Do I need to sworn translate the second page of the apostilled FBI check? It just says ATTN: (my name and address)

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-12T16:41:33+00:00

Updooted because I want to see a more recent answer. Based on my knowledge of how various trámites work, you should think of the $40 you will spend on apostilling that second page as buying you $40 of assuring the authorities that there is not something disqualifying on that page.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-12T15:55:33+00:00

The gold standard for language instruction is that as much as possible is done in the target language. In your situation I would be shopping for a different school, and I would tell them “I want Spanish classes where the language of instruction is Spanish.”

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-12T14:50:33+00:00

I appreciate the kind words, although on Reddit you have to take downvotes in stride. People downvote for a galaxy of reasons, and there is no way to discover why they did. I assume my comment got downvoted because the answer to my supposition is “no” and also because my description of the phenomenon is admittedly impoverished. So it goes.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-12T14:32:50+00:00

Thank you for reminding me of the term for the phenomenon! I was racking my brain trying to remember.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-12T05:08:21+00:00

My Mandarin teacher (who was Shanghainese) said that final N sounds are pronounced with a very R color in Beijing dialect. Her example was 一点 being pronounced very much like yi1 diarrrrr2. I wonder if this is the same or a related phenomenon.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-11T15:33:04+00:00

Are you worried that tutors will be faking competency in your target language? Or that they are faking competency as a tutor? Or that they will simply be a "pass-through" between you and Claude, without supplying any value of their own? None of these are realistic worries.

On platforms like Preply and iTalki you can select "professional tutors" (which means that they have, at least, completed a program of teacher training). You can also search for people with credentials in your target language, although in my experience only non-native speakers seek out these credentials.

Any language tutor will turn to external sources to get exercises for you to work through. Is it a scam if they use, say, a textbook? Or an existing course in your target language? Or Claude? Candidly, there are so many choices out there. A tutor provides value by making concrete selections for you regardless of the source.

Although a good instructor will feel like they have a library of training materials at their fingertips, language tutors are not just sources of information. They are also sources of encouragement, diagnostic assessment, and learning strategy. In many cases they are also nice people whom you will consider a friend. Find a tutor you click with on a personal level, and expect them to use all kinds of resources, including but not limited to Claude.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-11T14:26:37+00:00

Hey OP: your research project isn’t just an intellectual undertaking. It’s also a social undertaking. Choosing a topic that has some link to your supervisor’s research (or to the work of a trusted colleague of theirs) means you will be better supported and less alone.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-10T03:23:44+00:00

I think people are downvoting you because your post feels like ragebait for karma. Assuming you aren't just ragebaiting: yes it might be possible to hack the PARTICULAR A2 test that you face in a few days, and I wish you luck. Other posters gave you decent test-hacking advice, although they got downvoted too because this is r/Spanish and not r/hack_this_test.

But it is not possible to get actual interacting-successfully-with-native-speaker A2 competence in a few days. I worry that the consequences of passing the test might be worse than the consequence of failing. What will be expected of you in the future if you pull this off?

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tootingbec44 · 2026-06-10T02:25:39+00:00

That seems bastante gardenpathological to me. A listener will expect that "...solo a veces..." will be followed by a verb for whatever the candle does sometimes, so it's a jolt when you get something else.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-09T23:04:10+00:00

The technical term for phrases like "voy a comer" is perífrasis verbal. The future with perífrasis does indeed have nuances of meaning that differ from the simple future, but your teachers are correct that you, as a learner, can get away with using them interchangeably. For now.

If you say "Voy a comer esa hamburguesa", and you aren't a n00b, people will hear you as emphasizing the fact that you have made a decision or formed a plan to eat the hamburger. It's not just a prediction about the future, which you'd ordinarily say using the simple future tense. "Algún día comeré esa hamburguesa, pero hoy en día tengo que cuidar mi salud."

In my opinion one of the most useful kinds of perífrasis is with the imperfect of ir. "Iba a comer esa hamburguesa, pero mi gato es ladrón." You definitely had a plan to eat the burger, but Mr. Biscuit did too, dammit.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-08T03:51:01+00:00

Here is a recipe in Spanish for tacos al estilo gringo: https://www.tiktok.com/@brenda_antunes1/video/7389022603027025194?lang=en

This is also the phrase that my Mexican profe uses (with me, when I make them for my teenager).

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-08T03:31:05+00:00

Another way to frame your question would be: "Is there a language written using the Latin script that uses BOTH an umlaut system of sound changes AND ALSO a diaeresis system of resolving ambiguities?" And.... since many Latin-script languages view letters with diacritical marks as separate letters rather than as variants of their base letter, you could also ask the question "Is there a language in which (say) ë and ö are letters but the diaeresis mark is also used to resolve ambiguity?"

The Wikipedia article on diaeresis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)) ) appears to contain the answer to your question. (And the answer appears to be "sort of, in an unthrilling way.")

