How come in most school in the USA (at least mine) they teach Spain Spanish instead of Mexico Spanish? Would not Mexico Spanish be an obvious choice to teach?
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.
So would ASL, yet here we are.
The education system is for schooling, not learning.
I took 2 years of Spanish & didn't learn either
Why learn the language of a second world country when you can learn the language of a first world country?
Kidding/not kidding
So would ASL, yet here we are.
The education system is for schooling, not learning.
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
In New Mexico we learned Mexican spanish
Do you mean New Mexican Spanish?
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.
It is the same language. In fact some regions of Spain suck at speaking their own language. Spanish has a central authority that collects and organizes Spanish as it is used in the real world and it codifies it into its official rules. Furthermore, because of its grammar and syntax rules, you always know exactly how every word is pronounced just by reading it. There might be accents and regional synonyms, but there is a "standard" Spanish that everyone learns speaks.
And then when you actually spend any time in a place where Spanish is the first language, you start to understand that, like any language, there's the academic form (commonly taught to non-native speakers as a second or third etc. language), and then there's the local version, complete with all the colloquialisms and slang and unique pronunciations. In Argentina, the double-L (which school taught me makes a "y" sound, "ella" being pronounced basically "ey-ya") is commonly pronounced as more of a soft "J" sound ("ella" becomes "ey-jha"). As far as my (admittedly limited) knowledge goes, that's really not common outside of Argentina. And then in Bolivia, especially among native descendants (Quechua and Aymara predominantly), the double-r (which school taught me is one of two conditions when you roll the R with a tongue trill) is more commonly pronounced almost like a "zh" ("herramienta" becomes "hezhamienta"). Again, not common outside of Bolivia. Spain has that classic "Barthelona" lisp, and uses the "vosotros" pronoun where most South American Spanish speakers would probably use "ustedes" (basically "y'all" vs. "esteemed plural second persons"). And that's not even getting into which verb tenses are used most widely in different regions. There's like 14 or 15 specific verb tenses in Spanish to English's 7, and in school I was taught to use specific ones to communicate effectively; then I went and spent two months in Bolivia pretty much never using past perfect or predicate, instead using past imperfect for 95% of interactions, only using past perfect with other folks que hablan español como segunda lengua, or in a few very specific interactions where more detail or specificity was required than would be so in common, everyday interactions. [Edit for spelling]
Spaniard living in the US here to clarify how our language works. Spaniards are the best at speaking their own language by definition. We make the language, and we decide how it evolves. When you say many Spaniards suck at speaking their own language, I think you are getting confused with the many dialects that exist within the Spain. Some dialects, while being perfectly and dramatically correct, are very hard for non-native speakers to understand. Pronunciation of letters may change from dialect to dialect, but the grammar is basically the same.
The authority that sets the Spanish language grammar rules (Real Academia Española - RAE) is in Spain, and it's rules only apply to the "standard" Spanish dialect spoken in Spain, which is also known as Castillian. However, there are multiple other dialects of Spanish within Spain (and multiple other languages that are not Spanish - Galego, Catalan, Euskera, etc). Other countries that speak other Spanish dialects choose if they want to follow or not the rules set by the RAE, and many Spanish dialects do not follow those rules. Some Spanish speaking countries have their own organizations to define their Spanish dialects. There are dialects of Spanish that are very different from the original Castillian Spanish. For example, listen to Argentinian Spanish, and compare it to Castillian Spanish. The difference is noticeable even for non-Spanish speakers. They also use a slightly different grammar.
I mean. You're just wrong. Maybe if you'd focused more on the info and less on your nationalism you'd have noticed.
RAE doesn't make the rules "just for Castillan". RAE describes, rather than just 'make up', the rules of the Spanish as used around the world. They observe how Spanish is used and codify that. They are descriptive, not prescriptive.
Also, the whole point of dialects is that they vary in vocabulary and grammar, otherwise they are the base language itself. I don't even know what you're saying?
