Learn Dominican Spanish Free!
In this section I’m going to be publishing some of my Spanish notes. I’ve lived in the DR for a couple of years now and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not that fond of learning new languages although to date I have been around Creole, some French, and have even learned some American Sign Language (ASL) as well as my continual Spanish studies.
One thing you will likely notice while reading them is that my goal isn’t really to have perfect Spanish, at least not yet. For now I need to just get by. If you’re learning Spanish in school, you teacher is going to have you memorize large amounts of rules, conjugations and vocabulary words. My goal here is to get the most mileage possible from my ongoing battle to memorize enough words to communicate with people in the DR.
While reading through my tips you will find most of what I write will be more along the idea of the minimum it will take to get by and making sure you are getting the most mileage from the things you learn. Somewhere along the line you will likely want to start doing some writing so this page “Setting up MS Word for Dominican Spanish” will help you get started.
This is pretty important when you move to a new country, you don’t have time to learn the language perfectly, and you need to get the most out of what you learn with the least amount of effort. Perfection can come later.
I’ll be breaking up my Spanish tips into four sections:
- Getting by – these will be written to give most results out of the minimum possible work
- Vocabulary Tips – These are quick easy rules that will help you to rapidly increase your vocabulary often by learning how to say English words in a Spanish way. You’ll understand what I mean when you open one of these pages. I will also have lists of the most important words, the ones that you will use the most often in a Spanish Speaking country
- Slang and Sayings – This is more for fun. Not really necessary but it adds more color to your speaking. Most of these words and saying are only used in the Caribbean and the Dominican Republic.
- Rules – Yes you do need to learn a few rules. Glance over the links for these pages so you know what I have available and read the page when you come across something in my other pages that you have a question about. You will likely need to start out with my page on Conjugation.
For all of these pages I will be assuming that you already have a Spanish verb book. If you don’t have one then that is one of the first things you should invest in. For now you can also use an online Spanish tool to conjugate your verbs like this.
Because I do need to call the form of the verb something, I will be using a few of those parts of speech word (that you probably hated in school) to let you know how you need to say the verb. Also, if you see a number after a verb (i.e. #3) it is referring to the verbs tense. In the case of this example #3 that would refer to the preterit verb tense. You can find more information on that verb tense by clicking on the link under “rules”.
Vary basically; these are the parts of speech you will need to learn, Spanish has 14 of them I will focus on 5.
- Infinitive – This is the basic starting point, all changes (conjugations and tenses) will happen to this word. For the most part all Infinitives end with an “r”. This form of the verb means “to” – [verb], for example “to have”, “to eat”, “to walk”.
- Present – This is conjugated into the 5 conjugations use in Caribbean Spanish. Spain Spanish uses one more but it is not used in any of the Caribbean countries.
- Gerund – Basically this is when you take an English verb and end it with “ing” (running instead of run), No conjugation is used here.
- Future – Like the present tense this tense is conjugated.
- Past participle and Preterit – these are two ways to speak about the past. The preterit requires conjugation the past participle doesn’t. I’ll explain these in my page about the past.
This is a work in progress; I will be adding new pages on a regular basis, frequently after I have learned something new that has been very useful in helping my new Dominican friends understand me! Best of all, by following along you can learn Dominican Spanish Free!
| Getting by | Vocabulary Tips | Slang and Sayings | Rules |
| Common Spanish Traveling Phrases | To Be – Ser vrs Estar |