Mexico or Spain Spanish? You're Asking the Wrong Question!
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Why is choosing between Mexican Spanish and Spanish from Spain not the biggest problem for beginners?
Welcome to the Language and Travel Hacking Podcast from Fluent in Three Months.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Language and Travel Hacking Podcast. I'm your host, Benny Lewis, and there's a question I've heard maybe a thousand times now that I want to talk about. I've heard it in 20 different flavors, but it comes up so often that it really bears diving into. And it just happened to come up in a recent boot camp call I had with my coaching students. And the thought is often phrased something along the lines of Benny, should I be learning Mexican Spanish or Spanish from Spain? Because I started on Spanish from Spain, but now I'm actually planning a trip to Colombia and I'm worried I picked the wrong one. Now, this can happen also for other languages. I'm not talking just about Spanish, but dealing with French dialects, Portuguese, or any language you may be thinking of and breaking it up into dialects.
The honest answer is that this question is so far down your list of actual problems that it shouldn't even be on the list yet. Let me put this to you another way. I'm Irish. I speak with an Irish accent and I use Irish phrases. I've spent many years in the United States and I've spent several months in both England and Australia and many years meeting people from South Africa and Canada and every English speaking corner of the world.
How does Benny illustrate that dialect differences rarely stop real conversations?
None of them has ever stopped the conversation and said, Benny, this isn't working out. You're simply gonna have to change your accent to speak like I do before we can continue. It just doesn't happen, especially in brief exchanges. Now obviously there are certain examples I could give of when a local term caused confusion, but I can truly only count them on one hand despite many decades of talking to thousands of people. So this is the entire dialect problem played out in a language I happen to speak natively, and it's not really a problem for me in English, so why are we acting like it's a five alarm fire in Spanish or French or Portuguese or other languages with obvious dialects? You see, when you're a beginner, what you actually have on your plate is enormous.
You're trying to remember what the verb endings do. You're trying to keep present and past straight without melting your brain. You're trying to catch a sentence at full speed when half the words are still very strange sounding to you. You're trying to find the courage to just open your mouth in the first place. That is the workload. That's what's hard. Worrying about whether your Zed should sound like an S or a th in some context down the line, I promise you, is a luxury problem that's way down your list of triages of emergencies to solve. And here's the thing: the dialect anxious crowd always seems to forget. People adjust.
What does the host say about the overwhelming priorities for language beginners?
A Mexican who hears a learner say vosotros doesn't shut down. They smile. They slot you mentally into the this one obviously had a Spanish teacher from Spain box and they keep going. A Spaniard who hears you say, way, doesn't faint. The whole Spanish speaking world is wired for the fact that Spanish is spoken across two and a half dozen countries. They hear variation constantly from other natives and from learners. They're used to it. Now I've been in Mexico for a few weeks in this recent visit. I started in Mexico City, then I went up to Monterrey, over to Saltillo, and now I'm down in San Luis Potosi. And in these three or so weeks, I've crossed four different sub-dialects of Mexican Spanish. The pace changes, the vocabulary changes.
In the state I'm currently in, they even have their own way of saying. being okay that you don't actually hear elsewhere. Now I've done precisely zero hours of research on this. I've just happened to come across it in natural conversations.
How do real‑world experiences in Mexico reveal sub‑dialects and their impact?
The local flavor just rubs off on you because you're standing in it. And this is how dialects actually get learned. Not from a decision you make at the start, not from picking the right course on month one. Or you're setting yourself up uh for failure for the rest of your life. No, no, no.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why is choosing between Mexican Spanish and Spanish from Spain not the biggest problem for beginners?
0:11–1:37
2
How does Benny illustrate that dialect differences rarely stop real conversations?
1:37–3:14
3
What does the host say about the overwhelming priorities for language beginners?
3:14–4:24
4
How do real‑world experiences in Mexico reveal sub‑dialects and their impact?
4:24–5:44
5
When does focusing on a specific dialect become useful for learners?
5:44–7:35
6
Why is spending months researching the ‘perfect’ dialect considered procrastination?
7:35–8:49
7
What practical advice does Benny give for picking resources and getting speaking practice?
8:49–10:03