping bags though, and had found a description of the route on top of the microwave in the kitchen at La Posada that appeared to have been photocopied from a guide book. So we went for it. The evening before we set out we picked up fruit and nuts at the local shops – easy light foods that didn’t need cooking – and a few bags of coca leaves to fight altitude sickness.

The next morning we got on a crowded bus that took us – very slowly – to the tiny town of Uquía. From what I remember, the guide book told us to walk up a dirt road in Uquía, cross a bridge, take a right, follow another road to the left, and at the top of the hill on the last road, we’d see a trail that went straight into the mountains.

Mountains on the trail to Capla.

We missed a turn, and ended up walking for an hour before realizing it. After back tracking, we found the trail that exited the road. This trail quickly faded out in a criss cross of game trails and wash outs as we walked into the desert of giant cacti and llamas, toward huge peaks with bands of red, gold and purple color running through them. After a couple hours of walking and wandering, we found the trace of a dirt road that meandered in the direction of Capla, the ghost town where we planned to spend the night and get water.

At this point we realized that, between the bus ride and our wanderings, we didn’t have much time if we wanted to get to the town before nightfall, so we hiked fast down the road, despite being out of water and thirsty. Within a few hours, we came on a collection old broken down clay buildings at the top of a small draw, dwarfed by the ridge line we were supposed to cross the next day.

Walking into town, we heard dogs barking, and found a well-worn foot trail, with food scraps littering the ground. We decided that if there were still people here, we’d better introduce ourselves before setting up camp.

An (unfortunately poorly focused) photo of the corral.

Soon we came across two old ranching dogs, guarding a round stone corral. Inside the corral a herd of goats nervously watched us, and as we came around the edge of the corral, we could see one home that was clearly still being maintained. The dogs approached us, still barking, and the plank door of the house opened a crack.

“Hola?” I called out.

The door didn’t move.

“Hola… estamos buscando agua,” I tried.

An old woman came out, dressed in several layers of wool clothes with irregularities that suggested she’d made them herself. She had the dark, deeply wrinkled skin of someone who’d spent a lifetime working outside in a brutal sun. I was at least a foot and a half taller than her, wearing a bright red T-shirt, sunglasses, shorts, and a huge orange backpack. She stared at me like I’d just stepped out of a space ship.

“¿Que quieren?” she asked brusquely, staying about 5 feet away.

“Estamos buscando agua, ” I said, “y un lugar en lo que podríamos acampar.”

I don’t think my grammar was too bad, but my horrible accent threw her off, and I had to repeat myself several times, slowly, before she got it. She waved toward the high end of the draw and said we could find water that way, waved toward the entrance to the town and said we could camp over there. Then she turned her back, and called the dogs to follow her back to the home.

We hiked back to the town entrance, and found a spot to camp in the footprint of a long-gone structure, next to another crumbling home. I went to find water while my wife started setting up camp.

The stars were amazing that night. We stayed out as long as we could in the cold desert air watching them and wondering about this woman, why she was up there, apparently alone. Why she had held out so far from the rest of humanity. When it got too cold, we finally crawled into our tent, exhausted.

Our campsite in the ruins of Capla.

But I didn’t sleep. I felt odd all night, and laid in my sleeping bag listening as the wind outside began to howl. The next morning when I crawled out of the tent and stood, I felt so dizzy I thought I would black out or vomit. Altitude sickness had definitely set in. Meanwhile, the wind had kicked up to tornado speeds, and the peaks above us had been erased by all the sand whipping through the air.

We tried waiting it out in the tent for a few hours, with me chewing coca leaves and drinking water. As we listened, hoping the wind would die down. It didn’t. By noon, I still felt terrible. It was time to bag this attempt. We packed up and headed back down, but decided that we would definitely see the jungle, even if we had to ride a bus there.

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When it comes to literature in English, I’m admittedly a snob. To improve my Spanish, I’ve had to rethink my standards.

When the Harry Potter craze started several years ago, I listened to the critics who said it was shallow writing, the fast food of literature, meant only for short term commercial success. Besides, I had already read the Lord of the Rings series several times when I was young, and didn’t imagine those could be improved on.

So, when I started learning Spanish, the first thing I went for was the high brow stuff. Cortázar, Borges and Unamano. I loved these, and would still recommend them to anyone, especially the short stories of Cortázar. They were especially great reading.

