Well, my previous post was made before my trip to Argentina & Uruguay, and now I'm home.
Although before I left the US, my professor (a Spaniard) told us that there is a standard academic Spanish that is used in all universities in the Spanish-speaking world (and thus not to worry about voseo), as it turns out, they DID teach us to use
vos. It was actually not so difficult. The verb conjugations are easier (there aren't as many irregulars) than those for
tú. It's just a matter of remembering to use
tú when speaking with people from other Spanish-speaking countries (most of the hispano hablantes in this part of the country are not from Argentina or Uruguay...)
A note on a comment made in another thread about the use of
vos in Uruguay. I specifically looked into this. My friends who live in Montevideo use only
vos. One of these friends was telling me about her young nephew who watches too much television. She said that one of the things that bothers her most about his television watching is that he is picking up speaking habits that are not like "the way we speak". And her first example was that he says
tú and not
vos. It really upsets her to think that he's not speaking like someone from Montevideo...
But when I was in Rivera (which is out in the countryside about 500 km away from Montevideo, and is on the border of Brazil) I asked my friend there about using
vos, and she said that most people who are from Rivera do
not use
vos. Of course, they have a mix of Portuguese and Spanish (they have a name for it ... I think it's something like
Portuñol ... reminiscent of what we call
Spanglish) which is a different issue all together. But the only people in the area of Rivera (and maybe other rural parts of Uruguay?) who use
vos are those people who have moved there from Montevideo or Argentina...
Here are a few pics that I snapped in Argentina that use
vos in their signage/advertising. The first two are obviously for iPhone and Burger King. The last is from my favorite cafe in Buenos Aires, Cafe Martinez.
Now I've got myself going.
The moderators will probably be all over these back-to-back-to-back posts ... sorry!
Anyway - here are more links about the use of voseo:
http://www.cortland.edu/flteach/wksp/voseo/voseo.htm
http://eldesaguaderorevista.blogspot...-el-tuteo.html
http://www.larousse.com.ar/entretene...erse-c12.shtml
http://www.cortland.edu/flteach/wksp...elvoseo-TM.htm
And some images I've found online. (Although I didn't see it myself, they say that sometimes in Uruguay,
tú is used as the pronoun with the verb conjugated for
vos...)
And some more images...