Andalusia: the same language is not the same language
My Spanish has an address. It was built over six years in Colombia, and it carries Bogotá in the vowels and the Caribbean coast in the shortcuts. I had never really tested it anywhere else.
Then I travelled through Andalusia, and the test happened in the first café. Nobody failed to understand me — they understood me perfectly. But every sentence I said announced where I had learned it, and every sentence they said arrived faster than I expected.
The first adjustment was vosotros. Latin America does not use it; Spain uses it constantly, and hearing a form you have never once needed is a strange feeling. You understand it long before you can produce it.
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