In our English-speaking lives, we must always make it blindingly obvious who is doing what particular action. Spanish people don’t.

To avoid sounding like an oddball when you speak, you’ll need to say a tearful goodbye to ‘yo’, ‘él’, ‘ella’ and the like.

Aprovechar is one of those wonderous useful Spanish verbs with a multitude of meanings, that make it singularly difficult to translate neatly into one English equivalent.

Read on to find out how to use it better than your peers.

Before nipping away from the dinner table at home, you’d most likely say something like “I’ll be right back”.

What, then, would be the optimal way to express this same idea in Spanish?

The way you’ve been taught to say “I like” – “me gusta” – has a different meaning when it comes to talking about people, rather than activities.

Mix them up at your peril.

A natural way to introduce new ideas into English conversations is with the expression “the [x] thing” – as in: “the good thing”, “the bad thing”, or “the crazy thing”.

But how can we do the same in Spanish? Quite easily, it turns out.

The subjunctive. It’s the stuff of Spanish students’ nightmares.

But learn this little language trick, using the subjunctive, and it might make you hate this mysterious grammatical concept a little less.

Make the odd tweak to your Spanish and you can have a big impact on what native speakers think of you.

Read on to discover how you can easily speak about how long you’ve been doing a given activity.

Us English speakers get a hefty amount of use out of the phrase “to look forward to”.

Things are a touch more complicated when talking in Spanish – some verbal gymnastics are required to get us to communicate the same thing.

Irritatingly enough, Spanish has no direct equivalent of the English phrase “to be fluent”. How very insensitive.

Beware the clunky, unnatural options that dictionaries and phrasebooks suggest you should opt for.

It takes much more than a quick ‘¿cómo estás?’ to get conversations going.

Discover the Spanish expressions and phrases you’ll need to inject some energy and interest into those fleeting everyday encounters.

Bad news, Spanish learners. There are few more effective ways to let people know that your language skills aren’t up to much than by asking questions using the phrase ¿Es posible…?.

Find out why you should avoid it at all costs.

Our trusted friends, the textbooks, teach us beautifully formal ways to order things in Spanish that people rarely (if ever) use in real life.

Here’s how you should go about ordering things in Spanish.

Our trusted friends, the textbooks, teach us beautifully formal ways to order things in Spanish that people rarely (if ever) use in real life.

Here’s how you should go about ordering things in Spanish.

Our trusted friends, the textbooks, teach us beautifully formal ways to order things in Spanish that people rarely (if ever) use in real life.

Here’s how you should go about ordering things in Spanish.