Did you even visit the RAE's website before answering? Or did you just assume that because you're an spaniard living in the US you have perfect knowledge? Because it checks out.
Same language but with huge differences world wide, as languages tend to do. Believe a person whom lived in Mexico for over 2 decades, Mexican Spanish is NOT the exact same. It's mostly similar and you'll be able to understand but it will be immediately obvious that it's very different.
I watch Spain Spanish movies and regularly have trouble understanding it all
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.
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...
And in Switzerland we have to learn quebeccan French. And so the circle closes.
(we train it at the end when we train understanding non-standard pronounciations)
Well yeah, but you also learn Swiss German and Swiss French and Parisian French, and Italian is an option isn’t it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
But why?
I'd think in all of those cases it should be the variant that has the greatest population or proximity.
Formality and standardized grammar.
At some point, when you're involving teaching a language to a class, you need a systematic way of doing so.
Typically, that means going with dictionaries and that in turn is likely to be the most formal version of a language's pronunciation. And, with grammar, you start with the simplest but also most standardized, codified version because that's what the books are going to use.
You don't worry about idiom and dialect until you've got a fairly good grasp of the formal. Since Castilian Spanish is more or less the oldest formal Spanish, we end up learning that first.
Like, I suck at learning languages. But I tried several. One of those was Spanish. School Spanish is kinda like school English, it's taught in strict way. Vocabulary with pronunciation, grammar rules, verb conjugation. Conversationsal Spanish just isn't what most schools are going to start with. One could argue whether or not that's the best place to start or not, but it is the way most languages get taught.
I dated a girl from Mexico City during that time, and she said the books were essentially the same there at least.
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..
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.
Dosen’t Mexico speak Spanish?
In the same way that Americans speak English.
Sure, their language is mutual intelligible with English, but if an Englishman comes over here and asks for some chips, they're going to get a bag of crisps. They'll mess up verb conjunction on a bunch of collective nouns.
And bless the souls of my Australian mates who come here and call everyone a cunt.
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.
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.
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!
France French people say wayh too. It's the same difference between saying "yes" and "yeah".
Ouais is more like 'yeah', not 'yes'.
Mine taught Mexico Spanish, but with a brief reminder every once in a while about the vosotros conjugations.
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.
We learned Mexican Spanish in my redneck school.
We learned American Spanish when I was in school, no vosotros, no soft S, because we learned it from Cuban teachers. My kids got a mix but mostly, as you are saying, Spain Spanish. I think part of the reason is that Spain Spanish is one thing - canonical Spanish, yes? But in the Americas it's varied, different in the US from Mexico, from Colombia, from Argentina, Costa Rica. Dialects.
I think it's silly to say that Spain Spanish is canonical, though. Like, says who? Spanish people? Spanish in Spain is a dialect just like any other Spanish-speaking country. Imo it makes sense to teach the dialect that learners are most likely to encounter based on their geographic location, with context about the other dialects.
We have several dialects in Spain that talk different. We all write proper neutral Spanish though, determined by the Royal Spanish Academy, RAE.
Same thing with Basque, in the tiny territory we occupy there's a dialect per fucking town almost with distinct differences. Textbooks teach the official neutral Basque though. We would literally not be able to communicate if there was no neutral dialect everyone also knows...
Saying "country dialect" sounds very USA American tbh...
I took Spanish-for-Spanish-Speakers in public school so my experience may be different.
“Spanish-Spanish” (Castillian-Spanish, Castellano) is pretty easy universally understood and accepted as a “proper” Spanish. It seemed to work well despite our mixed nationalities in the class (Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and a few more but those are first that came to mind.)
Like many others have stated, my (also redneck) school taught primarily Mexican Spanish.
I don't know for sure what we learned, but I remember my Spanish teacher talking about a girl from Spain that came to her class and didn't do her work.
