Spanish

Los dichos y refranes, Spanish proverb and sayings, are an integral part of a regional culture and identity. Mastering them can be particularly helpful, as a single line can convey thousands of years of oral history, and with it, an incredible amount of information.

Katie Jacoby presents some of her favourite words in Spanish. Some because they’re beautiful, others because they’re fun to say, others because she likes how they’re used or their meaning, others because she gets a kick out of their translation, and others still because they just have a je ne sais quoi about them.

It is impossible to imagine the Spanish language without gender. Every noun is inextricably tied to its 'el' or 'la', and each adjective defers...

'Trabalenguas', as the name implies, will get your tongue stuck trying to figure out their pronunciation. Tangle and torment your tongue with Diana Mejía’s tongue twisters.

What does it mean to be nea? Photo by Arjun Harindranath “¿Usted sí sabe qué es nea?” was...

Running has become immensely popular in Bogota in recent years, providing runners with more and more local opportunities to both practise their sport and compete. Katie Jacoby runs through all the language you need to correr or trotar with the best of them...

Diana Mejía tells us how to transform words into a smaller, cuter and perhaps even less offensive versions of themselves using diminutives, or make them big and violent through augmentatives.

Katie Jacoby takes a look at all the ways to count our blessings in Spanish, wherever we’re from.

Diana Mejía looks at some of los problemas you might have, and lays out some of the basic rules to identify and correctly use grammatical gender in Spanish.

Take some time to let Katie Jacoby give you a quick run-down on how to express the two extremes of time, afán and demora, in Colombian Spanish.