General question about learning spanish, looking for people who have become fluent.
So I have been living in Puerto Rico for almost three years. The last two years I have been studying spanish very hard and working very hard on my spanish. I have a large vocabulary and know many many verbs, I can read basically anything. My question is with all this knowledge obtained about the language, when I hear the locals talk I can barely understand them, its like they are not even speaking spanish. When I watch t.v. I can see the subtitles and see what I have learned but out there on the street its like a whole different monster, I dont get it.
2 Answers
Puerto Ricans are indeed difficult to understand. They hardly ever pronounce an "s", they say "l" for "r" ("trabajal" for "trabajar" (Bálbala for Bárbara, etc.) When you see the captions on the TV, it is indeed different from what you hear. I have mentioned just two of the differences. There are more.
Here's a link from Wikipedia to an article on Puerto Rican Spansh. Once you realize what they are doing that is different from most Spanish speakers, you'll be able to "get" what they are saying.
link to puerto rican spanish
I totally agree. I have been studying Spanish for about a year pretty seriously and have been learning it off and on for a couple more years. Even though I know a lot of the words that people would normally use I also have the same problem.
When I am around town or at school I have a really hard time understanding what people are saying. Here they speak very quickly and are pretty much impossible to understand if you haven't grown up speaking Spanish. I just try to listen really closely to what they are saying and ask them to slow down! Though if they aren't looking straight at me, or if I am not paying that much attention to what they are saying I get completely lost.
