Sometimes I wish I could kick myself over and over for not having taken advantage of the opportunity to explore Nicaragua while I was bumping around Costa Rica. For one Nicaragua is Costa Rica's northern neighbor and now a lot further away from my home base in Florida. My reasons for not going at the time are quite simple. My travel partner and I knew little about Nicaragua and hadn't planned much on exploring the country seeing our trip to Costa Rica was already a huge turn-around from the Thailand one we had planned for months. We heard of some of the difficulties getting around Nicaragua and the scarce amount of ATM's and these two things also gave us reason to refrain from all the incredible wonders the country has to offer. Yes, silly I know.

Today's word is a Spanish word used in Nicaragua:

cercano - (pronounced ser-ka-no) nearby

Certainly one must see the significance in knowing such a word. If you know a decent amount of Spanish already you'll be able to ask where un hotel, un albergue juvenil, or even where an ATM can be located cercano or nearby. I've always fancied broken Spanish or Spanglish, but that's just because I've been a little lazy at learning Spanish myself.

As you begin to plan your first or next trip to Mexico, Central America or South America think more about making the lingo part of one of your pastimes in addition to your research on the country so you won't regret missing something later. Amerispan, Cactus Language and IMAC are all good starting points to learning abroad. A free membership at Spanish Unlimited gives you the opportunity to learn a new word everyday by email, gain pen pals and hear audio of the words. Their website is actually a good resource tool for many different Spanish related topics. I won't even begin to list some of the texts out there that could further your studies because there are entirely too many. If you know of some language books that would be useful please feel free to list them.

Past Spanish words: escalar

Filed under: Learning, Nicaragua