Those strange looking Spanish people...

News article from ABS news in Australia: the main amusement was: "those people in the picture don't look like your typical Spaniard". link to story

Learning Spanish

Monday, 19 February 2007

Presenter: Madonna King

Researcher: Loli Padilla
enjoying tapas
Loli (right) and her friends and family enjoying tapas in the markets in Spain

When Australians think of Spain, flamenco and tapas seem to be the first things that come to mind, and while food and dancing are important elements of Spanish culture, there’s so much more to learn!

And that’s what we’ll be doing over the next four weeks, with help from our Spanish teacher, Loli Padilla.

Learning to speak Spanish will certainly help you if you’re planning to do any travel, as Spanish is one of the world’s most commonly spoken languages, along with English and Mandarin.

“Spanish is what’s known as a world language, like English,” explains Dr Roberto Espezeto, a Lecturer in Spanish and Hispanic Studies at the University of Queensland. “It’s got close to 500 millions speakers who have Spanish as their first language, and millions more have it as their second language.”

Spanish is also spoken all over the world. “It’s spoken in Spain, but also basically from the United States down to Argentina, and then in parts of Africa,” says Dr Espezeto. “There are important populations in the Philippines who speak Spanish because – as many people know – the Philippines was a Spanish colony for hundreds of years, and the name itself refers to one of the Spanish kings in the 16th Century.”

The lifestyle in Spain is very different to life in Australia. “The day is longer in the Spanish-speaking world… so maybe people would go to work at 9am, or maybe a little bit earlier, they’d have a proper lunch – a three course meal – and then they might have a kip, and go back to work at 4pm and then work until 8pm and have dinner at 10pm. It’s just a different pace of life, and they use the day much more than we do,” says Dr Espezeto.

There are also many interesting facts about the Spanish language. Spanish is the only language that uses questions and exclamation marks at the beginning and at the end of a sentence, for example, ¡Hola! ¿Cómo está usted?

The Spanish alphabet has the letter 'ñ' - the n with the little 'thing' on the top: España, niño, niña - it sounds a bit like 'nya'.

Something else to look out for is that the Spanish languages have two different genres: words finishing with –o are generally masculine and words finishing with –a are generally feminine. For instance: el hombre (the man), la casa (the house) - with some exceptions.

To learn more about Spanish, and practise some phrases, visit the lesson pages below.

Lesson 1 - Greetings