But then I started wanting to listen to more audiobooks as a way of improving my Spanish listening skills. I wanted to be able to work on my listening abilities at the gym, in my car, or while cleaning up around the house. In other words, without a dictionary in my lap. And it needed to be entertaining to hold my interest while I was doing other things.

While living in Argentina, I’d caught bits and pieces of the Harry Potter movies on television. And thought they’d maybe be at the appropriate level, and focused enough on entertainment for my needs. It took me some time to track down the audio books. As far as I can tell, the usual places – iTunes, Audible, etc. don’t carry the Harry Potter audio books.

Eventually I found one that may or may not have been pirated, and was apparently read by amateurs (you could hear the pages turning, and occasionally a background noise would disrupt the recording. But overall, the sound quality was great, and it was just what I needed.

The Potter series is truly addictive, and as it contains several really long books, it provided me with literally months of daily listening in Spanish. I enjoyed it all so much, that I’m now on my second round of listening to them.

I would say that in my last 6 months of listening to the Potter series, my Spanish listening skills have improved  greatly. At the same time I’ve learned lots of words that may or may not be useful in daily conversation, such as hechizo (spell), varita (wand), and caldero (cauldron). But I’ve also learned things that are very useful, such as reporting words like chillar (scream), cuchichear (whisper), farfullar (babble or sputter) and mascullar (mumble).

More importantly, it helped my ability to not get hung up on every word, but to relax, let words I didn’t know float by, and follow the thread of the story.

Check out the clip below for a taste:

If you’re searching for Spanish audio books, you may check here, although I’m really not sure if these are legal downloads, and you’ll always want to be sure of what your downloading before you click…

All in all, I’d highly recommend the Potter series for improving your Spanish.

I’m still not going to read the Twilight series, though. That stuff is crap.

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One of my long time favorite websites to visit when I need a laugh is The Onion. If you’ve somehow missed it, apparently by not being on the internet in the last few years (which makes me wonder how you even found this blog in the first place) it’s sort of The Daily Show of the internet.

Anyway, while I was living in Argentina, I began noticing a newspaper floating called Barcelona, popping up in the hands of youngish people (I’m 35 and consider myself youngish) on the subway. The tagline below the masthead read: “Una solución europea para los problems de los argentinos.” A European solution for the problems of the Argentines. It seemed like an odd thing to put on the cover of a paper.

Then I noticed that the readers were almost always smiling, and sometimes laughing hysterically while reading it, and I finally realized that the Onion, or at least something like it, had come to Argentina. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to understand at first. Humor, especially when it relies on wordplay and cultural context, can be difficult to understand, going way beyond the typical meanings of words and phrases.

Even now after several years of studying, I don’t always get the stories in Barcelona, but I’m pretty satisfied if I can read something and get a true laugh out of it. Here’s a short video they put up on their YouTube channel. You can find Barcelona here.

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Juan Ramón Lucas of En Días Como Hoy.

I’m always on the hunt for new podcasts in Spanish, especially since BBC Mundo Radio stopped broadcasting, which had been one of my favorites.

I’ve been using podcasts as a way to keep up with my Spanish for several years now, listening to more simple ones like Notes in Spanish and News in Slow Spanish when I first started. There are plenty of podcasts made specifically for beginners. What I’ve been looking for though, are podcasts that are actually intended for native speakers.

Actually, what I really want more than anything is a Spanish language version of This American Life or RadioLab, two of my favorite English language podcasts, that I think are far better than anything you’ll typically hear on the radio. Both of these, above all else, exhibit great story telling.

I’m sure something like this, in some form, exists in Spanish. Somewhere, there’s a Peruvian version of Ira Glass recording his stories in a studio. Unfortunately, I haven’t found him yet. A Spanish speaking friend of mind did recently turn me on to a podcast series out of Spain that may not be This American Life, but maybe more along the lines of All Things Considered.

En días como hoy is a daily news podcast that covers just about anything. You’ll find interviews with famous people on the street, news reports about Spain, Syria, world economics and much more. It’s a great one to put on your iPod and listen to during your commute.

I found this one especially interesting, about the state of the Spanish economy on the Day of the Consumer, mainly because of the number of different people with different accents interviewed. The interviews are mostly “man on the street,” done in a crowded commercial center with lots of background noise. It should really be a great test of your Spanish listening skills.

So there you have it. If anyone thinks they’re on to the This American Life of the Spanish speaking world, please let me know in comments!

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