You may have heard of Spanish referred to as a Romance language, but what does that actually mean? It’s nothing to do with romance with a small r in the sense of being romantic (though the word has the same root, and many do think that Spanish does sound very romantic!), but rather it derives from Roman – the Romance languages are those that have their origins in the spoken Latin of Roman times.

The Romance languages evolved between the 6th and 9th centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. They include French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Romansch (spoken in parts of Switzerland), but by far the most widely-spoken of the Romance languages is Spanish, with an estimated 410 million native speakers worldwide. English is not a Romance language because, while it does have many words derived from Latin, it is more heavily influenced by Northern European languages, and as such is classed as Germanic. That doesn’t mean, however, that you won’t recognise a single word as a beginner in Spanish. They may belong to different families but our two languages share as many as 40% of words from the same root and with similar meanings – called cognates – which makes learning Spanish much easier than tackling a completely unrelated language. They also form sentences in much the same way.

Here at Lingua Clinic, a private tutor will guide you every step of the way through your Spanish journey. We offer Spanish tuition in London in several different formats. You can choose private, group or intensive lessons, depending on your personal preferences and learning objectives. We cater for all levels of learners and can fit around your busy schedule. So say ¡Feliz año nuevo! and make Spanish your resolution for 2015.

New Year’s Eve (Nochevieja or Fin de Año) is a time for family celebrations, usually consisting of a meal of shrimps or prawns and lamb or capon. Since 1962 the countdown to midnight has been broadcast on national TV from the clock on the Casa de Correos building in Puerta del Sol Square in Madrid where many people gather to see in the New Year in Spain’s equivalent of the UK’s broadcast from Big Ben.

For just over a century it has been customary to eat a single grape on each chime of the midnight bells. This tradition, known as Las doce uvas de la suerte (The 12 grapes of luck) was actually begun in the early 20th century by vine growers to dispose of a particularly good harvest, but superstition now has it that the practice will lead to a prosperous New Year – as will the wearing of new red underwear on New Year’s Eve. After the bells, fireworks, greetings of “¡Feliz Año Nuevo!” and toasts ensue and many revellers then go on to New Year parties (cotillones de nochevieja) which can last until morning.

The town of Bérchules, on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada in the La Alpujarra region, has a rather unusual tradition. Back in 1994, the town suffered a power outage which disrupted the usual New Year’s celebrations. Not to be deprived, the locals instead held their party on the first weekend in August. New Year’s Eve in August has since become quite a tourist attraction, with visitors swelling the small town’s population of only 800 to around 10,000.

If learning or improving your existing Spanish is one of your New Year’s resolutions, get in touch to arrange Spanish tuition in your home or office throughout the London area.

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you may already know that the Christmas season in Spain starts on 8 December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, or Inmaculada Concepcion. It might be a little early yet to wish people a happy Christmas (Feliz Navidad) but it’s never too early (or late!) to try your hand at the Spanish language. So, as we enter the festive season here are some ideas and vocabulary for you to try out.

Spaniards listen to Christmas carols (villanciscos) and often sing them at family gatherings, particularly when children are present. You would recognise the melodies of some carols and songs which are also popular in Spain, such as Silent Night (Noche de Paz), O Come All Ye Faithful (Adestes Fideles) and Jingle Bells (Cascabel), and of course Spain has many traditional Christmas songs of its own besides these. Music is a great aid to language learning, so why not download some of these carols and get to know the lyrics?

Christmas is, of course, also a time for eating and drinking with family and friends. If you like cooking, you could try your hand at making a selection of the foods eaten at the traditional Spanish family feast on Christmas Eve (La Noche Buena), or if you prefer you could bake a Christmas cake (la tarta de Reyes) or a Christmas pudding (el pudin de Navidad). Refer to your dictionary if you need to but do follow the original Spanish recipes as this is a great way to reinforce and grow your vocabulary of foodstuffs, and the tasty treats you will enjoy are an added bonus!

For a more in-depth understanding of the language, join our Private Spanish lessons, provided at your workplace or home throughout the London area.

In the last of our series of profiles on fashion designers from the Spanish-speaking world we look at Adolfo Dominguez, or Adolfo Domínguez Fernández to use the Spanish naming custom where, if you remember, Dominguez is the paternal surname and Fernández the maternal one.

