Spanish words on your Mexican or Spanish or South American restaurant menu and in the restaurant

 I have been religiously learning Spanish words prior to y next trip to a Spanish speaking country, Spain. Spanish is also useful for South America as well as central America, nd is increasingly used in the USA. I practise on Duolingo every day. I also have Berlitz's earworms. Here are some handy words and phrases>

Spanish - English

agua - water

bebidas - drinks

blanco - white

botella - bottle (Double l pronounced like y)

cerveza - beer

cuchara - spoon (starts cu like cup shape)

dua - two (like duo)

menu - menu

mesa - table

por favor - please

rosado - rose wine

sal - salt

te - you singular

tinto - red wine (think of tinted)

vaso - glass (my memory aid is glas vase)

vino - wine

English - Spanish

beer - cerveza

bottle - botella

drink/drinks - la babida (las) bebidas

fork - 

glass - vaso

knife - c

menu - menu

my - mi

please - por favor

red wine - vino tinto (adjective second)

rose wine - rosado

salt - sal

Spoon - cuchara

table - mesa

two - dua

white - blanco

wine - vino

waiter -

water - agua

you (singular) - te

Quiz

Questions

Give the Spanish for

1 table

2 knife

3 fork 

4 spoon

5 two

6 wine

7 water

8 waiter

9

10

Answers

1 mesa

2

3

4 cuchara

5

6 vino

7 dua

8 agua

9

10

Useful Websites

duolingo.com

Wikivoyage phrasebook

What Service do you expect in restaurants? Free water? Water glasses? Cutlery and cup handles correctly placed?

Table Laying

 Is it too much to expect the server in a restaurant to see that the water glass is placed top right of the table mat?

Is it too much to expect the knife to be placed on the right and the fork on the left?

Is it too much to expect the handle of the tea cup or coffee cup to be placed on the right of the cup? I knew all this at the age of ten.

Is it too much to expect that if we are being charged ten per cent in a restaurant we expect service. We expect a glass of water for free.

We want the glass placed top right. We expect cutlery in the correct place, not slung down.

We expect cup handles where we can reach for them without playing hunt the handle. We don't expect to spend five minutes relaying the whole table whilst trying to hold a conversation, greeting our dinner guests, hosts, family or friends. If I want to do table laying I stay home.

More Vital Spanish Words for use in restaurants - including the bill!

English
a table napkin

- a glass

- a fork

- a knife

- a spoons

sorry

the bill -

please - por favor

it's nothing/you're welcome - de nada

Don't mention it - No lo menciones (different word order; stick to de nada)

The bill, please (work this out from the other words given)

Spanish
una servilleta (a or one serviette, to use the French word)

- un vaso (not a vase but a vase shaped glass)


- un tenedor

- un cuchillo

- unas cucharas


lo siento


la factura -

Grammar Lesson
English sentence structure is nearly always subject verb object (SVO for short).
In Spanish you can see from the examples above that the object it comes at the start or middle and the verb at the end.

About The Author

Angela Lansbury is a travel writer and photographer, blogger, author of 20 books including an ebook on Improve Your English, from Amazon, and teacher of English and Business English and other languages to individuals, colleges and companies. For more information on learning languages see the previous posts. For information on sites to see in Spain and Portugal see the next post. Please bookmark your favourite posts and share the links with your family, friends and colleagues.

Life Hacks: How to Open a Can Of Food Without Openers in an Emergency, and a wine bottle with t a corkscrew and tell Irish Jokes

The comments are hilarious.

When would you have a can and no can opener?

Your budget allows for buying a can of tinned food from a nearby shop but not a can opener.

Hotel
When travelling to a hotel where you might arrive after the restaurant has closed. If you are lucky you may be in a five star hotel which has 24 hour room service. But if its late and you are tired you don't want to wait 30 minutes whilst they cook up a meal. You may also be unwilling to pay their inflated prices and risk getting spicy food or food not meeting your diet requirements.

Moving House And/Or Overseas
When moving house which may be overseas and your kitchenware will take 3 weeks to arrive.

