Essential Spanish vocabulary to get around
In order to tourist or live in a place you don’t need fluent Spanish. But you need some key phrases and vocabulary.
Of course, if you’re planning on staying, I recommend you work on getting your Spanish as fluent as possible. That will help you integrate into society, manage everyday life better, and reduce your chances of homesickness. But with just some key vocabulary and phrases, you can jump start your learning process so you can learn the rest by immersion. You’ve learned grammar in this post, now let’s give you some vocabulary to use it with. I’m not going to go over most food because you can learn that when you’re shopping in the grocery store (or at home with your Spanish-learning app).
Let’s start with getting you where you need to go.
airport: el aeropuerto
hospital: el hospital (hey that’s an easy one!)
train station: la estación (station) de tren (train)
subway: subte (short for subterráneo, meaning underground)
bus stop: parada (stop) del colectivo (bus)
(more on Argentina’s public transportation system in a future post)
taxi: taxi, remis (a taxi-like service)
gas station: estación de servicio
car: auto, coche, carro is a horse-drawn carriage in Argentina
line (for things like bus or subway line): línea
line (waiting to be attended): cola (tail) or fila
grocery store*: el supermercado
bakery: la panadería (pan is bread)
veggie store: la verdulería (verduras are veggies)
butcher: la carnicería (carne is meat)
deli: la fiambrería (cold cuts are fiambre) la quesería (cheese store)
ice cream parlor: heladería (helado is ice cream)
bookstore: la librería (also used for office supplies store in Argentina) libro is book
library: biblioteca
theater: teatro
movie theater: cine (often in shopping malls)
shopping mall: el shopping or la galería (smaller, but similar)
hotel: el hotel
restaurants: el restaurán, el restaurante, restobar
museum: el museo
zoo: el zoológico
home/house: la casa
To ask where is the hospital, say “¿Dónde está el hospital?” If you’re asking where are multiple places ask, “Dónde están la estación de tren y la panadería?”
*el almacén is a place that sells the essentials. El kiosco isn’t exactly a kiosk. It’s a place that often will sell things like photocopies, use of their printer, charging your public transportation card, along with some sweets and maybe some essentials. la dietética sells some foods for more health-minded folks and possibly organic foods.
Many places will list more than one thing on their signage. For example, if a store sells both cold cuts and cheeses, it’ll often say quesería y fiambrería.
Now you can ask where is the bakery all you want, but you can’t understand the answer yet. So let’s talk about directions. Then we will discuss numbers, money, and essential conversational phrases.
Directions:
dirección: address. The numbers go after the street name, not before. It’s also direction, but that use is less common.
straight: derecho, recto (these are rarely used except maybe by Google Maps in Spanish)
right: derecha
left: izquierda
turn: gira
there: ahí and allá. allá is more common in the case of directions.
blocks: las cuadras many people tell directions in numbers of blocks and hand gestures indicating the direction. Landmarks are also commonly used. Get to know your major streets and public transportation access points as they’re often used for reference.
Hands: this is used differently than in English. Sure we have the right hand side of the road, but that’s not how they’re used in Spanish. La mano derecha (the right hand) is like going with the flow on the right hand side. And “contramano” which literally means against hand means you’re going the wrong way or that something is out of the way of your path that you’re traveling.
So next we’re going to talk about numbers, which will transition us nicely from directions to money and phrases.
1: uno 2: dos 3: tres 4: cuatro 5: cinco
6: seis 7: siete 8: ocho 9: nueve 10: diez
11: once 12: doce 13: trece 14: catorce 15: quince
16: dieciseis 17: diecisiete 18: dieciocho
19: diecinueve 20: veinte 21: veintiuno
22: veintidos 23: veintitres… 30: treinta
31: treinta y uno 32: treinta y dos….
40: cuarenta 50: cincuenta 60: sesenta 70: setenta
80: ochenta 90: noventa 100: cien
200: doscientos 300: trescientos
400: cuatrocientos 500: quinientos
600: seiscientos 700: setecientos 800: ochocientos
900: novecientos 1000: mil 1100: mil cien 1150: mil ciento cincuenta 2000: dos mil 3000: tres mil…
With the currency and addresses you’ll need numbers in the thousands. But sometimes people shortcut the large numbers and say something like mil nueve cincuenta for 1950 instead of mil novecientos cincuenta.
Some fun money trivia, then we’ll go onto common phrases so you can buy stuff and talk to people more naturally. Money is plata (literally silver), guita in slang. The currency is pesos. In lunfardo, 1 peso = 1 mango and 1000 pesos = 1 luca and the expression for “peanuts” would be chirolas. Onto useful expressions!
Let’s review questions.
For this section, I’ll give you the translations to question words. In the next, we’ll put them to work in phrases. The ones that end in s are the plural variants.
