Street Spanish: How to Speak and Understand Spanish Slang

A very helpful book for those wanting to learn how to speak the street Spanish and learn the buzz words. It puts you in the groove to be the hippest of your group. This book is absolutely essential!

It all started with "merde", the little book that taught you everything your French teacher wouldn't. As a Spanish teacher, I found the book amusing, but tossed it aside after I read it once. I don't really know what a student would get out of it.

I've had numerous copies of the 501 Spanish Verbs, and of Street Spanish 1 & 2. (now it's time to add #3.) I've always given them away to other Americans down there in The Jungle By The Sea. I'm ordering a fresh batch of all of them and this time nobody but me gets to use them. *smile* It's true, you have to know the street talk or the natives go "Ay!" and the merchants charge you triple. I lived in The Jungle By The Sea for almost 4 years. Great place. Great country. Great people. The Mexicans and the Irish seem to have a special bond.

Street Spanish 1 is the best book I have come across on Spanish slang. It provides a wide range of phrases and terms not generally found elsewhere, but which a native speaker would normally use when talking to friends or family, or which often crop up in movies and books. In other words, it teaches the real Spanish that is needed to promote a better understanding when conversing with or listening to native speakers. The dialogues are made up of the most popular slang expressions that are used in various Hispanic countries, allowing their usage to be observed in context while on the facing pages an English translation is provided for easy reference. The vocabulary section that comes at the end of every dialogue focuses on each slang term and explains its usage even further by means of additional examples, while synonyms, antonyms and variations used in different countries are included to ensure that a thorough grasp of each term is reached. To gain that extra edge, this book is highly recommended for travellers and students alike.(Having the cassettes, which are not part of the package, would be an added bonus since you would hear the dialogues being spoken by natives of Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Spain, providing a better feel for the language, its speech patterns and the varying pronunciations).

Street Spanish tremendously improved my vocabulary of street slang as well as basic Spanish words. I know more slang than my Hispanic friends! My only problem with this book is that the answers to the quizzes were not always correct and there were a few errors in translations. Besides that, I loved it!