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The other day I found myself in a cafetería (a café) and I thought I might teach you some words for being in a cafetería and trying to order a café (a coffee) and things like that!
Here in Spain, the use of ‘formal you’ Ud. (usted) is restricted to speaking with elders or the president, something really formal. Even when at a café you can use the informal tú with your server and no pasa nada (‘nothing’s wrong’, literally ‘nothing happens’). You are expected to be quite informal with the barista. You can say ¿Me pones un café solo? (‘Could I get a shot of esperesso?’, literally ‘will you put me a single coffee?’). You can even cut right to the chase and say un café solo, just the thing you want, and have done with it. You can add por favor afterwards if you want, but I’d say people say please here less often than we do. It doesn’t seem as rude or blunt as it might in English to not to include it.
In repsonse to your request the server will probably say vale which means ‘okay’. Maybe you’ll ask for un cruasán or una magdalena (a croissant or a muffin) ... you can ask in the same way as you asked for the espresso: ¿Me pones un cruasán? ¿Me pones una magdalena? Note that you can write croissant in Spanish, written as they write it in French (and indeed, as they write the word in English) or you might find it written as cruasán. Whether you find the word written like croissant or cruasán in Spanish, you pronounce the word like cruasán in Spanish.
El dinero is ‘money’. La cena is ‘dinner’, as in, the evening meal. Though dinero looks a lot like the English word ‘dinner’, I repeat, it means ‘money.
People eat dinner very late here, as you have been told many times before. You might pay with la tarjeta de débito or la tarjeta de crédito (‘debit card’ or ‘credit card’). If you’re just buying a coffee at a café, you’re likely to be asked for dinero en efectivo, ‘cash’, and paying with a card would be reserved for when eating at a sit-down place. In general, credit cards are less universally used here than in the United States, particularly outside of the big cities like Madrid and Barcelona.
In Spanish, we have individual verbs for the eating of meals, so
cenar = to eat dinner
almorzar = to eat lunch
desayunar = to eat breakfast ------ the word comes from des (dis) + ayunar (to fast), along similar lines to the word ‘breakfast’ in English.
Here are the nouns for the meals:
la cena = dinner
el almuerzo = lunch
el desayuno = breakfast
When you conjugate the verbs for the eating of meals (mentioned above) you will notice that some forms of the verbs are identical to the noun: ella/élle/él/Ud. cena & la cena; yo almuerzo & el almuerzo; yo desayuno & el desayuno. And as I have already stated, often the subject pronoun is omitted from the verb in Spanish, when the subject is already clear. When I say yo desayuno I could just as easily say desayuno and the yo is understood. SO you will notice that desayuno can mean ‘I eat breakfast’ as well as the noun ‘breakfast’. You simply have to deduce (based on context) whether the word desayuno is the verb form or the noun.
La moneda is ‘coin’ and el cambio is ‘change’ (it can mean change in the sense of a thing that has become different OR money exchange, just the word ‘change’ in English). El billete is a bill, like a dollar bill or a euro note or whatever the case may be. La cuenta is the check, like what you get at the end of the meal when you’re reading to pay. La cuenta, por favor, you can say. El cheque, which looks like the English word check, means check only as in the check that you receive when you get paid by your employer or the check your grandparents give you for Easter or a birthday!
You can (and indeed, are advised to) tell a server hasta luego (‘see you later’, literally ‘until later’) when you are leaving a café even if you are fairly certain you’ll never see them again. Adiós, ‘goodbye’, is a little bit more formal feeling, and may carry a greater deal of finality, like ‘farewell’ or ‘goodbye forever’. In Brazilian Portuguese, the equivalent adeus (pronounced more or less as if written in Spanish except with the stress on the second syllable -- Portuguese has different accent mark rules than in Spanish!!) pretty much always means ‘goodbye forever, we shall tragically never meet again’ and carries a very dramatic connotation in Brazilian Portuguese. In Iberian Portuguese (as in, Portuguese spoken in Portugal) adeus is a simple ‘bye’, without such drama (my Brazilian Portuguese teacher would say ‘people in Portugal say adeus because, well, they are very dramatic there’ haha). Até logo (‘ah-TAY LO-goo) is ‘see you later’ in Portuguese and also serves as the regular way to say ‘goodbye’ in Brazilian Portuguese.
Impress your Galician relatives-in-law by saying ata logo, which is ‘see you later’ in Galician. Hasta luego (Sp.) ~ Ata logo (Gal.) ~ Até logo (Port.) = See you later!
See you later and take care :) love to parents from gabu :)
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