Apparently the girl wasn't doing well in Spanish class and later accused the teacher of teaching "gutter Mexican."
Which ... honestly didn't hit me as the flex my Spanish teacher seemed to be making it out to be.
TIL there are two versions of spanish.
There's uh, lots more than 2. It's similar to how there's English English and Nigerian English, just dialectical differences - some more major than others.
Or American English and maybe southern American English? Not sure thats different enough to count.
Depending on how diverged they are people can communicate between them with various words or phrases that are different.
Ex. Americans use the word toilet, England uses loo (which might also refer to the whole bathroom? I'm sure someone from England will correct me)
There's far more than two, just like there's plenty of dialects of english jaja
A lot more than two. Even within Latin America, there are some fairly interesting differences in grammar, vocab, and pronunciation.
Do they? Duolingo, meanwhile, teaches a Latin American dialect (possibly Mexican), with “ustedes” as the second-person plural. (IIRC, their Portuguese is also Brazilian, which is a greater leap.)
Does it? My partner has learned some very strange words I have never heard used in mexico. But I guess the rest of Latin America also uses different dialects.
From what I recall, it does, especially for new words (items like “backpack” and “T-shirt” seem to have almost a different word in each country). Maybe Duolingo’s Spanish is from former south (Argentina or Chile perhaps?)
Idk which variant of spanish I'm learning, but the teachers keep playing the Cinco de Mayo cartoon something about the day of the dead, so I'm assuming its the Mexico version.
The tipoffs to being Spain Spanish if they teach extra conjugations for vosotros and if they speak evening with a lisp because at some point it was decided to emulate a king with a speech impediment.
No answers from me here, but I'm curious - how much of the US learns Spanish in school?
My knowledge may be dated and it may vary by state, but the "I want to go to uni" track had a two-year requirement of a foreign language. When I was in school, French and Spanish were the only choices and most people wanted to study Spanish. My school system had German as well at some point, but it was cut before I got into highschool in the mid '90s. Some schools have Latin, Japanese, and others as well.
I live in a medium size town in the midwest, and all of our schools offered Spanish. My high school also had french, and the richer schools had german and japanese
Here in the upper mid west a lot of schools teach Spanish. Not at a you can speak level usually. Similar to how a lot of people learn biology and forget it all when they graduate.
In my state there was some reason they wanted us all to take a second language (I think it was some scholarship we would qualify for our something?) and I always thought the reason most schools had Spanish was because finding a teacher certificated to teach Spanish was more common than other languages. And both of mine were just Midwest white dudes.
If they would only do the same with their "English".
I've never heard of that in the states. What region are you referring to? Sounds like an eastern seaboard thing to me.
I think it depends more on your instructor rather than the region you're in. When I was in HS I took two years of Spanish and our teacher was from Spain, so her instruction was in line with that.
I don't know about OP. I went to a public school on the eastern seaboard and we certainly weren't taught "Spain Spanish." The pronunciations and pronouns we were taught would've been very different if that were the case.
If any specific dialect was taught in those classrooms, it would've been because a teacher spoke that dialect natively. All of our teachers were either non-native Spanish speakers, or from somewhere in Central or South America. Maybe OP had teachers from Europe?
If there were regional differences for vocabulary, we were told about them. For example, for the English word "bus," we were taught that "autobus," "guagua," and "camion" all work but in different countries/regions. To be clear, we weren't expected to remember all the variations, but we were informed that they exist.
the short answer is colonization. the US school system admires the Castilian language more because they have a shared history with the Spanish empire of using European languages to commit cultural genocide against the indigenous peoples of America
It makes zero sense.
The indigenous people didn't talk in Mexican Spanish.
I didn't say they did. Spanish versions from Latin America are still marginalized though because the indigenous peoples heavily influenced the language and the vocabulary, etc. that's why Spaniards get judgemental when they "correct" Latine people because they view their language as inferior and grammatically incorrect
Probably racism.
It's definitely racism