Nde
Guaraní for "you" — and the word Paraguayans put at the front of a sentence to grab you, scold you or exclaim.
Related lesson: Paraguayan Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
¡Nde! Mirá lo que hiciste.
Hey! Look what you've done.
Nde vyro, te dije que no toques eso.
You daft thing, I told you not to touch that.
¡Nderakore! Casi nos chocamos.
Bloody hell! We nearly crashed.
What It Actually Means
Nde is Guaraní’s second-person singular — “you” as a pronoun, “your” as a possessive — and it has walked wholesale into Paraguayan Spanish as a vocative. Thrown at the start of a phrase it means roughly “hey, you”; placed in front of an adjective it builds the country’s favourite insult template. It is not Spanish, it is not translated, and it is used by people who would tell you they were speaking Spanish at the time.
Where It Comes From
Straight from the Guaraní pronoun set: che (I, my), nde (you, your), ha’e (he, she). In Guaraní proper it behaves like a possessive too — nde róga is “your house” — and it triggers the sound changes Guaraní grammar requires. Its first-person partner che is the same word linguists put forward as one possible source of Argentina’s che, which is why the two countries occasionally squabble over a syllable.
How Natives Use It
Constantly, informally, at the head of the phrase. The productive pattern is nde + Guaraní adjective: nde vyro (you fool), nde tavy (you idiot), nde japu (you liar), nde kaigue (you lazy thing). Between friends these are closer to teasing than to abuse. Alone, ¡nde! is simply how you stop someone doing something stupid from across a room.
Common Pitfall
It is second person and only second person — you cannot use nde to talk about somebody, only to them. And treat nderakore with care: it functions today as a general-purpose “blimey”, but its literal source is an anatomical phrase that is decidedly crude, and older or more formal listeners still hear that in it. Safe among friends, best avoided at your partner’s family lunch.