If you’ve heard the oh so annoying Pitbull song, counting to cuatro is a piece of cake. Maybe even up until diez or veinte. But how about the bigger numbers? We’re talking hundreds here.
Luckily, that’s another subject that Bueno, entonces… happens to cover in one of the 30 Spanish classes in the series. Here’s a clip from Spanish Class #6, in which Jimena and David are having their weekly Saturday review over the phone.
Feel like this is a language program that you could actually stick with? That’s why we made it – we can’t sit and read about grammar for hours, either. Check out the Bueno, entonces…Learn Spanish site to find the whole downloadable 30-class series for only $147!
The Latin culture is full of intensity—there is passion in everything from fútbol (soccer or football) to comida (food) to amor (love) to odio (hate).Surely you’ve seen spoofs on Italians and their passion in everyday conversations, complete with yelling and almost-lethal hand gestures.Well, Argentines are very much like that, as most of them a) have ancestry that traces back to Italy, or b) think they have ancestry that traces back to Italy.The Latin culture in general is very passionate, but as the culture in Argentina is so largely influenced by that of Italy, intensifiers are key to everyday conversation.
Intensifiers are words that… well, intensify a concept or thing.They can be used with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs.Some examples of intensifiers are muy (very), mucho (a lot), and sumamente (extremely).However, our favorite intensifier (and the one that is the most fun to say) is actually a suffix that you stick onto the end of a adjective: -ísimo/-ísima.
The suffixes -ísimo and –ísima are common to hear in everyday conversation.Just add them to the end of any adjective and voilí¡, it has infinitely more meaning.Example: El recital estuvo buenísimo! (The concert was great!) or El recital estuvo malísimo. (The concert completely sucked.)
One more important intensifier to know when in Argentina is re.Re is similar to muy (very), but is the equivalent to English’s ‘so‘—as in I am SO tired (Estoy re cansada).Re is not necessarily used in all Spanish-speaking countries, but it will be understood anywhere you go.
To learn some Argentine gestures to go along with your new intensifiers, visit this site for some cool body language, or visit our Facebook Page to get updates on the Words or Spanish Phrases of the Day! If you want to learn Spanish, it doesn’t have to be boring – check out more clips from our Spanish classes on our Youtube channel and you’ll see how you can go from 0 to bi-lingual in five weeks!
We love Julieta Venegas–she’s TRI-lingual, super hot, down to earth, and her music videos are the cutest damned things we’ve ever seen. We’ve taken her song “Me Voy” and Pizarra Magica‘d it up so that you can see and hear the words in Spanish and English simultaneously.
Porque no supiste entender a mi corazí³n
lo que había en el porque no tuviste el valor de ver quien soy
porque no escuchas lo que esta tan cerca de ti
sí³lo el ruido de afuera y yo
que estoy a un lado desaparezco para ti
No voy a llorar y decir que no merezco esto
porque es probable que lo merezco pero no lo quiero
por eso me voy que lastima pero adios
me despido de ti y me voy
que lastima pero adios me despedio de ti
Porque se que me espera algo mejor
alguien que sepa darme amor
de ese que endulza la sal y hace que salga el sol
yo que pense nunca me iría de ti
que es amor del bueno de toda la vida
pero hoy entendí que no hay suficiente para los dos
No voy a llorar y decir que no merezco esto
porque es probable que lo merezco pero no lo quiero
por eso me voy que lastima pero adios
me despido de ti y me voy
que lastima pero adios me despedio de ti
Me voy que lastima pero adios
me despido de ti y me voy
que lastima pero adios
me despido de ti y me voy
que lastima pero adios
me despido de ti
me voy
que lastima pero adios
me despido de ti
me voy
“Yo tengo un sueño: que mis cuatro hijos pequeños vivirí¡n un día en una nacií³n donde no serí¡n juzgados por el color de su piel sino por el contenido de su carí¡cter.”
Let’s break this down. When we do this, we’re going to hone in a few things:
1) Verbs and conjugations.
2) The future tense.
3) Transvestite nouns.
4) Adjectives.
5) False friends.
Yo tengo un sueño: que mis cuatro hijos pequeños
I have a dream that my four little children
(verbo: tener [to have])
*Note that the adjective ‘pequeño‘ (little) goes after the verb.
vivirí¡n un día en una nacií³n donde no serí¡n juzgados
will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
(verbos: vivir [to live]; ser [to be])
*Both verbs are in the future tense.
**’Un día’ although ending in ‘a’ [a trait of a feminine noun] is a masculine verb.
*The adjective ‘juzgado‘ (judged) comes from the verb ‘juzgar‘.
por el color de su piel sino por el contenido de su carí¡cter.
by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
*False friend: The word ‘carí¡cter‘ does mean character in this context, but when talking about a play/book/movie, we use the word ‘personaje‘.
