Puerto rican spanish ?
Are these spanish words are correct ? Also I want to know is this like puerto rican spanish to because I dont want to learn spain spanish .
5 Answers
It does not depend on the variety of Spanish you learn, it depends on the way you use the language and the abbilities you develop, the truth is that we speakers of Caribbean Spanish have a tendency to drop (we say "eat") letter or syllables when using the language colloquially, but that doesn't prevent us from switching to a more standard usage if we see someone struggling to put together a sentence.
Anyway, it's not that Spain, Argentina, Colombia or Mexico dont have any slang or heavy accents that may hinder communication, and many peopleseem to forget that in each of those places there's more than one dialect and that they can be as different as "Colombian" and "Argentine" Spanish are.
As for saying that Spanish from Spain is standard elsewhere, well, that could not be more wrong, there are over 400 million of us Latin Americans who don't ever use vosotros and its corresponding verb conjugation, and many of those people have never even been exposed to Madrid's Spanish by TV or movies, and find their Z, C, S and J pronuciation to be very odd. It's the same as saying that every person who doesn't speak English English, or more specifically, London's English, speak secundary dialects that are understood only by them.
Forgve me for repeating an anaolgy which I have made several times through the years on this forum.
Think of Spanish as a tree. The trunk of the tree is from Spain, the mother country of the language. The many branches correspond to the dialects found throughout the Spanish speaking world. If you study a branch, you will only be understood in that specific dialect or country.
If you learn from the trunk,Castillan Spanish, you will be able to function anywhere. You will be understood. Better said, you will be able to communicate.
Think of it like this:
When I was young I leant English.
Then I went to England and I could not understand a single word that they said in Glasgow or Newcastle-upon-Trent. It was a terrible blow to my self esteem. However, in Edinborough I had no problems.
Here in Devon, where I live, I still have the odd problem with local farmers who think I come from South Africa..
However, I think I could go to the USA or Canada and have no more problems than do here.
Spanish is the same. Basically, learn the words and how to put sentences together, then a few local variations is only what you can expect if a language has spread over half the world. Or stayed still for hundreds of years, with no incomers, this also leads to peculiarities.
It is a good idea to learn both Castilian Spanish (of Spain) and Puerto Rican Spanish.
The reason is this, Castilian Spanish is the root of all the Spanish spoken in the world. Some places, like Colombia, I hear, speak very correct Spanish. If you only learn the Puerto Rican dialect, you will be limiting yourself as you will not be understood in other places.
The other challenge is that in Puerto Rican Spanish the words are not fully pronounced. They "swallow" the last part of the word. If you never learn the correct word, you may not be able to read and write Spanish. Most Spanish words are written as they are spoken. You may not pronounce the whole word in PR, but the letters are still there. This makes it a little like a southern drawl in the U.S.
Learn them both.
I think mostly you will get "new world" Spanish here, but the structural difference is very minimal from one country to he next. One thing to consider is that many translated books you may come to read will use the vosotros form, because many professional translators come from Spain. It's a good idea to at least have a working knowlege of those forms if you plan to do much reading.
