is the Spanish spoken in Spain different than the one spoken in Latin America?

Question

if yes,
what are the differences?
if i'm going to Argentine and Spain .. should i learn separate spanish for each country? or do they (in argentine) understand the same spanish in spain and vice versa?

Answer 1

Of course there are differences, but you should be okay.

It's closer to the difference between the English spoken here in the US vs. the English spoken in the UK than the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese.

Answer 2

The Spanish spoken is Spain is diffrent than the ones spoken in Latin America. Further more the Spanish from Spain can be broken down into Castilian, Galician, Basque, and Catalan depending on what region you are in. Word of advise when you go to Argentina don't call it espanol (Spanish) call it Castellano. The good news is that most of the words have the same meanings. It's just like the English from England and the United States. You will be understood so don't worry you want to take an extensive course in Spanish from Spain to Spainsh from Latin America.

Answer 3

There are some difference, mainly in pronunciation. But basically is is the same language.
You can find differences even in the spanish spoken in latin american countries, for example the word "bean" is "frijol" or "poroto" depending the country, and if you say "poroto" in Costa Rica (where I am) nobody will understand you.
With some differences in pronunciation and words and meaning of words, the language is the same.
This last poin is important, because a normal word in a country can have a different meaning in other country and be a dirty word or offensive. For example the word "picha" in south america means rotten and in Costa Rica is a very bad word and offensive, regarding the male genitals.
The same occurs with spanish from Spain and Latind America.
I think this is logic to happen considering the amounto of countries that have spanish as mother language and the amount of people that speak it. In some casese the language has influences of native language of certain region or country making it richer and diffenrent from one place to an other.

Answer 4

I've been using Spanish for business (in Europe) for many years and a couple of months ago was in Mexico. I was surprised at how few differences there were! Quite a lot of my time in Europe was spent in Andalusia and the Canaries, where there are characteristics of speech similar to those found in Mexico and other countries of S. America.

A couple of characteristics worth noting are:

1.Seseo - in Spain, the 'c' before a front vowel is like the English 'th' in 'think' - it's like 's' in SA.
2. The sound 's' at the end of a word tends not to be pronounced or may be aspirated in SA, so 'dos hermanos' becomes 'doh hermano'
3. Castillian 'y' and 'll' are pronounced differently in various SA countries.
4. Some of the words in SA ARE different, because they haven't been contaminated by English as in Castillian.

Spanish speaking people are generally wonderfully tolerant of regional accents and mistakes in grammar - so don't worry - enjoy learning it.

Answer 5

Although they have different accents and some differences in verb conjugation, they certainly understand each other without problem.

So, you can choose either. Peruvian and Colombian Spanish are quite pure and neutral.

Argentinians have a strong and very typical accent, which make them easy to recognize in all the Spanish speaking world (they can't pretend they are not Argentinians).

Answer 6

Yeah they do understand each other but you'll notice they're really different.
I've been in both countries and I noticed that the intonation and vocabulary are totally different. I found it easier to adapt to the Argentinean accent, I barely speak Spanish but I found myself catching some words from them sooner than I started understanding the Spaniards.

Answer 7

It is the same Spanish with very few differences and different accents, but remains the same. Don´t worry they will understand you perfectly.

Answer 8

The language spoken is not so much different but it is spoken with a different accent.

Answer 9

Yup

Answer 10

they use a form of pronoun called vosotros only in Spain