Hablar con Marco

For several years now, we've come down to Argentina in August or September to escape the Texas heat and enjoy big-city life. While we're here we take Spanish lessons, in the wild hope that someday we will be able to speak another language.

Buenos Aires is a good place to learn Spanish, or castellano as they call their version of it. There are many schools and teachers to choose from, but there is very little English spoken out on the street or in shops and restaurants, so you are forced to at least try to speak castellano.

Although castellano is understood by anyone who speaks Spanish, it is a bit different from the dialects spoken in, say, Mexico or Spain. Here, they use 'vos sos' instead of 'tu eres' for the second person informal, and the 'y' and 'll' sound is a kind of shushing noise. For example, 'tortilla' in Buenos Aires is pronounced something like 'torteesha'. (And the thing they call a tortilla is nothing like the tortillas we're used to back in Texas.)

When we visited Barcelona back in January, I spoke one sentence of Spanish to the woman who was renting us an apartment, and she immediately said, "Argentina!"

Each year we try a different school or teacher. This year we've been lucky to find Marco Luccón, a young college student from the nearby town of Luján, now living in Palermo. (Thanks to our friend Dave for the recommendation; Dave took lessons from Marco when he and his family lived down here.) He has converted part of his apartment into a small classroom, and four days a week we spend two hours there, wrestling with the indefinido and the imperfecto, and trying to master yet another strange bit of castellano syntax. (Click on the photo for a larger version.)

Marco is an excellent teacher, patient and thorough. How he keeps from bursting into laughter at our outrageous mistakes is beyond me. If you come down to Buenos Aires and want to learn some Spanish, get in touch with Marco.

Here's Marco's website, Hablar en Bs As:

Hablar en Bs As