Day 3 of 90
Please, thank you, and how to be polite
You can get a long way on hola and gracias, but knowing when to switch to usted is what stops you sounding like a tourist reading from a card.
The courtesy words
Four words that make every other sentence land better.
perdón and lo siento are not interchangeable, and swapping them is the most common early mistake. perdón asks for a small pardon in the moment, so it fits squeezing past someone. lo siento means I feel it, so it belongs to bad news and genuine fault. Using lo siento to get past someone on a bus sounds strange in the same way sorry for your loss would.
Asking without demanding
Spanish softens requests with a question, not with extra words.
English piles on words to be polite: would you mind possibly. Spanish mostly does not. A plain present tense verb turned into a question is already courteous, and por favor finishes the job. Adding more words does not make you sound more polite, it makes you sound uncertain.
tú or usted
The decision you make in the first second of every conversation.
This is the one place where Latin American and Spanish usage genuinely splits. Spain keeps a separate informal plural, vosotros, with its own set of verb endings. Latin America dropped it, so ustedes covers every group of people you address, and that is one whole verb form you do not have to learn. This course teaches the Latin American default, and the switch at the top of each lesson shows the Spain form where it differs.
Being too formal reads as respectful and slightly stiff. Being too informal with the wrong person reads as presumptuous. The cost of the two mistakes is not equal, so start with usted and let the other person move you to tú. In much of Colombia, Costa Rica and the Andes, usted is used even between friends and family, so do not assume it is cold.
Check yourself
Eight questions. Get 5 of them right to finish the day.
More from this course
Weeks 1 to 2: first words, first sentences.
See all 90 days of the course →