"Preguntas Fáciles" Videos on YouTube

[Bobbert]

I have been enjoying a YouTube series from Argentina called, “Preguntas Fáciles.” It’s a great YouTube series that has exposed me to the country’s unique Spanish. I've been enjoying the videos the last couple of months and can already understand Argentinian Spanish much better, including the accent, the use of the voseo, and all of its fun expressions and word choices.

The videos are conducted by Tomi Munaretto, who was a Crónica TV journalist that got fired for making comments on air about his low income and employment status. However, his firing gave him a boost to social media fame. He went from about 20,000 TV followers to over 1 million on TicToc and YouTube and the ability to create his own content.

Tomi has two types of content. One is the documentaries he makes while traveling the world, and the other is “Preguntas Fácilies,” where he goes out to the “man in the street” and asks and answers questions for money and/or prizes about general knowledge subjects. I’m hooked on “Preguntas Fácilies.” For me it’s almost like being back in primary and/or middle school, but in Spanish. I have to be able to understand the question in order to try to answer it, so I get a review of what I learned or didn’t learn in school many years ago, exposure to hearing the voseo and Argentinian slang, and I learn tons of new vocabulary in one single video of less than 30 minutes long. (Tomi has long videos too, but for learning purposes, I do best with the videos that are under 30 minutes that involve the local people in the streets of Buenos Aires.)

Tomi is entertaining and high energy, but he is a very fast talker and so are the participants. Therefore, I reduce the video speed to 75 and use the Spanish closed captions, even though they are auto-generated and not very accurate.

Here is a link to one of his recent YouTube “Preguntas Fáciles” that is under 30 minutes. Give it a try; you too may get hooked! And best of all, we have AleCcowaN on this site who can help us with any specific Argentinian Spanish questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvFncYpvHYM

[aleCcowaN]

I'll be glad to help.

I didn't know about this person and this program, but I followed the link and found it to be very entertaining. Family oriented, pero con onda, ¿viste?

Mid-class language level and a variety of local accents. This Tomi guy speaks like the typical non-ISER locutor. Until the early 90's, the ISER was the institution were all the aspiring locutores had to study and train in orden to work as such. With that, some level of uniformity in vocabulary and accent was reached throughout the whole country.

In the last 30+ years the playfield was opened and you can hear now all kind of local accents in media. Anyway Tomi's accent allways seem to fall back to the old ISER style even though his vocabulary frequently goes into the colloquial and even slang, and comes back.

Nice resource. About the speed, I found a speed of 80 or 85% better matches the real speed of daily speech, though some sounds seem mispronounced, like some over trilled r's. The faster pace is a consequence del "que no decaiga", a pressure to keep momentum in variety shows and game shows.

[Bobbert]

Because of the speed of the speech I could be hearing incorrectly, but one thing I'm noticing while watching “Preguntas Fáciles” videos is that the announcer, Tomi Munaretto, doesn’t seem to use a voseo conjugation when saying something that requires the present subjunctive.

For example, he might say:

Quiero que me digas......

instead of

Quiero que me digás......

Espero que disfrutes......

instead of

Expero que disfrutés......

Quiero que me recomiendes un......

instead of

Quiero que me recomendés un......

I noticed this because I have heard Central Americans speak to each other, and the people who are from those countries that use the voseo seem to follow though with a pure voseo conjugation for the present subjunctive; they don’t use a tuteo conjugation for the second person present subjunctive.

Is using the tuteo conjugation/pronunciation for the second person present subjunctive common in all of Argentina or is this something that is only regional? Or, of course, I could be noticing this incorrectly and am making a wrong assumption.

[aleCcowaN]

Because the Academia Argentina de Letras asked it, the voseo was included in RAE's conjugations, but only what had literary "pedigree", that is, imperative (comé) and present simple (comés).

Much of the rest is used colloquially, mainly present subjunctive (comás) and past simple (comistes). Some tenses are identical in both tú and vos, and in some tenses voseo has dissapeared, like future.

I was completely mesmerized when a Chilean fellow pointed to me an example from a book called "Cartas que nunca llegaron". The wife of Mariano Moreno, one of our founding fathers, writes to her husband sent to England, not knowing she has become a widow, and says "espero que no me habrés cambiado por una inglesa", voseo of future used as a conjecture.

For instance, ir is my style to say "no molestes" and, if they keep coming at me, change it to "te digo que no me molestés" in a harsh tone. A futher escalation translates into a change in vocabulary

There is a post of mine this year in a thread where I write all about voseo. It was started by our fellow forum member, an elderly gentleman from the USA.

[Bobbert]

Thank you, aleCcowaN. I will search for that post.

[aleCcowaN]

This is the thread I mentioned

https://forums.tomisimo.org/showthread.php?t=29003

[Bobbert]

Thank you, aleCcowaN.