Dominguez was born in May 1950 in the city of Ourense, in the Galicia region of Northern Spain. His father ran a fashion boutique in the city which the young Adolfo took over in the early 1970s and where he first started to produce his own designs. Fast forward a decade and Dominguez was ready to take his urban designs further afield. He showed his collection in Madrid in 1981 and went on to open his own store there and subsequently to build a successful chain of stores across Spain and the world. His first collection was launched under the tagline “La arruga es bella” meaning “Creases are beautiful”, a fitting description for his tailored designs from natural fabrics in loose-fitting styles.

Dominguez is as much known for his marketing strategy as for his clothing range. He made the early decision not to take his range into multi-brand retailers, instead setting up his own sophisticated distribution system to deliver his designs straight to the buyers via his own stores, franchises and more recently online. In 1997, in the ultimate mark of success for any business, Dominguez’ company was floated on the Stock Exchange.

To learn more of the vocabulary of fashion and business, enrol on one of our Spanish courses, available throughout the London area at a time to suit your busy schedule.

A relative newcomer on the fashion scene compared to some of the other designers we have profiled recently, Silvia Tcherassi has  none the less become one of the most influential contemporary Hispanic designers in her 15 years in the industry with her eclectic designs which have been described as “having the delicateness of a ballet dancer, while at the same time, the strength of a rock star”.

She was born in 1970 in Colombia and is based in Miami. Her meteoric rise to the top of the fashion world has seen her become a household name in Latin America and pick up several prestigious awards along the way including the title of “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”, an honour awarded by the French government to those who have made significant contributions to the arts or literature.

Tcherassi is renowned for her prêt-à-porter range and her stunning accessories, but in 2007 she branched out into the design of spaces with the launch of her Tcherassi Hotel Collection, the first of which is a renovated colonial mansion in Cartagena de Indias in her native Colombia.

Her activities go beyond design. She is also spokesperson for UNICEF’s “More Arts, Less Mines” campaign and in 2010 she published her first book, entitled “Elegancia sin Esfuerzo” (Effortless Elegance) in which she shares her advice on how to dress stylishly. If you are taking Spanish lessons, then you might like to add it to your reading list and see how much you are able to understand.

When it comes to fashion designers from the Spanish-speaking world, there can be few names that are better known than that of Carolina Herrera. Renowned for her personal style, she was named on the International Best Dressed list back in 1972 and inducted to its Hall of Fame in 1980. Her designs have been worn by First Ladies of the United States, of which she became a naturalised citizen in 2009, and her gowns have graced many a red carpet on actresses such as Renée Zellweger, Cameron Diaz and Nicole Kidman, and Colombian singer Shakira.

Born María Carolina Josefina Pacanins y Niño on January 8, 1939, in the Venezuelan capital Caracas, her father was Guillermo Pacanins Acevedo, a former governor of the city, and her mother was María Cristina Niño Passios. She was introduced to the world of fashion at an early age by her socialite grandmother who took her to shows by Balenciaga – mentor of Oscar de la Renta if you recall from our blog a couple of weeks ago – and bought her outfits by Dior and Lanvin.

Later, she rubbed shoulders with the likes of Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol at Studio 54 in the heyday of the New York nightclub and in 1981 started her own clothing line at the suggestion of the then Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, Diana Vreeland. She did so, and enjoyed almost immediate success. Her chic and feminine designs have won her many devotees since then, and her place in the annals of fashion history seems assured.

Do you know your way around the vocabulary of clothing in Spanish? If you want to learn your suits from your sweatpants or your cotton from your corduroy, our Spanish courses in London can help you with this and much more.

What’s in a name? Well in fashion circles, the name Prada is one of the most well known, but do not be confused with the illustrious Italian fashion house; the subject of our blog this week is Spanish fashion designer Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada. Born in 1960, she is also a high-ranking member of the Spanish nobility: one of the Grandees of Spain (Grandes de España), Marchioness of Castelldosrius and Baroness of Santa Pau.

She burst onto the fashion scene in 1981 when she launched her first women’s collection with a show in Madrid and went on to enjoy commercial success after partnering with the Spanish department store chain El Corte Inglés – the 4th-largest of its kind in Europe. She then took her colourful designs and trademark heart motifs to fashion shows around the world and extended her lines to include men’s and children’s collections as well as accessories, a household range, perfumes and more.

