Spanish lessons - making life less fun

I've found that Spanish isn't actually that hard to understand. It's like a different language that they speak here, and I've found that what you need to do right, is that the locals have a different word for most words that we have in English. So pretty much, if you learn the words that they use and just replace the English word with the Spanish word then you pretty much have it in the bag.

Alright jokin' aside, it really IS actually like that to some extent. Grammatically, at least at pond-scum level that I'm at, the grammar isn't all backwards like in some other languages, just that the adjective comes after the nouns, but other than that nothing major.

There are however a couple of simple rules that I learnt when I came over that I found were really useful.

The first is the simple rule that you can make pretty much any word in Spanish by just saying the English word more slowly with an "o" or an "a" at the end.

Telefono (telephone), Chica (Chick - as in the fit variety) and Idiota (idiot) are all prime examples of this that I've heard.

The second is that you can work out what most shops sell, simply because they have the Spanish word for the product followed by the ending -eria.

For example, the Spanish for beer is cerveza so a cerveceria sells beer, a panaderia sells bread and a carniceria sells meat.

However, when you combine rules 1 and 2 above, it can sometimes fall apart and this explains why, for a while I was too scared to go into a Ferreteria for fear of getting bitten by a carnivorous rodent and was certain that a Joyeria was a whorehouse.

Unfortunately, with my newfound knowledge, I now know this not to be the case. I did wonder why they needed quite so many ferrets and knocking shops!

Still no luck with the ladies though...

A,B,C,D....