Reason 2 to leave Santo Domingo: Don’t even try to understand their ‘Spanish’

Even native speakers – No matter if from Spain, Latin America or elsewhere – denounce the Dominican Spanish as incomprehensible chaos of words at light speed.

I was talking to a Canadian expat in Tubagua. He told me, that it took him about 7 (!) years to be fully capable of understanding, joining and participating in a group conversation of Dominican natives.

Although he was living in the Dominican highlands and maybe not the youngest anymore, the same holds true of course in Santo Domingo. You will face some difficulties to integrate yourself into the Dominican culture in Santo Domingo. People there won’t help you understand them. You have to – or won’t.

It simply demotivates you as an expat to ‘have to’ talk to Dominicans. Of course, your Spanish (if not being a native speaker) isn’t perfect and you make mistakes. But Dominicans…

• don’t try to integrate you in their conversations (or expect you understand everything)
• talk too fast
• chatter indistinctly, shorten sentences, swallow words
• ignore grammar rules. Respectively created their own logic.
• they don’t pronounce the ‘R’ (which is imo the strongest symbol of the Spanish language) and instead…
• replace it with an ‘L’

Wanna have a bite of Dominicans finest piece of talking?

My amol, comotuta? Qué lo qué, to’o bien? Montame!

Dominican chatter on the street

Only Dominicans themselves, other Spanish native speakers who are extremely concentrated and non-native speakers with a lot of phantasy or practice will understand this quotation entirely. All this makes you doubt your own Spanish.

Was it so wrong, what I learned before in the Spanish course and applied multiply times in other countries?

Next page: You’ll be always the gringo, no matter what