Beginners 1: The weather

00:00 Welcome to Spanish Obsessed, you’re listening to beginners, series 1, episode 1. I’m your co-host, Rob, and I’m here with Lis. ¡Hola Lis!

00:12 ¿Cómo estás?

00:15 Muy bien. So, during this series with Lis and I, we’re going to teach you functional Spanish which will be useful for various situations. You’ll learn useful phrases, snippets of grammar, and tips and tricks to help you with your Spanish. It’s not a particularly structured course, so it doesn’t matter if you listen to the podcast in order, but if you do want a more structured course then head over to spanishobsessed.com, and look for our series Spanish from Scratch. In the meantime, we’ve got a present for you! No matter where you’re listening from, whether it’s Spotify or another podcast app, or on the website, if you head over to spanishobsessed.com/go, we’ve got a present waiting for you there. You can get your hands on a Spanish starter pack, which contains over 90 starter phrases, and a link to help you learn those with flashcards. We’ve got a guide to the subjunctive, and much more to help you in your journey towards learning Spanish. That’s a freebee, so head over to spanishobsessed.com/go. That’s enough from me for now, so let’s get straight into the episode.

01:28 Buenos días Lis. [“Good morning Lis”]

01:32 ¿Cómo estás? [“How are you”]

01:38 Muy bien, también, muchas gracias [“Very well too, thanks very much”]. So, for people to get to know us a little bit better, I’m going to ask Lis four simple questions. So, see if you can understand the questions and Lis’ responses, so you can get to know us a little bit better. Lis, ¿de dónde eres? [“Lis, where are you from”]

02:02 A simple and very common question to get us started there. ¿De dónde eres? means “where are you from?”. So that eres comes from the verb ser, which is one of two verbs in Spanish meaning “to be”. So, when we’re talking about where we’re from, so about nationalities, we use the verb ser. ¿De dónde eres? means “where are you from?”, and then Lis’ response was soy de… “I’m from”. So, two conjugations there for you: eres and soy. ¿De qué parte de Colombia? [“From what part of Colombia?”]

02:44 Hopefully easy enough to follow again. ¿De qué parte…? Parte means “part”. So ¿De qué parte…?, “from which part”, and Lis said de la capital, Bogotá. Now, an interesting thing to remember about la capital is that it’s feminine, we know that because it’s la. So, when talking about capital cities, it’s la capital. Now, there is an el capital as well, don’t get confused with that, because that means “capital”, as in “money”. So, how much capital you have, etc. La capital is “the capital city”. Y, ¿dónde estamos ahora? [“And where are we now?”]

03:31 Sí, no estamos en Colombia, estamos en Londres. [“Yes, we’re not in Colombia, we’re in London”] So I then switch from the verb ser to estar, this is the other verb in Spanish meaning “to be”. So I said, ¿dónde estamos? “where are we?”, ¿dónde estamos ahora?. And Lis said estamos en Londres. “We are in London”. So, to describe a location where something or someone is, we use the verb estar. Estamos: “we are”. Estamos en Londres. Lis, ¿cuánto tiempo llevas en Londres? [“Lis, how long have you been in London?”]

04:18 ¿Llevas siete años? Mucho tiempo. [“You’ve been here seven years? A lot of time”]

04:25 So, here’s a handy verb for you: llevar. I said to Lis, ¿cuánto tiempo llevas en Londres?. Literally, “how much time do you carry in London?”. And this is the way you say in Spanish, “how long have you been somewhere?”. ¿Cuánto tiempo llevas en Londres? – “how long have you been in London?”. And then the response is llevo siete años – “I carry 7 years”, or “I’ve been in London for seven years”. Y, ¿a qué te dedicas? [“And, what do you do?”]

05:10 A nice way of asking someone what they do is to say ¿a qué te dedicas? So, “what do you dedicate yourself to?”. This is quite a nice, natural Spanish way of asking someone what they do. And now Lis is going to ask me those questions.

