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.
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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
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Tomas Esteban Rojas La Luz
Date Accepted
12/14/19
content
Yes, i’m from Chile and Chilean Spanish is very hard to learn, but it has its pros, they are actually bad things about Chilean but you can see them as good things. So, I will list them up…
Pros:
It’s wide and full of culture: A good thing about Chile is its culture, it’s just really wide, I mean, I live in the center of Chile and we have a completely different culture from here in comparison to those up north or down south, so, thanks to that the language itself becomes cultural and broad. For example: In south Chile we have Huasos, they live in farms and are kinda the national pride and sign of culture, the thing about them is that they speak with a cantaito’ (chanted) accent, and by that we mean that it seems they are singing when speaking (Because their tone varies a lot), in contrast, up north people just comen (eat) their ‘s’, meaning they skip or hardly pronounce them and here in the center we shush the ch, meaning we read instead of Chile, “Shile” but that really does depend on the person. Why is it a pro? Because that variety gives you a way of learning to adapt to different accents very quickly.
It has a lot of idioms: So, when you are speaking with a chilean they will often use po’ while finishing a sentence, and that really doesn’t mean anything, I mean, we use it just for enphasis. Then we have cachai’ and cachas (Note how in the first one we eat the s, the same in po’ that really should be pues) , cachai’ just means “Do you understand / get it?”, and cachar (actually a real verb in Chile) is just “To understand something”. Those are just two but there are a lot, I remember once reading a book with more than 500 of them. Again, why is it a good thing? It’s good because it makes you try to think in spanish and mecanize those words; Chilean people don’t really think when they use these idioms, it just comes out of their mouth naturally, so by learning idioms you learn to mecanize meanings (And that is technically learning a lenguage). Its conjugations: Ok, this one is controvesial, but again, these pros are just an optimistic way to look at what are really bad things. Well, in Chile we missconjugate practically all verbs that end with s, by instead ending them with i, for example: Eres (You are) becomes eri’. On the other side, we actually do have better conjugations in comparison to Argentinian Spanish, that’s because in Argentina eveything is bad conjugated, using a completely different accentuation that the one it should be, for example: instead of sabes (You know) they use sabés, and, to be honest it sounds awfull and should really not be put into practise, I mean, we do conjugate badly, but it really depends in the person and the sound tends to be kinda similar to the real conjugation, but if you change the accentuation of something, then it sounds completely different than the original sound. So yes, you shouldn’t be really seeing Argentinian TV to learn spanish, well, to be honest you shouldn’t be seeing Chilean TV also, better be watching Colombian or Peruan TV shows. So, the always asked question, why is it a good thing to missconjugate that way? Well, it becomes a thing of really making you understand conjugations, knowing when is “normal” to missconjugate a verb makes ypu understand better how to conjugate.
It’s fast: Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but no, I’m not an idiot if I consider this to be a good reason, because it may not seem to be a good motive to learn Chilean and kinda scares a lot of people, but the principle is: If it’s harder learning, it ends up being better learning. Speaking fast is just a motivation to the learner to make the transition from thinking to internalize the meaning of a sentence, because you don’t have the sufficient time to translate it back to Enlgish, it makes you need to think in Spanish, and thus makes you understand in Spanish.
So yes, Chilean is hard, but that can be considered a good thing.
Pros:
It’s wide and full of culture: A good thing about Chile is its culture, it’s just really wide, I mean, I live in the center of Chile and we have a completely different culture from here in comparison to those up north or down south, so, thanks to that the language itself becomes cultural and broad. For example: In south Chile we have Huasos, they live in farms and are kinda the national pride and sign of culture, the thing about them is that they speak with a cantaito’ (chanted) accent, and by that we mean that it seems they are singing when speaking (Because their tone varies a lot), in contrast, up north people just comen (eat) their ‘s’, meaning they skip or hardly pronounce them and here in the center we shush the ch, meaning we read instead of Chile, “Shile” but that really does depend on the person. Why is it a pro? Because that variety gives you a way of learning to adapt to different accents very quickly.
It has a lot of idioms: So, when you are speaking with a chilean they will often use po’ while finishing a sentence, and that really doesn’t mean anything, I mean, we use it just for enphasis. Then we have cachai’ and cachas (Note how in the first one we eat the s, the same in po’ that really should be pues) , cachai’ just means “Do you understand / get it?”, and cachar (actually a real verb in Chile) is just “To understand something”. Those are just two but there are a lot, I remember once reading a book with more than 500 of them. Again, why is it a good thing? It’s good because it makes you try to think in spanish and mecanize those words; Chilean people don’t really think when they use these idioms, it just comes out of their mouth naturally, so by learning idioms you learn to mecanize meanings (And that is technically learning a lenguage). Its conjugations: Ok, this one is controvesial, but again, these pros are just an optimistic way to look at what are really bad things. Well, in Chile we missconjugate practically all verbs that end with s, by instead ending them with i, for example: Eres (You are) becomes eri’. On the other side, we actually do have better conjugations in comparison to Argentinian Spanish, that’s because in Argentina eveything is bad conjugated, using a completely different accentuation that the one it should be, for example: instead of sabes (You know) they use sabés, and, to be honest it sounds awfull and should really not be put into practise, I mean, we do conjugate badly, but it really depends in the person and the sound tends to be kinda similar to the real conjugation, but if you change the accentuation of something, then it sounds completely different than the original sound. So yes, you shouldn’t be really seeing Argentinian TV to learn spanish, well, to be honest you shouldn’t be seeing Chilean TV also, better be watching Colombian or Peruan TV shows. So, the always asked question, why is it a good thing to missconjugate that way? Well, it becomes a thing of really making you understand conjugations, knowing when is “normal” to missconjugate a verb makes ypu understand better how to conjugate.
It’s fast: Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but no, I’m not an idiot if I consider this to be a good reason, because it may not seem to be a good motive to learn Chilean and kinda scares a lot of people, but the principle is: If it’s harder learning, it ends up being better learning. Speaking fast is just a motivation to the learner to make the transition from thinking to internalize the meaning of a sentence, because you don’t have the sufficient time to translate it back to Enlgish, it makes you need to think in Spanish, and thus makes you understand in Spanish.
So yes, Chilean is hard, but that can be considered a good thing.