Who: ¿Quién? ¿Quienes? (pl)
What: ¿Qué?
sometimes translates to ¿Cuál? which is more like which.
Where: ¿Dónde?
When: ¿Cuándo?
Why: ¿Por qué? ¿Para qué?
¿Por qué? asks for what reason and ¿Para qué? asks for what purpose
How: ¿Cómo?
How much/many: ¿Cuánto/a/os/as?
The ending depending on the noun (or understood noun) being agreed with.
Common questions and answers.
Let’s make some questions with those question words and throw in some other useful phrases when asking/answering questions. The ones that don’t have answers don’t have them because they’re either too open-ended or yes/no or a number. Tú forms in parenthesis
Q: Who are you?: ¿Quién sos (eres)?
A: Soy (name)
Q: Who is he/she?: ¿Quién es?
A: Es (name)
Q: What’s your name: ¿Cómo te llamás (llamas)? ¿Cuál es tu nombre? (surname is apellido)
A: Me llamo (name), Mi nombre es (name)
Q: What do you do?: ¿A qué te dedicás (dedicas)?
A: Soy (your profession)
Q: What is it?: ¿Qué es?
A: Your target vocabulary word
Q: How do you say x in Spanish?: ¿Cómo se dice x en castellano/español?
A: Your target vocabulary word
Q: Where is x?: ¿Dónde está x?
A: directions to the place
Q: Where are a and b?: ¿Dónde están a y b?
A: directions to the places
Q: Where are you from?: ¿De dónde sos (eres)?
A: Soy de (country)
Q: What time is it?: ¿Qué hora es? ¿Hora?
A: Es la una (at 1), Son las x (any time except for 1 am or 1 pm)
Q: When is x?: ¿Cuándo es x?
A: A la una (at 1), a las x (any time except for 1 am or 1 pm as above) (el día*) (de mes*)
*days and months covered in the next section
Q: Why did you come?: ¿Por qué viniste? ¿Para qué viniste?
A: porque (reason), para (purpose) ex: porque me encanta la cultura (because I like the culture) vs para estudiar (in order to study).
Q: How much does it cost: ¿Cuánto cuesta?
Q: How much money?: ¿Cuánta plata?
Q: How many x(feminine)?: ¿Cuántas x?
Q: How many x(masculine)?: ¿Cuántos x?
Q: How are you?: ¿Cómo estás? ¿Qué tal? ¿Cómo andás (I don’t think this expression is used much outside Argentina/Uruguay)? ¿Cómo va?
A: todo bien, bien, nervioso/a (nervous), emocionado/a (excited), contento/a (happy), feliz (happy), triste (sad), enojado/a (mad/angry), preocupado/a (worried), ansioso/a (anxious)
Q: Are you okay?: ¿Estás bien? (the literal translation) ¿Pasó algo? (more concerned – literally did something happen?)
Q: Do you speak English?: ¿Hablás (hablas) inglés?
Repeat, please: Repetí, por favor
Slower, please: Más lento, por favor.
Read on to learn everything to do with time and weather so you can plan your outdoor fun 🙂
Dolor Amet
Other useful vocabulary. Days, seasons, months, and weather. How to plan your outdoor tourism
We’ll cover seasons, days of the week, months, and weather.
Vocabulary related to the time of year:
Seasons: Estaciones (temporada is used for seasons of a TV series)
Spring: primavera, Summer: verano
Fall: otoño Winter: invierno
Days of the week: Días de la semana
Monday: lunes, Tuesday: martes
Wednesday: miércoles, Thursday: jueves
Friday: viernes, Saturday: sábado,
Sunday: domingo
Note that they don’t capitalize days of the week in Spanish like we do in English
Months: meses (also not capitalized like in English) January: enero February: febrero, March: marzo
April: abril, May: mayo, June: junio, July: julio
August: agosto, September: septiembre,
October: octubre, November: Noviembre
December: diciembre.
Next: Weather vocabulary
Weather: el tiempo, el clima (tiempo can mean weather or time)
It seems that Spain uses hace where Latin America uses está and hay. I can’t say for sure outside of Argentina, but here, hace is only used with heat and cold. I’ll put the expressions that aren’t used here, but I learned from Spanish classes in the Spain dialect in Italics.
It’s sunny: está soleado, hace sol
It’s cloudy: está nublado
It’s raining: está lloviendo, hace lluvia
It’s cloudy: está nublado,
Clear skies: está despejado
It’s windy: está ventoso, hay viento, hace viento
Fog: niebla, Mist: neblina, Light rain: llovizna, thunder storm: tormenta eléctirca, thunder: trueno, lightning: relámpago
I hope this vocabulary gets you started! You should be able to make a number of expressions now and do at least a little small talk. Good luck and have fun! 🙂
0 Comments