I Want to learn Mexican spanish. Is it the same as South American spanish?
If you are referring to the accent field in the library answer is that all lessons marked as Mexican will have a Mexican accent. Lessons marked as South American may include speakers from several countries in South America, including Mexico.
If you are just getting started in Spanish I strongly recommend that you study lessons of interest regardless of accent. I doubt in most cases if you will be able to tell the difference. The main task should be to get used to the language and acquire a large vocabulary.
Good luck.
I started learning Spanish in mexico and have since traveled through most of Latin America and lived several years in Chile. There definitely are different idioms and slang in each of the countries but if you learn a wide vocabulary you’d have little difficulty most anywhere.
I have often told people that I think that if one had a choice the best place to learn might be in Chile because the Chileans have a habit of cutting short their words (they say they “eat” the endings) and they often also speak very rapidly. Because of this, if you are able to understand a Chilean talking, you can understand almost anyone anywhere.
Hi I’m spanish. The lenguage is the same ,but change some expressions and accent as well. I live in the south of Spain and I speak a dialect called andaluz , but when someone speaking the lenguage can understand different dialects.
My favorite Spanish is from the edges of South America, and anything from Spain. Buttery smooth, very nice. The consonants remain consonants but just glide in to the ear very nicely. Sweet.
1 Like
It can be different, but not to a degree where you wouldn’t understand other accents if you tried to stick with Mexican Spanish.
@jfeka: I had a Chilean professor friend in college tell me that Chilean Spanish would be amongst the worst types of Spanish to learn. Which is partly why I studied in Spain; the other reason was the program in Spain was the most advanced one we had at our university since it let us take a lot of classes at the university with natives. You are right in saying that if you understand a “hard” type of Spanish then you could more easily understand other variants.
However, I take an opposing view and think that more “standard” types (Most Colombian, Peruvian, Mexican, Northern Spanish from Spain) are better in the sense that more people will find your accent more easily understood. Caribbean Spanish (whether from the Caribbean, coastal Venezuelan/Colombian) or Andalusian Spanish are more of the “non-standard” ones and are beautiful to many people, but my very biased opinion says that more neutral accents are best for learners.
All types of Castilian are beautiful to me, but I prefer Mexican Spanish since it is the most common type spoken in the US. As long as they are pronouncing all the letters and don’t use Spanglish, then I am cool with it. (bika, lonchera, lonchar, la podadora no está trabajando, aplicar a una universidad, etc)
@cazasigiloso : I’d agree with your prof. that Chilean Spanish wouldn’t be the best variety to speak … just that it would be the best learning language in achieving the ability to listen to and understand it. Of all Latin America, I believe the clearest and easiest to understand was in Colombia, and so that would be the “best” accent to learn if you wanted to be most widely and easily understood. I have little experience with any Spanish from other areas outside of the Americas. I hope nothing I’ve said seems like I’m criticizing any specific form of Spanish, my only point was to express what I felt would serve a person best in being able to function using that language. Except for local idioms all Spanish is written, spelled and pronounced consistently around the globe not like, for example, US and British English.
There probably isn’t a right or wrong way, just preferences in whether you want to be put in the shallow end (More neutral Spanish) or deep end (More extreme Spanish) when learning.
Personally, I think it is better to get your feet wet before going into harder content. So I would listen to news reports before going to informal interviews, then eventually to comedians or very informal tv shows/films. In the same vein, I would learn an easier to understand type before progressing to the hardest types. But everybody has their different methods.
Spanish is extremely uniform, but keep in mind the Rio-Platense way of conjugating verbs is very different when they write very informally. “Tenés”, for example.
Most people say that Colombian Spanish is the most neutral but I never really got it. Outside of Mexican and Spanish Castilian, Colombian is probably the type of Spanish that I most am familiar with but I find it harder to understand than Mexican and European Spanish. I think that Peruvians speak very well, actually. And Spanish from Valladolid, LeĂłn, and Castilla la Mancha is very clear to my ears.
I agree about preferences and suspect that most people would tend to the easier route unless they gave it a lot of thought beforehand. As it is, it doesn’t appear that most people give a great deal of thought about it – they just do it and usually with whatever is most at hand, too. I’d be surprised if there were many people start out with the objective of becoming the most proficient, knowledgeable Spanish speaker possible.
Have you become able to differentiate between the different accents which people have? To some extent, I’ve noticed that Mexicans have the same sound in Spanish as they do when they speak English and that Argentines speak Spanish with about the same accent that Italians speak English.
This discussion has also brought to mind something I was told by one of my first teachers in Mexico. She said that there are several different accents within Mexico itself and pointed out, for example that the norteños sound very different from people in Mexico City.
Yeah, at the extremes it is very easy for me to recognize where a person is from. Like Andalusian Spanish (since I lived there), Chilean Spanish, Dominican Spanish. Colombian, Mexican, and Argentine Spanish are VERY obvious to me, too. The Venezuelan accent is kind of obvious, too.
What is very hard is distinguishing sub-accents like recognizing that somebody is from Mexico City, Peruvian vs Ecuadorian, a person from Valencia vs Santander, etc.
You may be able to distinguish the Chilangos from the northern Mexicans by word use, but maybe that is “cheating.” 
This is a song from Chilango Community in Mexico:
You need to hear it
That song is rather funny but it would likely be difficult for many people to understand, even if Spanish were their native tongue because it is so full of localized slang.
This might help
Google translate doesn’t even come close to doing justice to this.
I don’t understand this song . jfeka has reason . so much slang,but it’s funny .
One thing that I’ve found very clever about the Chilanga song is the repetition of words which begin with “C” and the use of the “Ch” sound.
It has made me wonder if this is in any way characteristic of the slang in the area where it is used.
Also I’m wondering if anyone knows of any other songs – in any language – which focus on specific sounds or combinations to the extent that this one has.