Discussing Language Abilities - Part 1

Learn how to discuss your language abilities

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Lesson Transcript

¡Hola! Soy Brenda Romaniello. Hi! I’m Brenda Romaniello, your Spanish teacher.

And today, in the lesson, we are going to have a look at how to talk about our language abilities, discussing language abilities in Spanish. Specifically, how to talk about what languages you can speak.

Let’s start then with some vocabulario. Let’s have a look at some vocabulary of different languages in Spanish.

español

¿Puedes repetir? Can you repeat after me?

español

coreana

Okay, español, of course, means “Spanish.”

coreana, coreana means “Korean.”

Italian. How do we say “Italian” in Spanish.

italiano

Muy bien.

How do we say “English” in Spanish? Do you know?

inglés

How do we say “Chinese”?

We say chino.

chino

How do we say “French” in Spanish?

francés

How do we say “Japanese” in Spanish?

We are going to say japonés.

japonés

“German,” we say alemán.

alemán

And the last one that we have here today is portugués.

portugués

portugués which means "Portuguese."

A few things that I want us to talk about, about these languages that we have here. Have you noticed, number one, number one thing is that we don’t capitalize the languages in Spanish. As you can see, all the English translations, they have the capital letter at the beginning of the word. In Spanish, we don’t do that. Everything is with lower case at the beginning of the word.

Something else going to give you extra information that you can use as well. So, you can use this as well, not only the language, if you want to talk about a language in Spanish, you can also use these words if you want to describe the nationality of men in Spanish. So, if a man is from Spain, we’re going to say that this person is español. Or if someone is English, then inglés, etc., etc. So, it’s really interesting you have there a little bit of extra vocabulary that you can use for something else. But these are also languages. These are the languages.

Something else I want to point out is that some languages like inglés, japonés, alemán, portugués, francés, can you see the little accent, that written accent at the top? Well, that indicates where the stress of the word goes, so that’s really helpful. With this one, for examle, you know that it’s not íngles. You know that the stress of the word goes in the last syllable, inglés, inglés. The same with japonés, japonés, francés.

So, the other words, they don’t have this written accent, so you don’t know exactly- it doesn’t tell you exactly where to put the stress of the word, but you know that you can, for example, en español, you have to go with the stress in the last syllable as well, español, español.

¡Fantástico! Let’s have a look at this vocabulary and let’s put it into practice in a dialogue.

So, por ejemplo:

¿Hablas inglés?

¿Hablas inglés? “Do you speak English?”

¿Hablas inglés?

Sí. Hablo inglés.

Let’s have a look at some other answers that we’re gonna have for this question.

¿Hablas (por ejemplo) español?

¿Hablas español?

Sí, hablo español.

Sí, hablo español. “Yes, I speak Spanish.”

¿Hablas japonés?

Sí, hablo japonés.

And let’s say that you don’t speak the language. How do we answer that?

Por ejemplo, for example: ¿Hablas chino?

¿Hablas chino?

Then, if you want to say that you don’t speak Chinese, then you can say:

No, no hablo chino.

¡Fabuloso! Okay. But remember, if you want to talk about the abilities that you have for speaking other languages, you can say - Sí, hablo… and then whatever language you speak.

So, let’s have a look at the structure for this.

We’re going to say - Sí, hablo… and then [the language].

“Yes, I speak… [that language].”

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