When popping down to a corner shop when you are in a guest house and the corner shop sells cheap cutlery but no can openers.

Hotel
You are in a hotel and have a can of food. The hotel has cutlery but not tin openers.

Emergency Bag
In Japan which is prone to earthquakes I am told everybody keeps an emergency bag by the front door to grab when they rush out in an emergency.

Swiss Army Knife
We used to travel with a Swiss army knife which includes a can opener.

Then planes started banning knives.The first time we lost a knife. The second time we were carrying a stamped self addressed envelope just in case we accidentally took something we needed to post home. Sure enough we did. The Swiss army knife still in the suitcase from the last trip by train within the country and the trips in the car.

We were able to go back through security and post it and then come back through security.

Granny's Tips
I plan to be the perfect President of the club and the grand granny who has an answer for every question. Here's one of those 'I wish I had known this earlier' moments. How to open a can without a can opener. Holding a meeting and buying a can of fish to provide a quick nutritious protein meal. Arrive at a hotel after the restaurant has closed. I wish I had known this when i moved house and unpacked the tins of food but a half hour wait before we found the can opener.
Another tip - always keep an old knife, for and spoon in the bottom drawer of your kitchen. Then you have something to hand out when your spouse or handyman (or woman or person) asks do you have a knife, or fork or spoon, without damaging your best crockery.

Open Champagne And to go with the food, several, seven, ways to open a bottle of wine or Champagne without a corkscrew!

Tell Jokes Whilst you are waiting for somebody else to risk damaging their body or their clothes, here are some Irish jokes:
An Irishman take his car into a garage. The mechanic says, 'I'll put my head in here and try to fix. You tell me if the indicator is working or not.
The customer replies, 'it's working, it's not working; its working; its not working.'

https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/craic/irish-jokes-best

Useful Websites
https://vinepair.com/articles/7-ways-to-open-a-bottle-of-wine-without-a-corkscrew/

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

London Versus Las Vegas Dessert Place Setting

This is Las Vegas, USA. The Americans do everything differently.

In the UK everything has its own logic.
In the UK the knife blade would be facing towards the plate, ready for use. To me the knife blade out looks like you are about to stab the person on your right, or maybe the waiter.

Dessert spoon 
At the start of the meal, the dessert spoon with its oval bowl is above (ie beyond) the top of the plate with the handle on the right.. The dessert fork, used for holding down the food or pushing food onto the spoon, faces the other way because you will be holding it in your left hand.

In a smart restaurant, after removing the previous course, ready for dessert, the waiter might move the dessert fork and spoon down with the fork on the left and the spoon on the right.

If you are British you will enjoy travelling to the USA and Las Vegas. Like it or loathe it.
If you are American you will enjoy visiting Britain.
If you are neither, you will enjoy visiting both and seeing how they differ.

Useful Websites
visitbritain.com
visittheusa.com.uk

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share your favourite posts.

Fruit is Fruit - and Five More Easy Romanian Words For Food

Problem
How do you remember them?

Answer
Look for similar letters.

English - Romanian
and - si (note cedilla or comma shape which should be under the s converts the sound to sh)
banana - banana
coffee - c a f e a
fruit - f r u c t (plural is f r u c t e )
knife - c u t i t (looks like cut it!)
with - cu (short version of the Latin word for with, cum as in magna cum l a u d a an academic term meaning with great honour)

Romanian - English
banana - banana
c a f e a - coffee
cu - with
c u t i t - knife (spell checker preferred cutie)
f r u c t - fruit

For more see www.D u o l i n g o .com (no spaces)
www.romaniatourism.com
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and speaker and teacher of English and learner of languages such as Romanian.
I have several more posts on Romanian, French, Italian, German, Hebrew, Greek and other languages. Please share posts.

How to remember German words for food

German words are similar to English. German for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert? Easy. the first step in learning a word is to recognise the German, when you want to translate from German to English. The second step is to recall the German when you want to translate from English to German.

Breakfast - das Frühstück

How do you remember it is das?
BreakfAst - dAs Frühstück - Remember the capital letter for the noun in German.