Agatha was one of the promoters of La Movida Madrileña, an artistic and cultural movement which emerged during the Spanish transition after the death of General Franco. It was a movement which encouraged freedom of expression and the breaking of taboos which had been imposed by the Franco regime. The Movida Madrileña was also credited with bringing about some changes to in the Spanish language; it brought the street dialects Pasota and Cheli – associated with the youth culture of Madrid in the early 1980s – into the open. Cheli expanded so rapidly during this period that several of its words were accepted by the Royal Spanish Academy, so you may pick up a few of them during our Spanish courses in London.

This week we continue our look at Spanish influence on the world of designer fashion. Since 1997, the Custo Barcelona label has been a regular at New York Fashion Week and on catwalks around the world. The man behind the brand is Custo Dalmau, born Ángel Custodio Dalmau Salmón in Tremp, Lleida, Catalonia, in 1959.

Custo grew up in Barcelona and studied architecture, which may seem an unusual subject for a fashion designer, but it would go on to help inspire the complex graphic prints and textured textiles for which his label is so renowned. His brother David undertook a less surprising course of study in the Arts and together the two formed the Custo Line label in 1980. They started out by producing printed T-shirts which were an expression of their interest in graphic design and quickly found success with their unique creations – and so the Custo signature was born. Custo designs have since gone on to feature in hugely successful TV series such as Friends and Sex and the City and are worn by celebrities including Julia Roberts, Antonio Banderas and Charlize Theron.

Custo has appeared on numerous Spanish language TV shows and has done much in his years in the forefront of the fashion world to promote Spain and his local area in particular. He was recently awarded the prize for ‘Lo emprenedor’ (The Entrepreneur) by the Lleida province tourist board in recognition of his services in raising awareness of the area around the world.

The fashion world last week mourned the loss of Oscar de la Renta, one of the best known designers of the Spanish-speaking world,  who died on 20 October at the age of 82 after a long battle with cancer.

He was born in 1932 in the Dominican Republic, leaving at the age of 18 to study painting in Madrid. To earn some extra money, he sketched clothes for newspapers and fashion houses and thus developed a love of fashion design. His sketches soon drew media attention and led to an apprenticeship with celebrated couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga.

The rest, as they say, is history. He was catapulted to worldwide acclaim in the 1960s when his designs were favoured by then first lady Jackie Kennedy, and he continued to dress first ladies of the United States right up to Michelle Obama. His designs have also adorned various Hollywood A-listers, and his final commission was to design Amal Alamuddin’s gown for her recent wedding to George Clooney.

De la Rentareceived many accolades, and not only for his contribution to the fashion industry. He received the highest honour of the Dominican Republic, the Order of Merit of Duarte, Sánchez and Mella, and served as the country’s Ambassador-at-Large; he was awarded France’s Légiond’honneur; King Juan Carlos of Spain conferred upon him the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts (Medalla de Oro al mérito en las Bellas Artes) and La Gran Cruz de la Orden del Mérito Civil (The Order of Civil Merit), and he also served as chairman of the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, which promotes Spanish tuition in the US as well as other aspects of Spanish language and culture.

Oscar de la Rentawill be immortalised by his designs and remembered for his philanthropic work. He will be sadly missed.

Every language has its variations from region to region – English being perhaps one of the prime examples with vastly differing accents up and down the British Isles and indeed around the world. Spanish too, is spoken in many countries and, despite the work of the Royal Spanish Academy to standardise the language, it has its own variations from one country to the next. Nowhere are these differences more marked than in Argentina.

In a previous blog, we looked at the use of Vos in Argentina but there are other significant differences in the way Argentinians speak which set them apart from their Spanish counterparts and even their Latin American neighbours.

The most notable of these differences is the way the ‘y’ sound is pronounced. If you’ve taken a Spanish language course (or even if you haven’t!) you probably already know that usually this sounds like the English letter ‘e’. So the word yo (meaning ‘I’) sounds like ‘ee-oh’. The double L (as in paella or tortilla) also has the same sound in most Spanish-speaking countries. Not so in Argentina, where it has a ‘sh’ sound, so yo becomes ‘sho-oh’, lluvia (meaning rain) instead of the usual pronunciation of ‘ee-uh-via’ becomes ‘sh-uh-via’ and so on.

Argentinian Spanish lacks the lisp of mainland Spain, tends to be spoken at a faster pace and has lots of slang words. One of the most common you will hear is ‘Che’ (as in Guevara – so nicknamed because he was born in Argentina) which means something like ‘hey’, but there are lots of other words which are particular to Argentina. Want to order a beer? Don’t ask for cerveza but birra. If you intend to visit Argentina and practise your Spanish, listen carefully for the differences!