A Birthday Call on a Mobile Phone (Spanish A1)
Lucía wants to call her cousin Mateo in Mexico City on his birthday. The call fails in the metro, then works on the street. An A1 story about móvil and celular, the arroba sign, and the ñ key.
El teléfono móvil
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About this article
What you'll learn
querer and poder plus an infinitive, the present tense, phone words (pantalla, teclado, batería, mensaje), and móvil / celular, ordenador / computadora, arroba
Lucía leaves work and wants to call her cousin Mateo in Mexico City because it is his birthday. In the metro the call does not go through, so she sends a short message and saves the low battery. On the street they talk. Mateo says celular and computadora; Lucía says móvil and ordenador. The same words are used in Argentina and in a large part of Latin America. He sends a market photo and a new email address. Lucía tells her coworker Nuria that the @ sign is called arroba, an old weight measure, and that merchants used the symbol long before the internet. At home she types mañana with the ñ key, then turns the phone off. The birthday already has its call.
After reading
Article learning block
Phrases, words, grammar, and quick practice from this text.
Phrases for training
Add useful phrases to SRS or mark them as already known.
El teléfono móvil
newmobile phone
Teléfono móvil is the device for calls, messages and internet. In the text it also appears in the short form el móvil.
Core vocabulary, and the short form is what people actually say in Spain.
en el bolsillo
newin your pocket
En el bolsillo means in your pocket. Spanish uses the definite article el where English uses your.
The article instead of a possessive is a habit worth copying early.
llamar a tus amigos
newcall your friends
Llamar a alguien means to phone someone. The a in front of a person is obligatory in Spanish even though English has nothing there.
The text uses llamar twice, including the closing question ¿A quién llamas más?
escribir mensajes
newwrite messages
Escribir mensajes means to send text messages from your phone.
Useful for talking about chat apps and texting.
enviar fotos
newsend photos
Enviar fotos means to share pictures through your phone. Foto is short for fotografía and stays feminine: la foto, las fotos.
A short word that keeps the gender of the long one, which trips up most beginners.
usar internet
newuse the internet
Usar internet means to go online. Spanish normally leaves internet without an article: usar internet, buscar en internet.
The missing article is easy to get wrong if your language uses one.
todos los días
newevery day
Todos los días means every day. Note the plural: literally all the days.
A frequency phrase you can attach to any present-tense sentence.
Key words
Vocabulary that carries the school-day topic.
Screen
pantalla
screen
La pantalla is the screen of a phone, a computer or a cinema. The same word covers all three.
You cannot describe any device without it, and the word gives no clue from English.
Móvil or celular
celular
the cell phone
Spain says el móvil, most of Latin America says el celular. The same split runs through el ordenador (Spain) and la computadora (Latin America).
Whichever word you learn, half the Spanish-speaking world uses the other one, so you need to recognise both.
Keyboard
teclado
keyboard
El teclado is a keyboard; una tecla is a single key. A Spanish keyboard has its own key for ñ.
Without ñ you cannot write mañana, España or año, so the letter has its own key.
Funny
graciosos
funny
Gracioso means funny or amusing. Here it is masculine plural, graciosos, to match vídeos.
A false friend: it has nothing to do with gracious.
Arroba (@)
arroba
the at sign
Spanish calls @ la arroba. The word is far older than email: an arroba was an old unit of weight, and merchants used the symbol long before the internet.
You need this word to read any email address out loud in Spanish.
News
noticias
news
Noticias means news and is always plural in this sense: las noticias.
A word that has no singular in everyday use, unlike its English counterpart.
Grammar in context
Patterns from the text worth noticing after reading.
Adjective agreement
vídeos graciosos
funny videos
The adjective copies the gender and number of its noun: vídeos graciosos (masculine plural), noticias interesantes (feminine plural), un ordenador pequeño (masculine singular), la pantalla es pequeña (feminine singular). Adjectives ending in -e, like interesante, change for number only.
Agreement happens in almost every Spanish sentence, and this text shows four different endings.
Poder + infinitive
puedes llamar
you can call
Puedes plus an infinitive says what you are able to do: puedes llamar, puedes escribir, puedes usar. Watch the stem change: poder gives puedo, puedes, puede.
The text repeats the pattern four times, and the o to ue change hides the infinitive you already know.
Tener and the pronoun uno
tienen uno en el bolsillo
almost everyone has one
Tener is irregular: tengo, tienes, tiene, tienen. Uno stands in for teléfono móvil so the noun is not repeated.
Tener is one of the most used verbs in Spanish and not one of its present forms is regular.
Nos before the verb
Nos ayuda todos los días
it helps us every day
Nos ayuda means it helps us. In Spanish this pronoun goes in front of the verb, never after it: nos ayuda, la usamos.
Pronoun placement before the verb is one of the first word-order habits to build.
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