The mid-day meal is Mittagessen - (mid day eat) - remember the capital letter for the noun in German

Evening meal - Abendessen - think evening or after eat

Don't muddle it up with dessert which is
dessert - Nachtisch (after table - what goes on the table afterwards, sounds like after dish). Remember the capital letter for German nouns.

I am now working on memory aids for other words used at meal times.

Starter/appetiser
The before the meal food.

Main course
The high point of the meal.

butter
The german word starts with b and looks similar.

beans
The German word starts with b

garlic - like a small knob

mushrooms -

mustard - contains the letter n

onions like a double bell

tasty starts with s like sip or l like lip smacking good

pungent

knife
Don't mess around with a knife said the wife. Messe is knife.

spoon - German word starts with l like lift. Use your spoon to lift your soup.

like and make

make
I was muddling up making and liking. M a c h e n and Magen. (I had to insert spaces because spell check instantly changed the German word to the English word machine.)
The German for make has a ch in the middle. A k is similar to the ch in Scottish loch.

However, the German for like has a g in the middle. Remember 'I think it's magic' - 'I love it' or 'I like it'.

cook
I was mixing up cook and cake. The word for cake ended with n - cooking done and here are cakes.

cake

recipe
I was mixing up recipe and receipt. I am still working on a memory aid.

receipt


Angela Lansbury, author, travel writer and photographer, and English teacher.

Russian words for knife and fork - memory aids

I am learning four languages this year through duo lingo free website, Spanish and Italian and German and Russian, trying to do one lesson a day of each.  I tend to do German first and Russian last as it's hardest because the alphabet is different. I am now up to what they call 30% fluent in German which I suppose means I have reached nearly one third (33 and a third per cent) of the way through their first, basic course.  I am only slightly behind in Russian, but now that I am reaching a slightly harder stage, or maybe losing my initial enthusiasm, I am having to re-do the lessons.

Some of the earlier words in Russian were easy and similar to English. Maybe they put the easy words first. Sestr is sister. Brat is brother - and I remembered 'My brother is a brat'.

Knife is nozh. (That's using the phonetic Russian, the way it sounds, not the Russian alphabet - which is another story.) At the moment I am thinking and speaking to you about the way of remembering the word, regardless of how you write it in the Russian alphabet. Once you know what it sounds like, it's easier to translate into the other alphabet. The Duolingo site is starting to put the words in Russian at the opening page which is off-putting as annoyingly they don't put the phonetic translation underneath.

Knife - Nozh
I use my knife to cut my food to nosh. N - 0 - Z - H. The only change is that the s becomes a Z. They almost sound the same.

Fork - vilka
The i l k have three uprights like the tines of a three prong fork. K at the end of the word fork, fork, villa, f and V are similar sounds.  f-v. or remember as if you are German, I vill have a fork-a. Vilka.

When you do the exercise on Duolingo, the words for knife and fork keep coming up again and again. You just need some way of remembering which of the two is which.

Angela Lansbury, author, photojournalist, travel writer and photographer, English teacher (O level, A level, English as a second language, English as a foreign Language) CVs, websites and package translation into English and soon to be languages teacher.

Spanish words - how to remember them

Many Spanish words have similar spelling to English words.

blanca - white, white as a sheet of blank paper (bleach to make white)

knife - el cuchillo-  the knife (C U chillo - CU tting - a chilling thought)

La piscina - swimming pool - same letters as the French piscine, or the fish swimming in water zodiac sign Pisces meaning fish piScINa SwImming or SwimmINg - the m and n are quite close in sound and close in the alphabet - It is a sin to swim in the Piscina if you are a Pisces (or something ruder - don't p..s in the piscina - that's a bad scene and should not be seen
una sartén - a frying pan (think of a sauté pan)
las sillas - the chairs (think of the seats, letter S, sound see)
la ventana - the window (which gives ventilation)

You can use these memory aids to learn or teach Spanish if your first language is English, also to teach English to people whose first language is Spanish.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, English teacher and tutor.