Now, I can’t produce it on my own but it’s very understandable when someone uses it with me. And I continue to use the ustedes form. You could look at this as laziness, but I don’t. I haven’t learned to vosotros form because really I don’t have to. I’d rather learn something else more useful.

Here is my whole take on the issue: http://www.theselva.com/should-i-learn-vosotros/

Comfort in the simplest way leads to the shrinking of the brain…

As a self-teacher, I’m always on the look out for advice, even though I know in the end it comes down to practising the 4 language skills (leer, escuchar, habar, escribir) and time.

Gracias

I’m sorry, but I consider vosotros as part of the standard, even if it’s not used in the Americas.

Same with vos, it’s part of the standard, there’s only one Spanish language. In Spain, vos is reserved for royalty, extremely formal situations and literature. Everybody knows how to conjugate it, or at least, recognize its conjugations.

Not teaching “vosotros” because it’s “only” used in Spain, sounds really weird to me. I mean, we are talking about the Spanish language, aren’t we?

And it’s not like teaching how to conjugate “vuesa merced”, “usía”, “vuecencia” or ” voacé”, to name just a few deprecated old-fashioned personal pronouns, “Vosotros” is alive and well, 45 million use it everyday. Same with vos. Spanish students should, at least, be able to identify them and understand its usage.

As for whether the South American “vos” is synonymous with “tú,” that depends on where you are. In some places, there are *three* degrees of formality: vos (used with family members and extremely close friends), tú (used with classmates, coworkers, etc.) and usted (used in more formal contexts).

(Hope you don’t mind the plug, Eleena )

Besides, Roberto; you *are* a bit biased, but I agree with you. Why bother learning just parts of a language and leave the rest for what it is? Especially if a pretty large part – although – of its speakers use therse parts of the language. To me, using ‘ustedes’ all the time doesn’t sound funny, I actually can’t stand it. But this could be me, of course.

And oh, ‘vos’ is instead of ‘tú’. For plural they use ‘ustedes’.

Costarossa, you’re right, you can live happily in Spain without knowing the vosotros conjugation, but to many Spaniards, including me, it sounds extremely funny to hear someone using usted/ustedes with children and dogs., for instance. It just doesn’t sound serious.

Steven Capsuto, as far as I know, vos is used instead of tu, but not instead of ustedes. At least, that’s how I’ve heard my Argentinian friends use it. But I could be wrong, of course.

I have a question that’s a little off subject but I would definitely appreciate any ideas/feedback that would help improve my pace when speaking. When I first begin learning Spanish, I struggled when I would try to hold a conversation with someone. It seemed like it would take me forever to get a sentence, let alone a paragraph out because some sentences seemed longer to form in Spanish than in English and vice vs. I never really knew how to keep up my pace when speaking to other Native speakers and was wondering is there a book or rule when it comes to delivery.

I have been listening to the stories from Cody’s Cuentos and find it amazing how the speaker flows while speaking. I know she is a Native Speaker and that it may take a while or I may never really reach that level but was wondering what tools I can use to help clean/speed up my pace.

P.S. Thanks for all the previous feedback, YOU GUYS ROCK!

Although I use the vosotros since my Spanish is decidedly European, the overwhelming majority of the Spanish used and heard in the U.S. does not use the vosotros *or* the voseo. So it makes sense to let students here know that these forms exist without necessarily forcing them to use them.

The reason, I think, why ‘vosotros’ isn’t taught in most language schools in the US, is because in English there’s no such thing a distinction between formal and informal (so it doesn’t only have to do with that it’s not used in Latin-America).

To me, using tú, usted, vosotros AND ustedes is more logical. I think mainly because there’s an distinction like this in Dutch as well (jij – informal singular, u – formal singular and plural, jullie – informal plural).

As it happens, the “vosotros” form is also learned formally in several countries in schools in Latin America. Although for most of them its use is never more than written. It’s better to know vosotros even if you won’t use it because coming from the other way (changing to saying “ustedes” all the time when you are used to vosotros) is very easy since no new conjugation is needed.

Apart from very few verbs (even excluding most irregular verbs), the vosotros conjugation is almost always very easy and consistent with other third-person conjugations with -áis, -éis, -ís instead of -amos -emos, -imos etc. Hardly a huge amount of extra brain work
¡Que tengáis un buen día!