As a native Spanish speaker from Europe, what aspects of the different accents of Spanish as spoken across Latin American countries are unusual to you or difficult for you to adjust to?

Answer 1

Hello there! Although I'm not a native Spanish speaker, I did live in Spain and earned my Master's in Spanish from almost all Spain-born professors. It seemed to me that most native Peninsular Spanish speakers would find Caribbean Spanish (D.R., Cuba, Puerto Rico) accents to be the most challenging to listen to. However, I don't believe that speakers from the different countries really have much trouble understanding one another in everyday speech. It's usually only the colloquial expressions (very regional idioms) that vary from country to country and that may not be understood across borders and continents. This is no different than all of the idiomatic expressions that vary within the United States alone - we are full of different sub-cultures, and even though we U.S.-born Americans may all speak English, depending on which part of the country we're in, we have lots of variation within our own native tongue. I am originally from the New England, for example, and now I live in Central Florida, which has lots of Southern influence, which is vastly different than the Northeast. However, just like Spain vs. Latin America and the Caribbean, we all can get by understanding each other just fine :-).