Cafe Cortado

Episode 003

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We're heading to Canada in this edition of the Café Cortado: Rob in Calgary has a question about using me gustaría and quisiera.

Rob is, in fact, spot on when he compares these two constructions. Let's look at me gustaría. We've already learned me gusta which means "I like". It can be combined with nouns or verbs, for example me gusta España, "I like Spain", or me gusta aprender español, "I like learning Spanish" or "I like to learn Spanish", depending on the context. This construction using me gusta is the present tense: it's how you talk about what you like doing in general situations. Just like other verbs, me gusta can be used in different tenses. In English we say "I used to like..." or we sometimes hear children saying "I will like coffee when I'm older". Me gustaría is a different tense of me gusta. In fact it's what is called the conditional tense, or more precisely the conditional mood. It's translated as "I would like..." and it can be used in phrases such as "I would like Spanish grammar if it weren't so difficult". Of course that's just an example - Spanish grammar isn't really difficult!

This construction, me gustaría, meaning "I would like", can also be used in the situation of asking for something: "I would like a glass of wine", and it's almost as if you were going to continue by saying, "if it's not too much trouble".

Let's consider quisiera now. As Rob suggests, quisiera comes from the verb querer, meaning "to want", or in some cases, "to love". I'm not sure if you want to know which "tense" quisiera is - in fact it's the imperfect subjunctive but I don't think we'll go into that just now! So quisiera is another way to express that you'd like something, eg. quisiera un café, "I would like a coffee", although this literally means "I would want a coffee".

Now, is there a difference? Well, I've been doing some research to answer this question, and I think that my gut instincts are proving correct. Of course, the usage will probably vary slightly from country to country. Firstly, it's important to say that if you're in a bar and you say to the waiter or waitress, quisiera un café or me gustaría un café, there is no doubt whatsoever that the waiter or waitress will know that you'd like a coffee and they'll head off to fetch it. However, it could be said that if you use me gustaría then this is perhaps slightly more rhetorical: "I would like a coffee ... but I'm not necessarily going to have one". Whereas if you use quisiera un café, well it means that you want your coffee and you're not going to take "no" for an answer! Of course, if you want to avoid any possible misunderstanding you could just be blunt and say quiero un café, "I want a coffee"!

So, Rob. Thanks for your question. I hope this has helped!

That's all for this edition of the Café Cortado. Don't forget to visit the website at www.thecafecortado.com, and if you've not yet subscribed to our main Spanish language podcast, visit www.coffeebreakspanish.com. We'll be in touch with this week's contributor to deliver the three free guides for the Coffee Break Spanish series. If you'd like to earn your own free guides, or if you have a question about Spanish then listen to the numbers coming at the end of the show. Tune in again next time - ¡hasta pronto!

Episode 002

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This episode of the Café Cortado will concentrate on numbers. Alejandro is looking for some help with numbers and the pronunciation of numbers.

We have covered numbers in the Coffee Break Spanish podcast - back in episode 6 we learned to count from 1 to 10 and then we dealt with larger numbers in episode 12. We'll go through the pronunciation of the numbers on this episode of the Cortado, and I'll do this first using the pronunciation of Spain, then using Latin American pronunciation. Of course by now most of our listeners will realise that there is one major difference between Latin American and Spanish pronunciation, and that is the pronunciation of the letters c and z.

Let's listen to the numbers from one to twenty, first in Peninsular Spanish and then in Latin American Spanish:

uno dos tres cuatro cinco seis siete ocho nueve diez

once doce trece catorce quince dieciseis diecisiete dieciocho diecinueve veinte

Hopefully that has helped you, Alejandro, and hopefully this has been a useful review for our other listeners.

A good way to practise your numbers is by giving yourself an arithmetic quiz in your head. You'll need some other words for this too. Let's learn "add", "subtract", "multiply" and "divide".

To say 2 + 3 = 5 in Spanish you'd say dos más tres son cinco, so más, which literally means "more" is used for "add" or "plus". You always say son for "equals", even if the answer to the sum is "one"!

To say 5 - 1 = 4 in Spanish you'd say cinco menos uno son cuatro, using the word menos which literally means "less". Indeed, we recently covered the phrase más o menos, meaning "more or less".

To say 2 x 3 = 6 in Spanish you'd say dos por tres son seis. The word por here is one of those tricky words which can be translated in many ways. We'll be covering it in future editions of the Café Cortado.

Finally, to say 8 ÷ 4 = 2 in Spanish you'd say ocho dividido por cuatro son dos. You can also say dividido entre, although dividido por is more common in Spain.

That's all for this edition of the Café Cortado. Don't forget to visit the website at www.thecafecortado.com, and if you've not yet subscribed to our main Spanish language podcast, visit www.coffeebreakspanish.com. We'll be in touch with this week's contributor to deliver the three free guides for the Coffee Break Spanish series. If you'd like to earn your own free guides, or if you have a question about Spanish then listen to the numbers coming at the end of the show. Tune in again next time - ¡hasta pronto!

Episode 001

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In this episode of the Café Cortado we're going to be listening to a question from Drew. Drew has question about directions.

Drew asks what the difference is between vaya todo recto and siga todo recto. Indeed, both of these phrases mean "go straight on" and they're both used in the formal form, the form you're most likely to hear if you ask for directions in a Spanish-speaking area. The word vaya comes from the verb ir, meaning "to go". Ir is an irregular verb, meaning that the different parts of the verb for "I", "you", "he", "they" etc. don't necessarily follow a regular pattern. A literal translation, then of vaya todo recto is "go straight on".

However, siga comes from the verb seguir, which literally means "to follow" or "to continue", so if you were to translate siga todo recto literally, it would mean "follow straight on", or "continue straight on". In English, there's very little difference in what "go straight on" and "continue straight on" mean - they're just two ways of saying more or less the same thing. That's an important part about learning a language: you have to accept that you can often say the same thing many ways in English, and there are likely to be similarly varied ways in the foreign language of saying the same thing. Think of the very common phrase "how are you?" There are many ways to convey the idea of asking someone how they are - "how are you?", "how's it going?", "how are things?", "how are you doing?", and so on. Similarly there are many ways to convey this same concept in Spanish: ¿cómo estás?, ¿cómo te va?, ¿cómo van las cosas?, ¿qué tal?, ¿qué tal estás?, etc., and very few of these translate word for word into the other language.

Rather than translating words I like to think of moving from one language to another as translating concepts. It's not about taking the first word and translating it into Spanish, then the second word, and so on. Rather, think about what the concept is and see if there's a phrase which means something similar in the foreign language. This way you'll begin to think conceptually and your ability to think of things to say in the foreign language will improve because you'll not be too caught up in word for word translations.

That's all for this edition of the Café Cortado. Don't forget to visit the website at www.thecafecortado.com, and if you've not yet subscribed to our main Spanish language podcast, visit www.coffeebreakspanish.com. We'll be in touch with this week's contributor to deliver the three free guides for the Coffee Break Spanish series. If you'd like to earn your own free guides, or if you have a question about Spanish then listen to the numbers coming at the end of the show. Tune in again next time - ¡hasta pronto!