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Mandarin and Cantonese are essentially two different languages that happen to share the same characters. Someone from Honduras would be able to understand 99.9% of what a Spaniard says. If you only speak Mandarin you wouldn’t be able to understand Cantonese at all.
It’s wild when you look into how many different languages are “Chinese”. It’s like if someone were to say that someone from Germany spoke “European”.
In contrast though, I’m close to native in German, yet have a hard time with Austro-Bavarian dialects and can’t understand Schwiizerdütsch at all. The amount of times I have to say “Hochdeutsch, bitte…”
Oida
Geh weida
Can confirm, I am learning Mandarin but every time I hear Cantonese I can barely make heads or tails of it.
But why?
I’d think in all of those cases it should be the variant that has the greatest population or proximity.
a couple reasons I can think of:
- choosing which dialects are taught where would be messy and complicated
- it would make producing and distributing textbooks and other learning materials more complicated and expensive
I don’t know what you mean by “choosing a dialect would be messy and complicated” since Mexican Spanish is an obvious choice. The rest of Latin America understands Mexican Spanish well because they grew up watching our shows, listening to our music and watching movies with Mexican dubs. I’ve met at least one Uruguayan, Argentinian, and a Peruvian who told me so. Don’t you think its widespread would make the choice easier?
And how do you mean it’d be more complicated and expensive? The learning materials are already made and widely used. I think it’d be a licensing issue at worst if they really wanted to switch over.
Good points.
Still at such an early level I’m not sure the distinction will be apparent or meaningful. Might be like learning German. Why pick a Hannover style of speaking over Bavarian so early?
That said I do think Mexican Spanish is more neutral in accent and cadence.
Also please enjoy this.
Fun fact: Mexican Spanish is derived from Castilian Spanish from the central and northern regions of Spain, and was later influenced by Indigenous, African and Caribbean languages.
It doesn’t change what you said, I just think it’s a cool fact. :D
Having learned a language where dialect often means you can barely understand each other if at all, I’m more inclined to consider Mexican vs Castilian an accent much the same way as English’s American vs Australian/british/etc…
Forgive me but I wanted to nitpick all those examples
Cantonese is not a dialect of Madarin. It’s a distinct language, just a smaller one.
Standard Arabic is not actually spoken anywhere, and is primarily a written form. Egyptian pronunciations ARE commonly taught, not only because Egypt is big but because, with Egypt’s large entertainment sector, they have exported their pronunciations around the world in TV and movies.
British English is taught largely as a colonial legacy, not because England predates the US and Australia in history and is therefore considered “standard.”
While all of these secondary examples are flawed, IMO, I believe you’re actually right about Castilian Spanish. It’s simply more of an individual case than part of a common pattern.
Maybe it’s because I’m from California, but we learned Mexico-Spanish. The books included Spain-Spanish (i.e. vos conjugations), but my teachers never included it in our lessons.
Kinda the same here in Nevada. Our Spanish teacher explained them briefly but told us we didn’t need to learn them, didn’t test us on them, so on.
I had a teacher from Spain for three years, then for the next four years they were from various countries: Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and the US. It was great to get used to each accent.
Vos-conjugations are not a thing in spain though? You mean tu-conjugations?
I meant vosotros, yes, thank you! Sorry, it’s been over two decades since I was in Spanish class; I mixed vos and vosotros up.
Vos is something only reserved to royalty and nobility outside of Argentina, I felt kinda offended lol.
Here in Canada we learn Parisian French in school despite Quebecois French being one of our national languages.
It’s probably because, like BBC/Oxford English, those are the places that have an “official” version of the language they try to preserve. Same thing happens with Portugese, despite Brazilian Portugese being more commonly spoken than Portugal Portugese.
When I was in school in the 1970s it was because they couldn’t get French teachers from Quebec. The youth wanted to stay and build a sovereign Quebec. So they imported French teachers from France and I speak like a French Duke.
I remember this, after I was told I was learning France French I was a bit confused. Why wouldn’t we be learning Quebecois?
To be fair, I was a bad student so I wasn’t actually learning either…
I don’t know what we you’re referring to, but in the part of central Ontario where my nephew attends school, the French immersion schools are most definitely teaching Quebecois French.
I tried speaking real French with my nephew and he reacted as if I was a space alien.
Texan here. We learned Mexican Spanish (seseo, yeismo, ustedes for everyone, etc) It’s been years since I had to use it for my job but IIRC there’s a difference in the subjunctive verbs as well.
