Is it normal that I find Chilean Spanish particularly hard to understand? I’m learning Spanish and training myself to understand spoken Spanish by watching telenovelas. I started with an Argentinian show. I find Argentinian the easiest to understand.
Item
Title
Is it normal that I find Chilean Spanish particularly hard to understand? I’m learning Spanish and training myself to understand spoken Spanish by watching telenovelas. I started with an Argentinian show. I find Argentinian the easiest to understand.
issuer
Quora
list of contributors
Edgardo Cabezas
Date Accepted
12/14/19
content
Our Chilean Spanish is even hard to understand for other Spanish speakers. I am not an expert in linguistics, but I would briefly summarize it like this:
We speak much faster than most Spanish speakers (maybe than all of them), and as a result, we usually do an aspired pronunciation of letter “s”, a weak pronunciation of letters “b” and “d”, and sometimes we even skip syllables that contain those letters, making it almost impossible to understand for foreign people, unless you are used to listen it.
During informal dialogues, for simple present second singular tense conjugation, we mix the subject “tú” with the conjugation for “vos”, besides, but we don’t say it properly. For example:
We say “tú tení” instead of saying “tú tienes” or “vos tenéis”.
We say “tú decí” instead of saying “tú dices” or “vos decís”.
We use plenty of idioms during informal languages, and the informal use of some words can be even contradictory depending on the figure speech we are using.
As you can see, our Chilean Spanish is a quite dinamic dialect, we create every day new idioms and, as a Chilean, every day you can learn a new one. Is not unusual that older people (70+ years) is unable to understand a dialogue between teenagers or twenty-year-old people, because our idioms are very different from those they use, and our pronunciation of those letters mentioned before is poorer than theirs.
We speak much faster than most Spanish speakers (maybe than all of them), and as a result, we usually do an aspired pronunciation of letter “s”, a weak pronunciation of letters “b” and “d”, and sometimes we even skip syllables that contain those letters, making it almost impossible to understand for foreign people, unless you are used to listen it.
During informal dialogues, for simple present second singular tense conjugation, we mix the subject “tú” with the conjugation for “vos”, besides, but we don’t say it properly. For example:
We say “tú tení” instead of saying “tú tienes” or “vos tenéis”.
We say “tú decí” instead of saying “tú dices” or “vos decís”.
We use plenty of idioms during informal languages, and the informal use of some words can be even contradictory depending on the figure speech we are using.
As you can see, our Chilean Spanish is a quite dinamic dialect, we create every day new idioms and, as a Chilean, every day you can learn a new one. Is not unusual that older people (70+ years) is unable to understand a dialogue between teenagers or twenty-year-old people, because our idioms are very different from those they use, and our pronunciation of those letters mentioned before is poorer than theirs.