05:29 Pues, yo soy de Londres. Inglaterra. [“Well, I’m from London. England.”]

05:43 Llevo en Londres diez años. Yo soy de Londres, pero no he vivido siempre en Londres. [“I’ve been in London 10 years. I’m from London, but I haven’t always lived in London”]

05:58 Yo trabajo en una agencia de marketing. [“I work in a marketing agency.”] So, although we didn’t provide all the analysis and the translations for that small part of the conversation, you can check those out in the transcript on the website, spanishobsessed.com, this is beginners episode 1, of course. And there you’ll find the full conversation and the transcript as well, complete with full explanations. Ok, now we’re going to move on to talking about the weather, which is a famous topic in England, and is something you can talk about pretty much anywhere in the world, because everywhere has weather of course! Now, the interesting thing in Spanish is that there are two verbs which are commonly used with the weather, which are…?

06:48 Hacer and estar. So these are two of the most common verbs in Spanish, hacer, which literally translates as “to do”, and estar, which translates as “to be”. So, commonly in English, “it is”, that’s the verb “to be”. So, when talking about the weather we use the verbs hacer or estar, depending on what we’re saying. So, Lis, give us a couple of examples. First of all, how do you even ask “how’s the weather”?

07:23 ¿Cómo está el clima? So, it’s the same question as ¿cómo estás?, “how are you?”, using that verb estar, “to be”, and then “the weather” is el clima. So, ¿cómo está el clima? So, that’s how you ask someone “how’s the weather?”. ¿Cómo está el clima? So, how do you say “it’s hot”?

07:51 Hace calor. Now we’re not using the verb estar, we’re using hacer. Hace – “it does” – calor – “hot”. “It does hot”, hace calor: “it’s hot”. How do you say the opposite, “it’s cold”?

08:13 Hace frio. So, the opposite of calor is frio. And again, we use the verb hacer. Hace calor, or hace frio. How do you say “it’s sunny”?

08:32 Hace sol. Again, using the verb hacer, so when it’s hot, when it’s cold, when it’s sunny, we use the verb hacer, hace sol – literally, that translates as “it does sun”, it’s sunny. Can you give us those three again?

09:12 And how do we say “it’s raining”?

09:22 Está lloviendo. So, “rain” doesn’t use the verb hacer, it uses the verb estar. So, just as we ask ¿cómo está el clima? We now say está – “it is” – lloviendo – that’s the verb “raining”. Now, in English we say “it’s raining”, that -ing ending is called a progressive ending, or continuous. And the iendo which you can hear in Spanish is similar. That’s the continuous, or the progressive ending to verbs. We’re not going to go into a huge amount of detail on that now, but it’s good to bear in mind that any time you hear a verb which ends in ando or endo we know that’s the progressive ending. So, está lloviendo from the verb llover, “it’s raining”. Now, what could you say if it’s not raining very hard?

10:25 So. this is quite a nice little phrase which people won’t expect from someone who’s just learning Spanish. Está lloviznando, it’s a similar construction, which uses the verb estar again, and this time the verb is lloviznar. Not a very common verb, but this means “to drizzle”. So, está lloviznando means “it’s drizzling”. And then, there’s an expression which you use in Colombia, isn’t there? When it’s…

10:55 Is it in Spain as well? What’s that?

11:02 Can you explain that phrase?

11:32 So, it’s actually two words put together, isn’t it. So, espantar means “to frighten”, and then bobos basically translates as “idiots”.

11:53 So it’s a rain which frightens idiots, I suppose…

11:59 So, if it’s raining not very hard, you’d say, está bien, es un espantabobos, no más

12:08 So you’d say “come on, it’s raining just a little bit, we can go out”. Es un simple espantabobos. Ok Lis, can you give us those phrases again, just one more time. So, listen and repeat.

13:33 Bueno Lis, muchísimas gracias.

13:43 A ver. Espero que sí.

13:47 Chao.