If you want to follow through with your resolution to learn Spanish this year, we strongly recommend you get started now. Do it for your job, your education, your family – do it for you. Make 2010 the year you make the dream of learning Spanish a reality; we’ll will help you get there.
I’ve only taken 8 weeks worth of Spanish lessons while in my life. At that is was mostly because the teacher was hot and my pubescent mind hadn’t figured out that hot 30something Spanish teachers are never gonna fall in love with a pimply teenagers. It’s kind of ironic that Bueno Entonces offered a bunch of expats a free ride on their series of Spanish learning videos in return for a review. I say ironic because they have cunningly figured out that the horny teenager in us all never really goes away and using sex to distract you from the fact you are learning a language is a winning strategy.
The series comes in a variety of formats but I went through the lessons on my ipod. This was pretty easy to do – I just dragged them into my iTunes and low and behold 30 odd innuendo filled episodes were ready to roll. I had in my mind that I’d zip through them over a spare weekend but as it turns out they are fairly hard work. Thankfully, the protagonists, an English bloke and his hot Argentine professor manage to keep your interest with a selection of vaguely titillating topics while still covering the basics. You could in fact be excused for thinking it was a primer on how to deploy pigeon-Spanish chat up lines to the fine art of getting you leg over.
Each video consists of a ‘magic white board‘ which offer a kind of subtitling system on steroids. The teach, Jimena, speaks only in Spanish and her words are displayed on screen with English subtitles underneath. I really don’t have much Spanish at all and from the get go it was tricky to keep up.
Between the ‘magic whiteboard’ and the questions asked in English by the English bloke I managed to figure most of it out. Having said that, it takes a while to get used to reading the Spanish and listening at the same time. It’s bloody tricky to read the Spanish and English and still pay attention to what is going on at the same time.
I guess this is how the Argentines speak in the wild so it is probably no harm to just push yourself and try to keep up with the lessons. By the time you get to lesson 9 or so you can pretty much get everything that is being said. The magic whiteboard also colour codes the text so that you can easily see which are verbs, nounes etc. Again, you don’t really get the hang of this at the start but eventually it becomes kind of handy.
I would certainly recommend the series to anyone seeking to improve their aural understanding of Spanish while covering basic concepts. It is a lot less boring than a text book, probably more fun than your own interactions with a Spanish tutor and at the very least you’ll brush up on your pickup techniques.
David & Jimena, our “protagonistas” if you will, are discussing their daily tasks when David asks Jimena what time she has sex. Jimena says at 9:30 AM, 3:20 PM, and 9:30 PM.
Then David, ever so inappropriately, asks her when she masturbates.
The verb masturbarse is actually a great way to explain the reflexive verbs because a verb is reflexive when the subject and the object are the same. You initiate and receive the action. We’d go into more details, but you probably get the picture.
Masturbarse=Masturbate
Me masturbo = I masturbate Te masturbas = You masturbate Se maturba = He/she/(it?) masturbates Nos masturbamos = We masturbate Se masturban = You all/They masturbate
Bueno, entonces… (Okay, so…) we hope that every time you pleasure yourself, you think about reflexive verbs. Or at least Jimena. Both are Spanish-related. And, if you want to learn some more reflexive verbs (we know this one is helpful, but it won’t get you that far) check Bueno, entonces…learn Spanish. There are clips of our Spanish classes on Youtube, and become a fan on Facebook and learn useful Spanish phrases everyday!
So, a valiant effort was made when trying to translate the above piropo on the Facebook Page, but damn, buena and dulce de lechejust don’t sound right in English. A lot of the pickup lines in Spanish do NOT make sense in English whatsoever–we try to avoid these for the most part, but this one was borderline.
Take the word buena, for example. The word literally translated, means ‘good’.
“¿Cí³mo estuvo la pelicula? Estuvo buena, no excelente, pero buena.” (How was the movie? It was good, not great, but good.)
It can also mean ‘delicious’. For example, “La comida estí¡ buena.” (The food is delicious).
*Use an -ísima and you’re re Argentino. ‘La comida estí¡ buenísima.” (The food is really delicious.)
It can also mean ‘hot’ or ‘gorgeous’ and can be used in piropos like the one above.
Estí¡s=You are–>Estar=verb ‘to be’ mí¡s=more buena=good/hot/yummy, etc. (all things good) que=than (que can mean various things depending on the context) comer=to eat dulce de leche=milk-based sauce con=with el dedo=a/the finger.
“You are more good (better) than eating milk-based sauce with a finger”?
Yeah, better left in Spanish.
