Che! Dame los cinco

Che! Cómo andas?

Welcome to the “Che! Dame los cinco” newsletter.

For the new folks joining us, I send these 4 things for you every Monday morning:

1. a new word

2. a new expression

3. a piece of content

4. an exercise for improving your Spanish

📖 Palabra - chusmear

My friend Tony used this in a voice message the other day and said it’s like investigar. When you want to find something out or research. Those best definition I found on RAE:

curiosear → ocuparse en averiguar lo que alguien hace o dice.

Mi jefe no está, voy a chusmear tw e ig un rato.
subí un dibujo a ig pueden ir a chusmear.

🗨️ Expresión - ponerse las pilas

This is the equivalent of motivarse or planear hacer algo y hacerlo as my friend explained it. There’s actually a 2-min episode that talks about this expression (slightly different words but same thing).

🔗 Contenido - Learn about Emilia Mernes

Remember the song I shared last week called La_Original? I didn’t realize it, but the artist Emilia Mernes is one of the characters from the Disney show Entrelazados.

And apparently she’s really popular 😂 Well thanks to YouTube’s lovely algorithms, I stumbled upon this video which explains her whole backstory and rise to fame. It’s really well done.

💪🏼 Ejercicio - Practice specific sounds

Surprisingly, this is been super helpful. So remember how I said I recorded myself reading a TV transcript (well subtitles)? I watched it back and had over 100 words I thought I was pronouncing poorly.

I then categorized them and looked for patterns. One week I practiced /b/ vs. /v/. Another week I practiced /r/. Last night, I watched a video on dipthongs.

And so what I’ve been doing is looking for patterns to correct by doing this:

1. find a pattern of words i.e. words with /r/ from my last of bad pronunciation

2. record myself and send to native speaker asking if anything sounds off

3. practice those words and identify patterns in them

This has made me much more productive in knowing which sounds I need to practice. Hope it helps you do the same! If you need more help, let me know :)

Thanks for reading! Espero que disfrutes la semana 😄

Abrazo de tu amigo,
- Joe