There are also distinct varieties of Spanish spoken in the US that differ from Mexican Spanish. As a general rule, if a common word has a similar-sounding English cognate (often false cognate) the cognate will be used. truck = troca instead of camión, concrete (as in cement) = concreto instead of hormigón, carpet = carpeta instead of alfombra, to park (a car) = parquear instead of estacionar, and so on. This is from my years working as a bilingual call center agent.
It’s not an autobus, it’s la guagua
It’s not un banana, it’s un gineo
It’s not automovil, it’s El carro
I can keep going.
Dominican here so my Spanish includes…
Que vaina
Un molote
Un mojonera
Mojiganga
Sana sana colito de rana
Because it’s the same language. I grew up in Argentina, and the “Spanish” (the name of the language is actually Castilian because there are multiple languages in Spain) we learn at school is the “Spain” one. In reality it’s the language as defined by the Real Academia Española so the language is the same (yes it includes the vosotros conjugation, no, no one outside Spain actually uses that but we learn it in school).
The differences between Mexican, Argentinian or Spanish Castilian is more in the pronunciation and the use of some words, but the language we learn at school is all the same, and I imagine it’s the same one that you learn too.
That being said, using vosotros to us sounds similar to how using thy might sound in English. A good teacher would explain that outside of Spain we use ustedes which uses the plural third person conjugation (i.e. the same one as ellos), but the correct plural second person is vosotros.
Thy is the super formal form of the conjugation, vosotros is the colloquial form of ustedes.
Tu-vosotros. Usted-ustedes. You-yall. Thou-thy.
You have it backwards, it’s the Latin countries which sound super formal and awkward to us spaniards.
Why learn the language of a second world country when you can learn the language of a first world country?
Kidding/not kidding
In New Mexico we learned Mexican spanish
Do you mean New Mexican Spanish?
I took 2 years of Spanish & didn’t learn either
Mine taught Mexico Spanish, but with a brief reminder every once in a while about the vosotros conjugations.
French taught on Canada (outside Quebec) is France French, not Quebec French. My source on this is that I was taught to say “we” for “oui” and not “wayh”. And the Quebec French sound I’m only getting from comediens on CBC so that could be way off.
France French people say wayh too. It’s the same difference between saying “yes” and “yeah”.
I once stayed in a youth hostel rural Quebec and had a really weirdly hostile reception from people there, despite dredging up my very best schoolgirl French to try and make conversation. Turns out they thought I was from Ontario. When I revealed I was a Kiwi they were all suddenly very friendly. Too late!
Ouais is more like ‘yeah’, not ‘yes’.
I’m not American so I’m speaking out of turn. But could it be resourcing?
Curriculums have to be made, and that sort of thing takes time and money. So I imagine it’s easier to take a curriculum for European Spanish that already exists and just keep using it under the assumption that it’s “close enough” for students to jump to Mexican Spanish from there, rather than reinvent the curriculum for Mexican Spanish.
What state are you from? In California, we learned Mexican Spanish. My teachers very briefly mentioned vos/vosotros, but we never spent any time on those conjugations and were never tested on them.
Although… now that you mention it… maybe the textbook was for Iberian Spanish… I definitely remember the teacher going over vocabulary, getting to the word “coger”, and then 90% of the class busting up laughing, while the other 10% was confused! 😂
Maybe we did have Iberian Spanish textbooks, but since most people in my town were Mexican, we learned Mexican Spanish from the teacher using an Iberian Spanish textbook?..
I grew up in California and had the opposite experience. I had friends who grew up speaking Mexican-Spanish at home, and would take the Spanish classes to get an easy A.
The teachers never understood what the Mexican-Spanish students were saying, and kept telling the native speakers that they were doing it wrong.
I’ll be honest, I never hear anyone say vos in Spain, except an Argentinian who said it all the time and it sounded really odd
They think that saying vosotros instead of ustedes is somehow a signal for us saying vos instead of usted. Fuck no we say tu-vosotros, the colloquial form of usted ustedes.
Argentinians use vos if I recall correctly the even more formal form of usted.
I learned Cuban Spanish. Upon going to Spain, I was told I spoke with the English vocabulary and accent equivalent to a southern yokel from the 1970s.
We learned Mexican Spanish in my redneck school.
because the school system is controlled by old people and they don’t know the difference. in my high school we had Spanish teachers that were actually from Mexico and south America and they taught us useful Spanish.
I think there is a European bias and maybe a (perceived?) prestige bias to Castilian as well.
yeah, especially with the older generation (who should not legally be allowed to be administrators, if you are old enough that your brain doesn’t work anymore you can’t be trusted with authority) on top of their lack of understanding about the difference.