Want to check out some other hilarious piropos? Become a fan on our Facebook page and every day you’ll learn cool Spanish phrases and interested tidbits. You can check out clips of our Spanish classes on Youtube and see how we’ve made the process of learning Spanish a hilarious one!
After class I meet the production people behind Bueno, entonces… in Palermo, where they work. I’ve brought some chocolate all the way from New Zealand, which I think Corrie is happy about. It’s still surreal, can’t believe these people just brought me to Buenos Aires because they felt like giving away a trip. What’s more, I’m being spoiled rotten. Tonight more amazing Argentine food… has anyone told you about the food here?
Argentines like cow. They like to eat it, apparently per capita they eat something like 80 kg of cow on average a year. I find that hard to comprehend as a concept, but then again the beef here IS really quite incredible. The portion sizes are also quite incredible. When you order a bife de lomo you get enough to feed a small village back where I come from. It also turns out that the other David from Bueno, entonces… (el productor) knows a thing or two about wine and likes ordering really nice bottles of wine. OOOh this is heaven…mmmm Malbec.
If you want to eat and drink yourself silly here in Buenos Aires with the Bueno, entonces… crew, take part in one of the contests that’ll be taking place over the next few weeks on our Facebook page. There will be a total of 100 finalists, so chances of winning are really good. Our goal is to have 10,000 fans by March 12, so do your homework and get all of your wannabe bi-lingual friends to show some love.
One of our favorite Spanish-language shows is Casados con hijos (Married with Children). There are various versions (a Chilean version, Spanish version, Colombian version, etc.), but today we’re just focusing on the Argentine version because Francella is our boy.
So, here’s some vocabulary–some slang, some lunfardo, some regular–to describe the Argentos:
Pepe: Estí¡ casado y tiene hijos. Trabaja en una zapatería pero todavía es un hombre pobre. Tiene que atendar a toda la gente insoportable. Pepe es un viejo verde pero el actor es un capo.
(He is a father and is married. He works in a shoe store but is still a poor man. He has to deal with the most unbearable people. Pepe is a pervert, but the actor is a cool guy.)
Moni:Ella estí¡ casada con Pepe, tiene dos hijos y es ama de casa. Es medio vaga y realmente no hace nada. Pepe dice que ella se vive con su culo hundido en el sofí¡ mirando la novela.
(She is married to Pepe, has two children and is a housewife. She is sort of lazy and really doesn’t do anything. Pepe said that she lives with her ass sunk into the couch watching the novelas.)
Coqui: í‰l tiene 18 años y siempre trata de conquistar a las mujeres pero siempre falla. Quiere ser chamuyero pero es un pelotudo.
(He is 18 years old and always tries to get the ladies, but he always fails. He wants be a real flirt, but is an idiot.)
(She is 17 years old and is not smart. She has the brain of a 4-year-old girl. She is beautiful, but is also easy.)
The show is still syndicated on Telefe, one of Argentina’s most popular channels. While watching TV definitely helps one learn Spanish, there’s gotta be some sort of supplementary material as well–it’d be like watching Romeo & Juliet and saying that you’ve read the book. Not exactly the same thing.
If you want a language program that has the fun of a TV show and that teaches more than a grammar class, then Bueno, entonces…is definitely your thing. When we first began learning the language, we watched TV because it was the only place we could hear real, colloquial Spanish. With Bueno, entonces… it’s like watching the telenovela without the guilt–we swear, the humor, storyline, and cheesiness is all there, but you actually learn Spanish. Without the commercials. (Check out more clips of our Spanish classes on our Youtube page – become a Fan on Facebook if you want to learn hilarious Spanish phrases!)
There were also a lot of vocabulary words for food that you will see on menus, and the words are often unique to Argentina. For instance, here they call bacon “panceta” not “tocino” as I learned it in high school Spanish and as my Spanish-English dictionary has it. This brings up a bigger point of the importance of learning the type of Spanish the people speak in the place where you will be traveling or living. Often times a routine Spanish-English dictionary is insufficient – you would think that although they may have different words for certain things they would still understand the common dictionary translations. Well, you’d be wrong. My wife and I have run into problems trying to order bacon, fix the toilet, buy ginger all by looking at our dictionary and using words they don’t use here. As I have said before, one of the strongest qualities of Bueno, entonces…Learn Spanishis the fact that it teaches real-life Argentine Spanish – something I wish I new more about before I arrived here and something I definitely did not get in 6 weeks of using Rosetta Stone.
Another major thing I learned in this class was that people here will often speak about the past in the presents tense and use context clues to tell the listener the event happened previously. Switching between the tenses is a major hurdle for me and it was nice to hear that I could use the present tense to explain the past and still be understood.
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