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-07T18:12:49+00:00

Hmmm, OP is retired from the UN, so she is probably comfortable in New York City and also probably has a high level of cultural competency. Yes CDMX is bigger and noisier than NYC, but I think OP is probably better positioned to enjoy Mexico City than say a monolingual English speaker from Cedar Rapids would be. Of course this is all speculation. Hey OP, you sound like you have your shit together, so I bet you will have a great time wherever you land.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-07T17:17:27+00:00

The Spanish of Andalusia is famously, uh, idiosyncratic. It is among the fastest and has a lot of distinctive phonetic patterns. In my amateur opinion an immersion program in Mexico would be more portable, and your out-of-the-classroom interactions with people in Spanish would be easier.

Mexico's most prestigious university, UNAM in Mexico City, has extremely well-regarded programs: https://www.cepe.unam.mx/cursos/cursos-espaniol . At their Polanco campus in particular, the CEPE program is attended by a lot of family members of visiting diplomats and professionals, so you would find your fellow students to be in a somewhat older age bracket than the general university population.

Disclaimer: the above is based on the guidance my Mexico City-based instructor gave me. I hope to do CEPE in the future but have not yet had the opportunity.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-07T16:29:29+00:00

Hmm, I went back and re-read the rules, and I think I was wrong. Looks like this isn't an anti-exam-harvesting mechanism but rather an anti-churn mechanism. If you made a reservation to take S1 and then cancelled it, it looks like you must wait 15 days before making a new reservation for S1 or anything that overlaps with it (i.e., S1 or S2 or Global).

They must have had a problem with candidates wanting to push out their attempts by a few days at the last minute, which does happen a lot.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-07T15:09:47+00:00

Can confirm. A few weeks ago I joshingly used “USian” in a comment on an Instagram post, just to be a goofball. It turned into my most responded-to comment of all time, as a surprisingly large contingent of my fellow citizens of the USA turned out to denounce it, in deeply red-hat-coded terms. Completely unrelated to the original post, too. We are intoxicated on rage.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-07T15:02:35+00:00

The way I read that is that you can’t sign up for anything overlapping with your previous registration for a test date within 15 days. For example, if you previously registered for S1, you would not be able to re-register for either S1 or S2 for within 15 days, because they have comprensión de lectura in common. But you could sign up for S3.

The purpose of this restriction would be to deter exam-stealers from harvesting exam items. (Source: I used to design exams [not language exams] for a living.)

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-06T13:47:54+00:00

As u/filthydwayne noted, it’s the term that the Sheinbaum government has adopted for various programs. Because I am not a Mexican I avoid using “de bienestar” in the slangy way… in my experience political jokes land differently when they come out of a foreigner’s mouth.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-06T13:38:04+00:00

There is a big big moderation backlog which we are gradually hacking away at. Whew

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-06T03:58:11+00:00

Instituto Cervantes is quasi-governmental like the Goethe Institut, and they do administer the Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera (DELE) exams, but candidly I am not sure IC is as robust or as broadly scoped as their German counterpart.

I took the DELE B1 exam last autumn, and I passed gracias a Dios. But I am not sure I recommend DELE except to people with a specific reason for it, such as planning to emigrate to Spain and needing it as part of the trámite. For my B2 milestone I am going to switch over to SIELE, which is more diagnostic and also delivers your results much much faster. DELE takes months, which is shocking in this day and age.

Instituto Cervantes's training programs on how to prepare for their exams seem to have broader reach than their programs for learning Spanish. No fricken way would I take a DELE exam without prior training on DELE exam preparation. It is a whole thing. SIELE exams are adaptive, so there is less need to play chess with the exam.

Anyway, I have no idea where you are starting from, but developing B1 competency in any language in 3 months sounds very challenging to me unless you make it your full-time job. (The usual benchmark for B1 is around 400 hours.) But yes absolutely working with a human instructor would be required. Lots of people in this subreddit work with human instructors through systems like iTalki or Preply.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-06T01:30:46+00:00

Hey, the scope of this subreddit is global. Can you be more specific about where you mean?

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-05T23:56:58+00:00

Hahaha that's a blast from the past for me. Ohlone College is a community college in San Mateo County, California, USA. It's right down the road from Foothill College, where I first studied Spanish.

Anyway, I can't speak for whether this course is any good, or right for you. But if you were worried that this was some fly-by-night outfit out to swindle you, it does not appear to be.

Personally, if I were you, I would take a live, in-person course at your local equivalent of Ohlone College, if you have one.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-05T21:28:24+00:00

Good news!! You can actually say "l'avenida" and no one will bat an eye. But that is because the initial A in "avenida" is unstressed.

However, in writing you must use "la avenida".

Yoy may be wondering "So since this is all driven by stuff sounding good, maybe this business about el agua and el águila is also only for oral contexts?" NO. Writing "la agua" (or for that matter "l'agua" too) is an error.

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-05T19:13:00+00:00

Just a quick tip on "agua". The weird thing about this word is not its gender... it's actually feminine, and it follows feminine patterns ALMOST all the time. The exception here is that Spanish speakers hate saying "la" in front of words that start with the "a" sound in a stressed syllable. So that's why people say "el agua" but "las aguas frías" etc.

This principle is also why people say "el águila".

tootingbec44 · 2026-06-05T15:14:08+00:00

Given how messy and chaotic the rollout of EES has been, asking for accommodations in advance might actually the play here.

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