Un Café en Palermo, Buenos Aires
Two old friends catch up over coffee in a Buenos Aires café, voseo and lunfardo included, the way Argentines actually talk.
Reinforces vocabulary from Argentine Spanish — A Survival Guide.
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The Scene
Two old friends reconnect over coffee in Palermo, one of Buenos Aires’s most popular neighborhoods, in a conversation built almost entirely on voseo verb forms and the lunfardo slang that defines everyday Rioplatense Spanish — a deliberate contrast to the Spain-Spanish readers elsewhere in this collection.
Vocabulary Highlights
- ¿cómo andás? — the voseo equivalent of “¿cómo estás?”, using the characteristic vos verb form.
- nomás — a light filler word roughly meaning “just” or “only,” extremely common in Argentine speech.
- quilombo — a mess or a chaotic situation, one of the most-used words in everyday Argentine Spanish.
- ¿qué onda? — “what’s up / what’s the story,” an all-purpose casual question.
- la guita — money, the everyday Argentine word in place of “dinero.”
- cómo viene la mano — “how things are shaping up,” a set idiom for an uncertain but hopeful outlook.
For more on the sh-sound, voseo, and Argentina’s distinctive vocabulary, see our full Argentine Spanish guide.
This scene only scratches the surface — the full chapter is in Daily Life and Culture, part of our Speak Spanish Like a Native book series.